Page 30 of Feels Like Falling
Blowing out a breath, I look down at the screen and smile at the one good thing I left back in Savannah.
BLAKE: Did you make it home all right?
ELLISON: Yes, and all settled in. How are things back in Savannah?
BLAKE: I have the flu
ELLISON: Oh gosh, I’m so sorry. I hope you feel better!
BLAKE: I don’t have the flu. I’m just telling my mother that so she stops trying to set me up on dinner dates with her friends’ daughters
BLAKE: I even called in a favor and got a doctor’s note and took off a few days from work
ELLISON: That’s a hell of a cover-up. You know you can’t keep that up forever.
BLAKE: I don’t need it to last forever—just like ten or fifteen years
ELLISON: I just told my mother off
BLAKE: (head explosion emoji)
BLAKE: How did that go?
ELLISON: About as effective as you’d expect.
BLAKE: So not very
ELLISON: Correct. She tried to set up dinner at the club with Dustin
BLAKE: The guy you punched in the face?
ELLISON: One and the same
BLAKE: Well I hope she respects your boundaries
ELLISON: We both know the odds of that are as likely as your fifteen-year flu
BLAKE: It would be a medical miracle
I snortand type out a goodbye message before tossing my phone onto the counter. Blake Reynolds might be the only real friend I made in Savannah, although our friendship was born out of necessity rather than anything else.
We’d met my senior year of college, bonding over our mutual disdain for overpriced dinners and pompous assholes who thought they walked on water. Our parents had been thrilled at our apparent fondness for each other, pushing us together whenever they could.
He’d been pining over a girl he couldn’t be with, and I’d been harboring the hope that Montana would come to Savannah like a knight in shining armor and whisk me back to Blackstone Falls. It hadn’t happened, and Blake and I seemed to be at an impasse in our lives romantically, so the solution seemed obvious, at least to me.
After one too many drinks at a fundraiser, I asked Blake to be my stand-in boyfriend. He laughed. I hadn’t.
And the more we talked about it, both drunk and sober, the more it started to make sense to him too.
In the beginning, we tried to see if we could do it for real—if we had enough chemistry to make an actual life together—but it just wasn’t there. We were friends with sometimes benefits who then had to dodge questions about marriage and children and a million other things we didn’t have answers to. It wasn’t a perfect setup, but it worked, and I think Blake thought it was a charade we could keep going forever.
But after I came back to Blackstone Falls for Nan’s funeral, I knew my time in Savannah was limited—and Blake did too.
He hadn’t talked me out of it or made me feel guilty for needing to leave. He was perfect in every way men in that world weren’t.
He just wasn’t meant for me.
Five minutes back in my hometown and I knew my heart would only ever beat for one man. A tall man with dark hair and brown eyes, who saw every one of my imperfections and loved me harder because of them.
