Page 65 of Shortcake
“A distraction,” she whispered. Her jaw ticked before she turned her back to me, swung open the oven door, and slid the casserole dish of ratatouille inside.
I let out a frustrated growl and wiped my hands over my face. I was making everything worse. Every word I said seemed to be wrong and insulting to her.
I reached out and curved my hand around her elbow, guiding her to look at me. “Addy, stop. Listen to me for a moment. Really, truly,listento me. Loving you would be so easy. I knew that I couldn’t ever learn your name because the moment I did, I wouldn’t have been able to walk away from you.”
“And that would have been terrible,” she said sarcastically.
“It would have been… messy. You were rebounding from literally breaking up with someone the day before. I was reeling from my mom’s diagnosis. We might have fallen in love. Or we might have ended up destroying each other. It wasn’t a risk I was willing to take.”
She looked down at my hand, still on her elbow. At some point while I was talking, I’d begun to trace small circles with my thumb over her skin. “You’re going to live a very lonely life if you never choose to take that risk of falling in love. And take it from me, the sex when you’re in love? It’s out of this world. No one-night-stand could compare.” Her voice softened and it brushed over me like silk. She talked like she’d had experience with love… hell, she probably had. Maybe even with the asshole from Halloween. She was young, but not that young. Not so young that she’d never experienced love.
I found myself filled with questions. Who was the man she’d loved once? Or was it multiple men? Has she been in love since our night together? That thought caused an ache to rip through my stomach. Where was he now? What kind of idiot would walk away from a woman like Addy?Me, that’s who.
In my limited experience with sex, it’d been quite the opposite. It had been heated and passionate. But it also had quickly shifted into something that brought trauma and anguish. No one was happy in our lives when those two lines showed up on Meghan’s pregnancy stick. No one had cheered and with tearful eyes hugged us. Meghan’s parents stopped speaking to her. And even though my mom let us move into her house, I saw the judgment in her eyes every time Meghan and I emerged from my old bedroom.
None of our friends were parents yet. Most of our friends were still out partying. Getting drunk and high while Meghan and I were scrounging up money to pay for a 3D ultrasound.
The judgment wasn’t so much because we were young parents. There were plenty of people in other parts of the country that were already married with children in their early twenties. But Meghan and I barely knew each other. She was in the States on a short-term work visa. Nope, it was less about age and more about circumstance.
In fact, if Meghan and I had been dating for a while and had gotten pregnant, I wasn’t sure it would have had the stigma it did.
But the one-night-stand aspect changed everything.
“Maybe sex with loveisbetter,” I said. I wasn’t sure I even knew what that kind of sex was like. In that way, despite our age gap, Addy was way more experienced than I was. “Or maybe that’s just something people tell themselves in order to stick around when the love fog clears.”
“Meghan and I tried to be in love when she got pregnant. We desperately tried to pretend that it was the right relationship for the both of us. But in the nine months that we lived together and tried to put on a good face of happy parents-to-be in love, it became clearer and clearer that not only did we not love each other… but we barely even liked each other. “
Whatever sense of lighthearted conversation we may have been presenting faded, right along with her smile. “I’m not some naive kid,” Addy said, her voice edged with anger and something else I couldn’t quite put my finger on.
“I never said you were.”
“You seem to be implying it. That somehow wanting love, wanting a partner, wanting someone to share my life with makes me immature. I know love is a risk. Trust me, I know. Usually,I’mthe most cynical person in the room.”
“Really? More cynical than Enzo?”
“Enzo’s not cynical. She’s pragmatic. And she’s also currently blissfully and disgustingly in love. As is Haylee.”
“So that’s it? You’ve recently watched all of your friends get shipped and it’s… what? Making your internal clock tick or whatever?”
She took a confrontational step toward me, closing what little gap was left between us and shoving her pointed finger into the center of my chest. “I realize we haven’t known each other for long, but if you were to ask around town, there isn’t a single person around here who would define me as a romantic. It’s taken me a long time to finally get to a place where I could imagine myself getting a happily-ever-after again.”
“I’m not trying to take that away from you,” I said. “You should want that happily-ever-after. You just shouldn’t want it with me. When I said earlier that it won’t happen again, my point was… I want you. I mean, Christ. Addy, I kept your number for three years in my phone. I tried to delete it so many times, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it.”
She snorted. “Yeah right.”
I yanked my phone free from my back pocket and opened my texts. Scrolling, I pulled up the contact for Anita Cavitysearch and fired off a quick text saying Brawny Man here, then waited two seconds for her phone to buzz. Which it did.
Her eyes widened as she dropped her gaze to her phone. “You kept my number… but didn’t use it. Why would you do that?”
I couldn’t answer that. Not the real answer. Not the answer that made me look even more pathetic than I already did. That I did use the number and another man answering in the middle of the night had nearly gutted me.
Instead, I dodged the question, pausing to run my hands through my hair. “Lookat you. How could I not want you? But I think we both know it’s a bad idea. Even back then, I knew it would be a bad idea. You were this young, vivacious woman who had her whole life ahead of her and I was a single dad on the verge of losing his mother.”
“Fine,” Addy said, setting her phone on the counter. “That was then. But what about now?”
“Now? I’m still a single dad. And you’re still the young, vivacious woman with her whole life ahead of her.”
“You’re talking like you’re ninety and on death’s door, Conrad.”
