Page 13 of Rematch
She nodded. “Yeah. Lately, I’ve even started to think he was right.”
Preston frowned. “To leave you standing at the altar?”
“No. Not that part. That made him a total asshat, but…” She shrugged. “I’ve spent most of the last six months in a fetal position…when I wasn’t devouring pints of Ben and Jerry’s New York Super Fudge Chunk. It turns out, that position gave me a lot of time to think.”
He chuckled. “And what did you discover?”
“With distance comes perspective, and once the pain faded, logic kicked in. I can see now that it wasn’t the perfect relationship I’d convinced myself it was.”
“Lot of fighting?” he asked.
She shook her head. “Not at all, which is probably what blinded me to the truth. The lack of fighting was the problem.”
Preston stroked one finger up and down her arm. “You want knock-down drag-out battles?”
She laughed. “Maybe not that extreme, but some emotion is better than none. At least it would have told me he cared enough about me to have a feeling, any feeling, even if it was just me pissing him off over something stupid. Rick never got mad, and I believed that was because he was so stable and steady, but it occurs to me now…it was less about his nature and more about the fact that he simply wasn’t plugged into me or anything I did. I mean, we’d known each other our whole lives, and we’d hit a level of comfortable that was boring and predictable. Maybe we were both just phoning it in.”
Preston heard a hitch in her voice that told him she hadn’t been phoning it in. “We? Or him?”
She shrugged. “I want to say him, but the fact that he went looking and found someone else makes me wonder if I hadn’t done enough, either.”
“Stop. Stop right there. Don’t lump yourself in with that asshole.”
Joy grimaced. “Maybe I overstated it when I said I’ve accepted everything.”
“I think you’re closer than you think. It’s natural to seek answers when shit goes sideways. And it doesn’t sound like Rick’s been very forthcoming with the whys.”
“Wow. Everything you say makes me feel so much better. I’ve been a mess for months, and now, just a couple hours with you, and it’s like you’ve helped me make sense of all the chaos swirling in my head. How do you do that?”
“I’ve got all kinds of mad skills.”
She laughed, but Preston wasn’t finished. “Rick wasn’t right for you, Joy. You deserve a relationship filled with excitement and passion and fun, and the occasional fight even.”
She shifted closer, and he could feel the heat of her breath against his cheek a moment before she kissed it. “You’re good for the soul, BFG.”
He was tempted to turn his head, claiming that kiss of hers on his lips rather than his face. “Preston,” he whispered.
“Preston,” she repeated. He waited for her to share her name, narrowing his eyes when she gave him a mischievous grin that told him she was still holding out.
“We’ve talked too much about me. What’s your story?” she asked.
“My story?”
“You’re a super-nice and apparently romantic guy, Preston. So why don’t you have a girlfriend?”
She’d been completely open with him tonight, and he wanted to give her the same, even though he wasn’t quite ready to let go of his anonymity. He liked this opportunity to get to know a woman without his career getting in the way.
Puck bunnies were a dime a dozen, and during the times when he had been between girlfriends, he’d taken advantage of their advances. He was far from a saint, but as he got older—and wiser—he’d become more discerning about choosing lovers. His preferred status was boyfriend, and he’d had several long-term relationships, but, sadly, none of them had gone the distance.
“No one’s ever wanted to play the permanent role of Preston’s girlfriend. I go out on dates, always with women I’m not just attracted to but who I genuinely like. I love to be in a relationship. It’s just, every time I meet a woman I start to fall for…she leaves.”
Joy frowned. “Seriously?”
Preston’s relationship history was a source of great amusement for his teammates, because while most of those guys were true hound dogs—looking to get laid and nothing more—he didn’t mind having a girlfriend. He actually preferred it, which was why he’d become known as the team romantic, his buddies teasingly calling him Romeo.
A couple of his former teammates had met women and fallen in love, Alex Stone and Elio Moretti, both now married with kids. The last time they’d gone out for drinks, he’d spent the entire evening listening to his friends talk about their wives and showing off pictures of their kids, while Preston sat there, aware to the depths of his soul that he wanted exactly what they had.
“I had a serious girlfriend in high school, but that ended after graduation. Then I dated a woman for a year or so when I was in my early twenties, but Julie got a job offer in New York and left. We both had,” he paused, then brushed over the real reason with a vague term, “careers that added an extra wrinkle to the long-distance relationship, because our schedules were busy enough and opposite enough that we’d known right from the start it wasn’t going to work.”
