Page 35 of Love.V2
Six months later, I was neither.
It wasme. I blinked hard, eyes unfocused on my salad. I was the problem.
Cue Taylor Swift.
“Hey.” Dylan could certainly feel me spinning out across the table. I looked up into his familiar brown eyes. “Don’t beat yourself up. I’ve been doing a lot of soul-searching over the last few months, and I realized work has become my whole personality. Like for years.”
“I think…I think I used to be fun, though.”
“Me too. I think.”
He had been.Wehad been. We looked at each other for a moment. All that light, airy first date energy evaporated like champagne bubbles. Like our life. All that fizzy potential had popped somewhere along the way, and now we were just staring at each other. Flat.
“I’m about to break your starting over fresh rules,” I warned.
“I think we passed that boundary a few minutes ago, anyway.”
“Whathappenedto us?”
Dylan propped his elbow on the table, hands massaging his brow. “Angel, it’s the question I’ve asked myself every day since you left.”
We blinked at each other, and all the carefree artifice that had gotten us to this moment stripped away. We weren’t going on a first date. We were two people who had once been deeply in love and gotten inextricably sidelined by life. I didn’t know what to say.
Dylan leaned closer. “All I can think about right now is that night in Austin, when you wanted to cross ‘riding a mechanical bull’ off your list.”
The weight sinking in my chest couldn’t stop the spread of an automatic grin. “And we ended up getting a ride back to the hotel with that clown.”
“He was a rodeo clown. There’s a difference.”
“I’m not sure he was, and I’m not sure there is.”
There was a lot I remembered about that night, and also a lot I didn’t. Like, I didn’t remember falling head-over-ass off the mechanical bull, but I remembered Dylan’s warm, familiar face, laughing as he held me close and bought me a mezcal margarita to make up for my epic failure.
I hadn’t been afraid to fall back then.
“Right.” Dylan rapped his knuckles on the table, glancing around and waving our server over. I didn’t know how long I’d been staring down at the sad dregs of salad on my plate. “You have mezcal? Think your bartender can whip up some margaritas?”
My eyes widened. “I don’t care what you say or how many margaritas you buy me tonight, I’m not breaking into a hotel pool to go skinny dipping.”
Dylan’s eyes darkened, flicking down to my lips before climbing back up my face. “I’d forgotten about that. The B&E, I mean. Not you naked in a rooftop pool. That’s…ingrained.”
It didn’t matter that we were having some sort of existential crisis together. When he looked at me like that, heat spread through me, nerves tingling.
“No, we are still those people. And if we want to get to know each other again, we’ll need to have something to talk about.”
The certainty in his voice calmed the increasingly anxious pitch of my thoughts. He had a plan. Dylan always had a plan. “Okay,” I allowed, intrigued.
He grinned up at the server who dropped off our drinks, then pulled his phone from his coat pocket, tapping through some apps. “We’re going to make a new list.”
It took a second for his meaning to settle in. “A list? Like…one of my old lists of stuff I had to do?”
“Not had to. Wanted to. And your lists have led to some of the best experiences of our lives.”
“It’s been a long time since I did one of those.” I’d started one the week I’d moved to Chicago, but between getting used to Jinx and wallowing over Dylan, I’d never gotten around to filling it out. “Besides, I feel like I’m a pro at sushi these days.”
Dylan shook his head. I itched to brush away the lock of wavy brown hair that fell onto his forehead. “Not anything that prescriptive. I want to know…I don’t know. I want to know who you are now. WhoIam now. What would we do if we had to do something we’ve always wanted?”
“Something I’ve always wanted,” I repeated, my brain spinning in a million overwhelming directions. A trip? A hobby? A new flavor of ice cream? “What would yours be?” I asked. I needed a touchstone. A parameter. Otherwise, the choice was going to flood me into paralysis.
