Page 44 of Runaway Bride's Guide to Love

I start to respond before Stella slams her hands on the table.

“No. No more Duncan talk. Not tonight. He’s not going to ruin this restaurant for me. And you know what? Enough about me. You. Let’s talk about you.”

I agree about the Duncan talk, but there has to be other subjects. “Do we have to?”

“Yes, we do. I feel like all we do is talk about me and talking about me always goes back to Duncan, and I’m not going to let him ruin this night. So, Emmett Collins, tell me something about yourself.”

“Um…” I’m suddenly unable to remember anything of interest about myself. “I work for your brother?”

Stella gives me a look that Maddie has given me many times. I don’t know what it means in their age demographic, but in mine it translates to “no shit, Sherlock.”

“I know that,” Stella says. “I know this isn’t a date, but what would you talk about or tell your date if this was one?”

I shrug. “I wouldn’t know.”

“How would you not know?”

“Because I don’t date.”

She stares at me like I have horns growing out of my head. “What do you mean ‘don’t date?’ I thought you were single?”

“I am.”

“But you don’t date?”

“That’s right.”

“How does that work?”

“Is that a trick question?”

“It’s not.”

“Okay. Then the answer is I just don’t.”

“At all?”

How do I tell her that my version of dating is picking up a woman’s bar tab and heading back to her place? “Not at all. I just…I have a very abbreviated version of dating.”

It takes her a second before I see the recognition in her eyes. “Oh…gotcha.”

Stella doesn’t follow it up with anything else, but I can tell in her eyes that she wants to push. To ask more.

And for some reason, I want to tell her.

“Aren’t you curious as to why?”

She shakes her head, pauses, then tips it side to side. “No. Yes. No. It’s none of my business. If you want to tell me, great. I’d love to hear more. If not, I get it too.”

Stella isn’t the first woman to want to know about this part of me. Pretty much all of the women I’ve told this to have been curious for an explanation. For them, I usually give a variation of “it’s just not for me.” But with Stella? She gets the whole story. It only feels right.

“I didn’t exactly grow up with a good example of a loving relationship.”

“Are your parents divorced?”

I nod my head while taking a sip of my whiskey. “Yes. And if that was it I’d probably be okay. Except when my dad took off I never saw him again, and my mom decided to try and set the world record for marriages.”

“There’s a world record for that?”

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