Page 24 of Unrealistic Expectations

Galvin shrugged. “They’ve already paid me.”

“But I could still kick your ass out of my restaurant and ban you.” Will had a very deep, pleasing voice. It made sense that he was on TV a lot. Alex gave him a look that said she was thinking the same thing with a more prurient twist.

“Jessica is also a brilliant therapist,” Galvin said. She felt her skin flush with the praise, even though he didn’t know whether she was brilliant or a disaster.

“So she’s here to fix your scrambled brains, rather than as your date?” Alex said with a smirk.

“No, I’m here as his girlfriend.” Jessica thought about taking it back as soon as the words were out of her mouth. She was his fake girlfriend, and it felt weird to say that she was his girlfriend given that she was someone else’s girlfriend the last time she’d said that word. And they’d been together so long that she hadn’t had to clarify their relationship with anyone for a long time.

Being in a new situation, with new people, felt vulnerable and foreign. It felt like she was an adolescent in a new school, fielding questions about who she was and what she was and just waiting to see what the kids in this new place would find to bully her about.

She thought that she’d gotten past the issues of her youth and processed everything. But Luke’s leaving had made her realize that she’d played it safe her entire adult life. She’d never broken up with him because she’d accepted that she’d simply never find better. She’d convinced herself that passion was for the emotionally immature, because she hadn’t wanted to risk opening herself up to the kind of heartbreak that passion often reaped. And she’d always stayed away from Galvin and men like Galvin—the ones that made her heart skip several beats—because she never wanted to feel like that girl who wanted to make friends but learned to watch every word again.

Galvin squeezed her arm. “Are you okay?”

Jessica shook off her inappropriately timed introspection. “I’m fine. Why don’t we get cooking before Alex lights you on fire with a blowtorch?”

“That sounds like a great idea,” Will said, his tone just a little bit sarcastic. “I lock away the blowtorches whenever Alex is around, though.”

“I burn one crème brûlée—”

—

It was hit-or-miss when they’d first arrived at the restaurant, but Galvin was relieved that he hadn’t totally fucked things up. He’d only thought that it would be fun, romantic, and different to have a private cooking lesson from one of the country’s best chefs, and Jessica had seen it as a critique of her cooking skills—of which he had zero knowledge.

Jessica had seemed shocked by her own reaction, and he didn’t think it was wise to get into it in front of people she didn’t know, so he’d dropped it after their little exchange. But the whole time they were cooking, he rolled it over and over in his head. The only thing that made sense was that Luke had done something to exacerbate any preexisting insecurities that Jessica had. In so many ways, she was so self-assured, but he was beginning to get the impression that at least some of that was a front.

He watched her line up carrots to dice them so carefully that she could have been judged on Top Chef. It was so strange that it sent heat down his spine. He didn’t know why the fast, accurate way she cut vegetables turned him on.

The way she watched Will when he demonstrated how to deglaze the pan made him jealous. The way his feelings ping-ponged back and forth in a matter of minutes made his head spin. He worried that he wasn’t being present, and he couldn’t stop himself from touching her as she moved past him in the kitchen. The small smile she gave him made his heart beat fast. He knew they were there to learn to make something special together, but he had a weird feeling that they didn’t need to cook to be exceptional together.

Despite the rocky start, they had fun. Will had walked them through preparing his famous osso buco, and Jessica had seemed to enjoy it. He was glad—Will and Alex were good people, and they were some of the only friendly acquaintances who hadn’t stopped taking his calls after his breakup with Kennedy.

Since the restaurant was closed, there was no valet, and Jessica and Galvin walked to his car so he could give her a ride home. The night was quiet—no one realized that L.A. was an early-to-bed town until they moved here—and the silence seemed to stretch out into tension as the conversations that both of them were having in their heads crowded the space between them.

“I don’t get you and Luke,” he said.

He expected Jessica to get immediately defensive—she had every right to be—but she kind of deflated next to him. “Looking back, I’m not sure I do, either.”

“You spent so much of your life with the guy, and he—” Galvin wasn’t about to explain that some guys just had really punchable faces. Jessica didn’t need to hear that right now when she was obviously still getting over the breakup. And that made him even more mad. The more time he spent with Jessica, the more he wanted from her. He wanted their fake relationship to morph into a real one. Given how she was still so prickly about Luke, there was no way that jumping almost immediately into a relationship with Galvin would be her next step. She’d probably need a year to process, a year to explore, and about a millennium before she would give him a shot. And then she’d find an emotionally mature adult, probably a divorced dad or something, to settle down with.

Galvin didn’t even know how long he should wait until having sex with someone new. And he was probably only so fixated on her because they hadn’t had sex yet. He would probably freak out afterward and prove Jessica and everyone else right about him. He didn’t have what it took to be in an adult relationship, and he was getting way too old to be having meaningless flings. He lacked depth, and the last thing Jessica needed was to be a proving ground for his inability to commit.

“I guess I hadn’t realized it until tonight.” Jessica had been quiet so long, and he’d been so lost in his own thoughts, that her words seemed to come from nowhere. “I didn’t realize how much that relationship conditioned me to doubt myself. When I was in it, I couldn’t see that the dynamic had always been more weighted to what would make Luke happy.”

That made Galvin angry. More than almost anyone he knew, Jessica deserved to be happy. The fact that Luke hadn’t even wanted to try doing that made him want to punch something. But he didn’t say anything, because he wanted Jessica to continue.

“And it’s weird to not know that you’re not happy until your late thirties, isn’t it?”

Galvin shrugged. “You’re the therapist, so I think you’re in a better position to know what’s weird and what isn’t.”

“It feels weird.” They stopped at his car and he opened the passenger door before jogging around the front and getting in. Instead of starting the ignition, he looked at her, thinking that maybe the person that everyone talked to about their problems could use someone to talk to. “It doesn’t feel weird to be here with you, though. It feels right.”

She looked at him expectantly, and he realized that she probably thought that he hadn’t turned on the car because he was going to put the moves on her.

And it wasn’t that he didn’t want to. He just didn’t think it was the greatest idea. For the first time in his adult life, he wanted to be seen as a real possibility for a real relationship, and he was sure Jessica wouldn’t see him that way if they had sex right now.

“You know what would make me feel better?” she asked, and he almost growled in frustration. Because he did know, and he wanted to give that to her. “Why are you shaking your head?”

---