Page 83 of Rebound With Me
“You should get their minestrone soup.” He looks so worried about me. It’s too sweet. He rubs his lips together. I have this feeling he needs to tell me something, and I just want him to get it over with.
“I just saw my Dad, he said that Charlie wants me to tell you that book was a big hit with his girlfriend.”
“She’s not his girlfriend,” I whisper.
“She will be soon enough. He’s a Devlin.” He grins.
I shift around in my chair.
“You gonna take your sunglasses off?”
“Not yet.”
“Are you okay?”
I take a breath. “How’ve you been? How was your day yesterday?”
“Weird.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. I had so many calls about a property that I just listed, more than I was expecting.”
“Oh yeah? Did you…have showings? At the property?”
“Yeah. What’d you get up to? I missed you. I told you that.”
Our waitress comes to take our order, but I haven’t looked at the menu yet. He orders me a minestrone soup and hot tea. He’s being so sweet I might start screaming. When the waitress leaves, he reaches across the table to pull my sunglasses off my face.
“Whoah.” He stares at my pink, swollen, damp eyes.
I can’t look at him anymore.
“Shit,” he says, under his breath. “What is it?”
“Umm…” I sniffle and wipe away a tear. There’s no one seated immediately around us, and no reason to put off this conversation. I stare at the center of the table as I speak. “I’ve been thinking…We should have a little time-out. Take a break. I just need to be on my own for a little bit to sort through my feelings, and I don’t want to speak for you, but maybe you could do the same.”
“Why would we do that?”
“It’s not you, Vince, I promise. It’s just…hard to overcome the circumstances in which we met.”
“I don’t see why it matters how we met. You met your principal the normal boring way and look how that turned out.”
“I just think we should take a break before things get too serious.”
“Well then you are way too late.”
I finally glance up at him and the look he gives me breaks my heart in two, but it wasn’t the one I was expecting.Helooks heartbroken.
“Why is this happening?”
“It was bound to happen eventually, you know that.”
“Why is this happening now?”
“I saw you yesterday morning. With Sadie.”
He doesn’t even blink. “Nothing happened. I mean, she was trying something, but I didn’t…You don’t trust me?”
