Page 76 of Suddenly Dating
“So... are you over it?” She picked at a fraying hole in the knee of her jeans, dreading his answer.
“Man,”he said. “Twenty questions, huh?” He laughed ruefully, as if he was gearing up to grin and bear something unpleasant. “I loved her, Lola. I still do in a way. But when something doesn’t work, it doesn’t work. I’m sure you know what I mean.”
“Boy, do I ever,” she said with a snort. “Were you together a long time?”
“A little over a year,” he said. “We were living together. I’ll let you in on a secret. I thought she was the one. But...” He shrugged it off and didn’t elaborate.
Lola didn’t press him, either. She was sorry she’d asked. She didn’t want to hear about the girl Harry had thought was “the one.” And now, even though he was staring ahead, she had the sense he was seeing anything but the road. It made her feel strangely at odds—like she’d misbuttoned herself and was all lopsided now. She didn’t need Kennedy’s budding psychology degree to point out that as hours clicked by in Harry’s company, she understood less and less what to think about the gorgeous man beside her, this roommate slash casual-sex partner.
What Lola did understand were the rules—she didn’t have the right to feel strange that he had feelings for another woman. That’s not how friends-with-benefits worked. She had the right to have fun, and nothing else. She wasn’t allowed to care. Unfortunately, she did care. She cared a lot. Maybe too much.
The jury was in—Lola did casual sex about as well as she bowled: terribly.
When they arrived at the lake house, Lola walked into the living room, dropped her purse beside some clothes on the couch that she hadn’t finished folding, and turned toward the kitchen. She sagged when she saw it. It was a wreck. “I forgot all about it.”
“Come on,” Harry said behind her, and put his hand on her shoulder. “Let’s knock it out.”
She much preferred to knock out a bucket of wine—that was her go-to response after a day with her mother—but Lola followed Harry into the kitchen and started in on the cleanup.
It didn’t take much time with two of them, and there was only a bit of washing left to do. Harry picked up a towel. She handed him a pot, and Harry asked, “What about Will?”
“Will?” she asked, startled.
“That’s his name, right?” Harry asked. “Your ex? Are you over him?”
Lola stared down at the soapy water, recalling the day they’d met at the café. “I amsoover him.”
Harry put the dry pan down and picked up the second. “How do you know? What’s the cosmic sign that says, I am over this guy, or this relationship has changed and it’s not what I thought it was?”
Lola could feel the shame in her cheeks rising up at just the memory of how hopeful she’d felt the last time she’d seen Will. She snorted.
“What’s funny?” Harry was smiling, as if he expected a joke.
“Nothing, trust me. That is unless you find total naïveté funny. You want to know how things have definitely changed, Harry? That you don’t feel the way you used to? When the puppy appears—that’s how.”
He smiled with confusion. “You’ll have to elaborate.”
Lola told him about the last time she’d seen Will. It was something she’d tell a friend like Mallory, or Casey. But telling Harry made her feel ridiculous. It made herlookridiculous. She wasn’t even sure why she told him, other than she felt like unloading. And there was something about Harry that she trusted on an almost primal level. She must, because she told him the whole ugly truth. About getting dressed up, about thinking this was it, that Will had asked to meet her to apologize. She told him how she hoped he would ask her to take him back, because part of her really wanted to be Will and Lola again. “But what he wanted was for me to take a puppy.”
Harry’s expression of sheer horror reaffirmed what Lola’s siblings had said—Will was the worst. “The sad thing is, if he’d apologized, I probably would have taken the puppy,” she said, trying to make a joke of it.
Harry didn’t laugh.
Well, of course not. Lola was very good about laughing off her deep hurts, pretending to the world that they weren’t so deep, that she was okay—it was hard for her to let other people see her pain. She never felt entitled to it. Yet even she could recognize the puppy story was god-awful, a glimpse into a relationship that had gotten terribly unbalanced along the way.
“Are you okay?” Harry asked, and put his hand on her back. “I didn’t mean to dredge up bad memories.”
“I’m fine,” she said. “I’m over it, I really am. I learned a lot from my marriage, like how you never really see all sides of a person. I mean, you can believe you know someone so well, inside and out, and then suddenly a new facet pops up from nowhere, and you never saw any hint of it. And you’re so confused how you might have missed that side, how you could sleep with someone and never see that side, and the next thing you know, you’re trying to make sense of the whole fucking world.” She threw the washcloth into the water and braced her hands against the sink. “It just makes me so furious that I fell for it. That I let my hope convince me it was something it wasn’t. Hope is for idiots.”
Harry gingerly stroked her head. “Maybe that’s part of making sense of the world.”
She nodded. “You’re right!” She pulled the towel free of his hold and dried her hands. “Just look at me now, Harry Westbrook. I’m in East Beach, living illegally in someone’s house, writing a book like I know what I’m doing, and sharing benefits with a roommate who wasn’t even supposed to be here. See? The world is making sense again.”
Harry grinned. He pulled the towel from her hand, tossed it onto the counter, and then settled his hands onto her waist. “You know what I don’t get? How a man could be such an asshole to you.”
Harry didn’t put any particular emotion in those words—it was just an observation. Nonetheless, those words moved like rockets through Lola’s heart. “That is very kind of you to say right now,” she said, smiling lopsidedly. “But in fairness, it takes two, and I—”
“Don’t say another word,” he said, touching his finger to her lips. “I like my fantasy of rooming with the world’s most perfect little lunatic. Don’t spoil it for me.” He kissed her.
