Page 68 of Will Bark for Pizza
Dammit, he was right. I was avoiding him.
I threw the final dart, but it bounced off the board and landed on the floor.Shit.
I retrieved my darts, but when I tried to return to the table, Beckett blocked my path. I put out a hand to avoid a full-on collision. Big mistake. My palm flattened against his chest, and there was no question that all his cut lines, hard muscle, andmanwere not an illusion. Not when I could touch them so easily.
I jerked my hand away as though I touched a hot burner. In some ways, I had.
“Do youwantthe bookstore?”
“I don’t live here,” I reminded him.
“That’s not what I asked.”
I didn’t know how to answer that, so instead I said, “If I win, I want a favor.”
“What kind of favor?”
“A future favor.”
“Done.”
“Just like that?”
“Do you want me to argue?”
“Nope.”
He stepped up to the line, his first dart hitting the triple twenty I’d aimed for three times but missed.
Double shit.
Beckett threw again, hitting the double nineteen. This was not looking good.
I pilfered a cupcake and took a bite.
Alyssa squealed with excitement the next board over, throwing off Beckett’s third throw. She hit a bullseye. Thoren looked at her with the same adoration he had at sixteen. Maybe someday, those two would figure out they were meant to be together.
Maybe not.
Was anyone ever really meant to be together?
I took a second generous bite of a confetti cupcake filled with some type of delicious cream I couldn’t quite pin. Cake batter?
When I first met Travis, he seemed to be everything I was looking for in a man. He checked every single box. Except, he actually didn’t check any of them. He pretended to be what I wanted, and only after I was completely ensnared in his web did I realize he fooled me.
The revelation was gradual at first. When the full truth finally hit the day I drove back to Omaha to break things off, it packed one helluva punch. It made me question everything I ever thought I knew about love.
About fate.
I used to believe in fate.
Now, it seemed to hold true only in the fiction Iwrote.
Used to write.
I took another bite.
Maybe that’s why I was stuck.
