Page 100 of Ten Rules for Faking It
When she turned from putting away the cream cheese, he was standing there in the small opening between her kitchen and dining area. Dressed casually in jeans and a waffle-knit T-shirt, he looked… well, he looked really damn good.
She picked up her plate and stared at him. He could fill the silence.
“Don’t let me keep you from your nutritious dinner,” he said, nodding to the plate.
She wasn’t hungry anymore. “Why are you here?”
“Why did it bother you so much that I was married?”
Shock struck her like a pedal against a drum. “It didn’t.” She walked past him, brushing his arm as she went to the couch. He followed after her.
“You froze up. You left.”
“I don’t like to socialize. I’ve done more than enough of it lately. I wanted to go home.” She curled into the corner and stared down at her bagel.
“I know I’m your boss, Everly. We can come back to that later, but I can’t stop thinking about how you pulled away when you found out.”
She looked up, her chest constricting from the seriousness of his gaze. “What difference does it make? Why are you doing this? The listeners just voted. Owen is their pick. He’s mine, too, so maybe it’s good you’re here. I want to forget about the second date. Just name Owen the winner… bachelor… whatever.”
He stared at her hard enough to make her focus on her bagel. “Why did it bug you so much?”
She sighed, met his gaze again, unable to hide her frustration. Why the hell was he pushing her onthis? “I apologize for overreacting. I’m just in a funny place with all the dates, my parents arguing, and this… whatever it is that happened between us. I thought we were getting closer. Becoming friends. Finding out that way was a shock. It threw me off, but it shouldn’t. Your past is none of my business. We’re just friends.”
What she felt for him was bigger than anything she could imagine feeling for Owen, and that scared the hell out of her. Overblown, uncontrollable feelings led to terrifying hobbies. Everly just wanted quiet.Right. Quiet, safe, comfortable.
He tunneled both hands into his hair and sighed, pacing infront of her coffee table. “I know that. I told myself that. Along with a hell of a lot of other things.”
Chris sat down on the other end of the couch. At least he was able to read her need for space. “We were twenty-one. There was a group of us, all good friends. We took a road trip. I was mad at my father, who is… Let’s just say he’s somewhat controlling. Her dad worked for my dad, and that pissed my dad off. It just happened. We thought it would make us truly feel like adults, but we were wrong. A few months later, we decided to call it quits and stay friends. She’s remarried and has three kids.”
They’d acted on impulse—on feelings. Her parents’ marriage was built on the same shaky foundation. Everly wanted a base of titanium and concrete. She closed her eyes, gathered her strength, and looked up at him. Why was he telling her this? She didn’t want to know about his ex-wife.God, why did that gut her to think about it? She put her plate on the table. “This is none of my business.”
He shuffled over and took her hand. “I disagree. Weweregetting to know each other. I’m not hiding from you. I want to know more about you because there’s something here, Everly. This isn’t typical for me. I don’t get tingles just holding a woman’s hand. Except for with you. Work complicates it, and I know you’re finishing up the dating, but be honest with me, with yourself: Tell me youdon’tfeel something back.”
She felt more intimacy with just the touch of his hand than she ever had with any other man. But she couldn’t just jump. It didn’t work like that. She had a list. She had reasons. Good ones. He was a roller coaster, and she wanted the teacups—a ride that threw her off balance but was easy to recover from. Acting on chemistry had led her down the wrong path many times. Attraction fizzled. Sure, this ache she felt in her chest for him and these feelings were different from anything she’d known. That just made her trust herself less.
“What if it didn’t work?” The whispered question surprised her. She hadn’t meant to ask.
Chris stroked a finger over her palm, making it hard to focus. He stopped, looked up. “What?”
She pulled her hand back, clasped both together, and put them in her lap. “What if we try, and it messes everything up? I mean, sure, you stayed friends with your ex-wife.” She took a deep breath, hating how much she disliked the whole friends-with-the-ex thing. “We work together. I don’t have that many friends. If it doesn’t work, I could be out of a job. Down a friend.”
“Jesus. These two situations are nothing like each other. I’m a thirty-one-year-old man who is a hell of a lot surer of my feelings than I was as a kid. My marriage has nothing to do with how I feel about you. It was a mistake. On both our parts. Why do we have to go into anything thinking about itnotworking out?”
“Because things don’t. Things happen. Life is hard. Marriage is hard. How do you know that if you got married now, you’d do anything differently? What if you got married and it wasn’t working out?”
His face contorted with exasperation. “I… I don’t know. Are you asking me if I believe in divorce? Yes. I do. There’s a reason my mother didn’t stay with my father. She’s happier without him. Should she have lived in misery her whole life just because she made some promises?”
Some promises.“Those promises mean something,” she whispered. Why did people make them if they couldn’tkeepthem?
“Theydid.But people change. God, look at your own parents. They can’t decide one way or the other. Tell me you don’t wish they’d get a divorce—just be done with all the back-and-forth?”
Her heart muscles tightened. Everly breathed through her nose. “Actually, I wish they’d stop looking at being apart as an option. I wish they’d stick by the promises they made. There shouldn’t be an out.”
He sprang up from the couch, startling her. “So, you think if two people are wrong for each other, they should stay together?”
She stared, hard, at her plate. The cream cheese was melted now, and the bagel looked soggy. “No. I just think they shouldn’t get married if they aren’t in it for good.”
“Sometimes people don’t know where life will lead them, Everly. You can’t be that naïve. There’s no way. Why does this even matter? If I were still married, we wouldn’t be having this conversation.”
