Page 40 of Bookworm and the Beast
Chapter Twelve
You Win
Jack
“The past year has been… really rough,” I admitted. “I broke up with my long-time girlfriend.”
Bonnie nodded. “Mrs. Potts told me. I’m so sorry.”
“She did? Did she tell you why?”
“No. Don’t be mad at her, please. That’s all she said—that you two broke up. She wasn’t gossiping, just correcting misinformation.”
I shook my head and held a hand up in a don’t-worry-about-it gesture. “It’s impossible to be mad at Mrs. Potts. Anyway, I’m sure it’s hard anytime a serious relationship breaks up, but sometimes it’s for the right reasons, you know? You want different things in life, you’re incompatible. This time… well, it was crushing.”
“She cheated on you?” Bonnie guessed.
“Yes. But it was worse than that. She was the one who sold the outline to the tabloid.”
Her intake of breath was audible, even over the noise of the waves. “It was real then.”
I nodded grimly. “A hundred percent genuine—that’s off the record, by the way.”
“Okay,” she agreed readily. “That’s horrible, Jack. Why on earth would she do it?”
“Well, I hear she got quite a payday out of it. But I think it was mostly for spite.”
“Spite? I guess you guys didn’t have one of those amicable ‘conscious uncouplings then.’”
I snorted at the new-agey term. “Hardly.”
Picking up a flat shell, I skipped it across the water, buying time while I decided whether to tell her the whole disgraceful story.
What the hell?I decided to go for broke. It felt kind of good to get it all out there finally. Bonnie would probably run screaming in the other direction, but maybe that was for the best.
“It was my fault,” I admitted.
Bonnie screwed up her face in a comical expression. “Yourfault that she cheated on you and sold your work to a tabloid?”
“I drove her away.” I paused to adjust to the influx of self-disgust that always rose inside me whenever I thought about my failed relationship with Claudia.
“We’d been dating for a while—three years,” I explained. “She was the first person I’d ever been serious with. It hasn’t always been easy for me to… get close to women.”
Understatement alert.
Hunter and I both had struggled with an inability to get close to anyone apart from each other and Mrs. Potts. A shrink would probably say it was because of our early lives—the people we’d been closest to had hurt us. Deserted us when we needed them most.
In our mom’s case it wasn’t her fault—she’d gotten sick and died. I’m sure she would have given anything to stay with us.
Our dad... well, maybe it hadn’t been his fault either, but the way he’d folded the tent after her death and disappeared into the bottle had probably inflicted even more damage than her tragically early death had done.
In any case, I’d shied away from serious relationships until Claudia. What happened with her only cemented my belief that “love,” if it even existed, wasn’t worth the risk.
I glanced at Bonnie, but she didn’t seem horrified yet—only curious—so I continued. “We were well-suited. She seemed interested in me—like as a person, not just the money and fame and all that crap most women cared about. I hate to say it because it sounds obnoxious, but it isn’t easy to find someone worthwhile when you’ve got a lot of money.”
Bonnie nodded. “I get it. You’re not sure if they’re in it for you or the lifestyle.”
“Exactly. But I’d grown to really trust Claudia, to count on her. We spent a lot of time together. She was consistent—seemed like she was there for me, you know? She started dropping hints about wanting an engagement ring, mentioning places she’d like to go that would be ‘perfect honeymoon spots,’ that kind of thing.”
