Page 67 of Actually Yours

“Why I let you walk away that night. And why I’ve been going out on all these dates, instead of just letting you in.”

I hear his swift intake of breath, turning my head away from him and focussing on the waves lapping at the shore in front of us.

“I started visiting the Love, Lilly café a week after you broke up with Robby,” he says after a few minutes of charged silence, his tone now casual, like I hadn’t just laid my heart out there for him.

“Oh?” I’m struggling to keep up with this swift turn in the conversation.

“I heard you talk about it with Robby so many times that I thought there may be a good chance I’d see you there.”

Ah, now I’m following.

“I went in a few times a week, hoping to catch a glimpse of you. See how you’re doing. Just see you.”

My face flushes and my heart takes off racing so fast I fear it’s about to escape my chest.He came looking for me?

“And then you were never there at the same time as me. But by that time, I was hooked…”

“On the brownies?”

We both laugh.

“Yes, the brownies. And the atmosphere. I enjoyed watching Bella and Lilly interact. It made me feel closer to you, as stalker-ish as that may sound.”

“Very stalker-ish!”

He pinches my side. “And then when Bella and Lilly opened the gallery next door, I bought several of Bella’s paintings, becausesomeonehad once told me in a huff that I needed to hang some art on my walls.”

I flashback to the night of Bella’s wedding, when I’d been slouched on his couch, staring at the landscape of the Melbourneskyline hanging on his wall.That was one of Bella’s paintings! No wonder it had looked so familiar.

“You bought Bella’s paintings?”

He nods. “Her work is exceptional.”

His praise of my friend’s work does little to stop my heart pounding in my chest.Why must he be so perfect?

“It is,” I agree, not knowing what else to say. We’d both revealed a lot in this conversation, and I don’t know where to go from here.

Jake, it seems, does know where he wants this to go. “That night, the night we all met?”

I smile at the use of the word ‘all’.

“I’d been at the restaurant for ten minutes waiting for Steven, who is habitually late. He’d forced me to meet him at this ‘trendy new place’, the sort of place that Robby would love and I would hate, and from the minute I arrived my feet were itching to leave, to get home and work on a brief that needed to be done by the end of the weekend. And then you walked in.”

I held my breath, dying to know what he’s going to say next.

“It was like there was a spotlight on you. One minute I’d been lost in the document I was reading on my phone, the next my eyes were glued to you. And then my feet that had been wanting to leave were suddenly guiding me to the bar. To where you’d just sat down.”

“And you said hi, and I was sure you were my match.”

He hums. “Little did I know there was some sort of artificial intelligence who’d already set you up with my brother.”

I frown along with him, equally as disappointed in this technology fail as he seems to be.

“We can’t blame just the supercomputer,” I say to lighten the mood and also because it’s true. The whole mess is purely my fault.

“I had to watch you withhim.” His voice is pained, tortured, and I lay my head on his shoulder, trying to get closer.

“I’m sorry.” I can’t say anything else. There’s no taking back what had come before this. The only question is whether he wants anything with me moving forward.

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