Page 79 of Best Man
Overwhelmed with the dreadful sense that she’d made a terrible mistake, she chased after him until they were shoulder-to-shoulder. “Tell me, Sasha. You’re breaking my heart right now, you know that?”
“How could I break your heart? Your heart was never in it. It was just sex. You said so yourself.”
“Stop being dramatic.”
“I’m not.” He took his place at the end of the line. “I’m just believing what you told me. What else can I do?”
She tugged on his arm and tried to pull him away from the line, but he didn’t budge.
“Stop it, will you?” he scolded her in a whisper. “People are staring at us.”
Their friends and family might be drunk, but they weren’t blind to messy emotional scenes.
Paulina didn’t care. “Sasha! Please. I have to tell you something.”
“I’m listening,” he said, but he wouldn’t leave the bus line.
She lowered her voice, so only he would hear, and came clean. “I lied, okay? It wasn’t just sex. Can we please talk now?”
He took a moment to look at her and consider what she was saying. At last, he stepped away from the bus line.
“Itstartedas just sex,” she said with a sigh. “At least, that’s what I had to tell myself. But it became something more, alright?”
“Why would you lie about that?”
“Because,” she murmured, her throat bone-dry. “Because I have feelings for you now. Okay, Sasha? And I’m afraid of getting hurt.”
“Why be afraid?”
“Because I know we can’t be together.”
“Who says?”
“I dunno,” she murmured. “I mean, you’re a pro athlete, and I live on a farm in freakin’ Montana.”
“So what? People move. I moved from Russia.”
“Yes, but you moved here to chase your dream. Not to be with some girl you literallyjustmet. That’s a big difference.”
“You’re right,” he conceded.
“And everyone says you fall in and out of love. Piper, all the girls, even your sister. They all say it.”
He frowned. “That’s true, I guess. But who doesn’t? Isn’t that the point of dating?”
“The point isn’t to fall in and out of love, it’s to find someone youdolove, and take that seriously.”
He grinned. “I agree. That’s what I’ve been looking for all along.”
“Really?” she asked, her voice filled with doubt.
“Look. It’s not like I’m a bad guy, purposely breaking hearts. Have I made mistakes before? Yes. But I’ve never cheated. I don’t lie to women to get them to sleep with me. Sometimes relationships work out—sometimes they don’t. I’ve just never met anyone like you before, Paulina. I’ve been trying to find a girl like you. To tell you the truth? It’s been very, very difficult since I got sober. My mistake, all along, was not realizing that once I met a girl like you, it’d be so very different—and so very obvious. I hate myself now for wasting time on other girls who can’t even come close to comparing to you.”
She found it so hard to believe that she was this mythical girl he’d been waiting for. She certainly didn’tfeelthat special. “How am I so different?” she asked.
He answered her question with one of his own. “Do you want me to tell you the real reason I broke up with Belen?”
“I already heard your sister talk about it. Because things were moving too fast, right?”
