Page 36 of When You Least Expect It
Calista scowled.“Oh, please,” she huffed.“The fact that he was a cheating snatch napkin helped me get over him rather quickly, so it wasn’t that at all.”
“What in the hell is a snatch napkin?”I asked, my spoon paused in the air.
Calista rolled her eyes.“A menstrual pad.”
“Of course, it is,” I replied, refusing to visit that topic on our first date.
“Anyway, I hadn’t wanted to jump into another relationship right away, so instead of using another man to help mend my broken heart, I had decided to take some time to heal completely, so that I didn’t carry any baggage with me into my next relationship, but then...”She shrugged.“Time just got away from me.While I’ve been on a couple of dates here and there, they’d been...I don’t know.It’d felt as if I’d just been going through the motions, which I might have been.”
“So, you can honestly say that you’re over your ex?”I asked, my chest feeling a bit tight.
“Oh, yeah,” she scoffed.“More than over him.”
After taking a bite of my ice-cream brownie, I leaned back in my seat, saying, “That’s good to know.”
“So, what about you?”she asked.“Why are you single?”
“I’d met Paula six years ago, and we were together for five years,” I answered, and it was hard not to notice how Calista shifted in her seat, not happy with the news that my breakup was still rather fresh.
“Five years is a long time,” she remarked evenly, her teeth nibbling the inside of her cheek.
“I agree,” I replied.“Especially, the five-year gap between our ages.”
“She’s five years younger than you are?”
I nodded.“Yep, and when we’d first started dating, I had convinced myself that five years was no big deal, but they turned out to be areallybig deal.”
“In what way?”
“While I’d been thinking about marriage and kids more, all Paula seemed to care about was being the next big thing on the internet,” I explained.“Not sure what she’s doing now, but back then, she’d been aiming to be another social media influencer, and she’d also been happy enough with letting me carry all the household finances myself.It was three years into our relationship that I finally began to see her for what she was, and that was someone on a very different page from my own.”
“So...so, you broke up with her?”
I nodded again.“I had to.Even if she hadn’t been ready for marriage and kids, it’d been clear that Paula hadn’t been interested in anything other than fun, and I was too old for that shit.I mean, yeah, I like to have fun and enjoy myself every now and again, but that’s all that Paula had been about.She had five years to where she needed to catch up to me, and I hadn’t been willing to wait.”
“I’m sorry,” she said.“I can’t imagine that it’s easy to break up with someone over something so non-dramatic.”
“Breakups of any kind are never easy,” I replied, doing my best to keep Calista from thinking that she was a rebound for me.“However, it wasn’t the actual breakup that I had struggled with; it’d been the doubt.You know, wondering what if I’d just given her some more time to...to find her way or whatever.”
“Well, how did she react when you broke up with her?”
“As expected, she’d been upset,” I answered.“However, looking back, I think that she was more upset about losing her opened wallet than anything else.”
Calista winced.“Ouch.”
“Yeah, and it was easy to see that we’d been falling off long before the breakup,” I went on.“After she had finally moved out, it hadn’t taken long for me to sell the house and move on.Honestly, I should have been more upset than I had been.”
“Do you hear from her at all?”
I shook my head.“No, and the fact that I’m not bothered by that says a lot.”
“Have you been on any dates before this one?”she asked, and I almost cursed my honesty.Calista was probably feeling like a rebound right now, and that was not what I wanted.
“A few,” I admitted.“However, they were all misses, no hits.Either I’m doing something wrong, or dating is a lot different these days.”
“I wouldn’t know since I don’t date,” she said.“I get asked out a lot, but it’s usually from guys at the facilities that I audit, and so that’s a big conflict of interest that I’m just not interested in getting involved in.”
Yeah, that wasn’t what I wanted to hear.
