Page 2 of If You Say So

One

Nate

Livingwith your ex is a task not fit for the faint of heart.

It’s for those who enjoy daily pain and torture, those who aren’t afraid to see the love of their life smile and go on without them, who are prepared to watch them flourish…without you. It’s for those who are ready to realize you weren’t needed at all.

I’ve discovered something about myself in the last three months.

My heart? It’s faint, and I’m barely hanging on.

“You’re staring at him again,” my roommate and best friend Carsen murmurs from across the table where we’re eating breakfast. “Neither of you will ever move on if you keep mooning over him, Nate.”

How can you tell your heart to stop loving someone?

“Just mind your own damn business and eat your breakfast,” I tell him.

Carsen glares at me and I ignore it, taking a bite of my breakfast so he’ll quit staring holes into my head.

Once his face is buried in his bowl of cereal, I glance back to the living room where my ex-boyfriend is stashing his books into his bag. He bends over, and I watch the muscles in his back jump.

I remember those muscles—well, I might add. I remember how they’d constrict under my hands, how I’d rake my nails across them. I remember everything about them, the dips and curves, how they taste.

I remember—

I’m not his anymore.

The thought slams into me like a speeding car, and it hurts just as badly.

I’mnothis anymore. That ended when I screwed everything up with a drunken New Year’s kiss—you know, with someone whowasn’tmy boyfriend, with someone who meant nothing to me.

Huh, funny how that works: we take things that mean everything with people who mean everything and destroy them with things that mean nothing and people who mean even less.

A foot nails my shin under the table, but I manage to hold in my yelp.

“That hurt, you ass.”

“Stop staring, you idiot.”

“I can’t just stop, Carsen. It doesn’t work that way.”

His brow rises. “Youdid this.”

“I hate you.”

“Liar.” He grabs his now empty bowl and heads to the sink. “I’m leaving. You want a ride, Blake?” he calls out over his shoulder.

Blake’s electric green eyes catch mine, and I swear I can see an ache in them—the same ache that resides in mine. He misses me too. He has to. There’s no way, after everything we’ve been through together, he doesn’t. I just don’t understand why he’s letting a mistaken moment in time define our futures.

I also don’t know why he’s placing all the blame on me. Technically, he’d broken up with me that morning during an intense argument. I was a free man…of sorts.

Blake rips his gaze away and focuses on Carsen in a flash. “Yeah. Thanks, man.”

He doesn’t look my way again. I watch him as he heads outside, slips into Carsen’s sedan…watch as he rests his head against the window and mumbles something to himself.

I pull my eyes from the scene in front of me before I lose it—again.

I grab my half-eaten bowl of cereal and spin toward the sink. Carsen’s leaning against it with hard eyes dead set on me.

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