Page 19 of Mr. Delicious
“Nope and that’s not what I meant, by awhile. I meant It’s been awhile since I felt like this, and it’s weird that I feel this.” I made a swirling motion around my heart. “It’s weird because I don’t even know her.”
She didn’t even know my name.
Chad looked me over with interest. “Did I ever tell you how my grandparents met?”
“Oh God Chad, is this going to be one of those stories that somehow involves animals. Someone trying to catch a pig then they both caught the pig and fell in love.”
He started to laugh but I wasn’t far from wrong. His family came from Oklahoma, had a farm that ran in the family, too, for generations.
“No. No animals.” He dabbed his sweat drenched hair with his towel and started munching on a protein bar. “My grandpa first saw my grandma when she was six years old. Her parents took her to the spring fair that year and every year after. My great-grandpa ran the fair. Anyway. All he did was look at her and watch her from a far year after year for a good eight years. He’d look at her, and she’d look at him. That’s all. Neither had the courage to actually meet each other. Then she stopped coming.”
He waved his hands for dramatic effect.
“Chad is that the story?” Better not be because it sounded like there was more. Like he had a point.
“Yes. The end.”
“That’s a terrible story.” I frowned. “Worse than the animal ones. How’d she become your grandma then?”
He laughed. “Now that’s the part of mystery. And I was joking, of course the story didn’t end there. Would have been lame otherwise. Okay, so she stopped coming and he didn’t see her for five years. At twenty years old, he literally ran into her in England. The other side of the world. He was studying law at Oxford and she was on a tour with the Russian ballet.”
“No way.” He’d just saved the story. I shuffled then straightened up eager to hear what happened next.
“Yes. He bumped into her at the supermarket and they both recognized each other straightaway. That was the first time they spoke, and they set a date for a date. He took her to dinner after one of her performances and saw her every day for the week she was there. Then she went to Russia and he followed her deciding she was his. He’d travel between England and Russia on a weekly basis to see her and she visited him every chance she got. They got engaged months later and literally lived happily ever after. You should see them now.”
My God, my skin tingled and something about the story gripped my heart. “Why have you never told me that before?”
“I don’t know, thought I did. I guess it’s really sentimental and you aren’t exactly a sentiment guy.”
I gasped. “Neither are you.” I hit him with my towel.
“Adam come on. At one stage you changed women like you changed clothes.”
“I’m not like that anymore.”
“Fair dues. I’ll give you that. You’ve changed a lot.”
I had. “It was different after Ava.” That was a name I’d avoided mentioning for the last five or so years. But, before her I was probably the typical billionaire bad boy who enjoyed having his pick of the bunch of women.
“Ava… can’t really say I missed that bitch. She was a nasty piece of work.”
“But I loved her.” I pointed out.
“Good you can say loved. As in past tense.”
“Yeah.”
It was past tense. Took me awhile to get over her. As is expected with an ex-wife you actually loved.
Sometimes I couldn’t believe I’d gotten married. It felt like it was in another lifetime or like I was watching a version of myself from an alternate dimension.
It was nothing like I expected it to be.
Ava and I had been seeing each other for close to a year when she got pregnant. I thought marrying her was the right thing to do. I loved her, so I thought why not?
I thought we were happily in love and awaited the birth of our child. Then I found out she’d lost the baby but never told me. We’d lost our child two months into the pregnancy, but she continued to act like she was pregnant. Too scared I’d want a divorce.
When I found out about the lie it crushed me that she thought she had to do that to me, but I forgave her. I loved her enough to forgive her.
