Page 67 of Kiss the Girl
I shrugged. “I don’t know much about you. Not as much as I usually know about my friends by now. You’ve hinted that there was a rough breakup, and now I want to know the details.”
His forehead furrowed. “Why?”
“So I can submit it to the front page of the Creekville Courier, obviously. Does it matter why?”
“I guess not.”
“Start with a name.”
“Lauren,” he said.
“And how’d you meet her?”
“High school. Or maybe college, depending on how you look at it. She was two years behind me at Granger, but we didn’t get to know each other until my senior year of college when my mom asked me if I’d give her a ride home from UVA for Christmas. Our moms worked together as tellers at the same bank.”
“Was she trying to set you up? My mom used to do that to me all the time.”
He shook his head. “No. But we hit it off anyway. Ended up dating for a year and got engaged. We were going to get married after she graduated. Seemed pretty perfect. I moved back to Granger to save money and commuted to my first teaching job in Charlottesville. By then, Paige had come back home, and I was helping with Evie. Lauren and I still saw each other a lot but not as much as when I was living right there in town. Then she started skipping some weekends, staying at school instead of coming home. And a month before we were supposed to get married, she told me she wanted to call it off.”
I called her a rude name, which made him laugh.
“Yeah, that’s one way to put it. It turned out that she’d started seeing a guy in law school. So those weekends she didn’t come home, she was hanging out with him. She said that in her mind she wasn’t cheating because she kept telling herself they were only friends.”
“That’s bull,” I said.
He didn’t agree. His expression turned thoughtful. “Maybe.”
“Definitely.”
“She said when the first RSVP for our wedding came in, she realized people were planning to show up and eat the food we’d picked and dance to the music we’d chosen, and it became real, and she couldn’t do it.”
“I don’t like this girl,” I said.
He gave a short laugh, his eyes crinkling the tiniest bit. “You and Paige both. When Lauren called off the wedding, Evie had been begging Paige for months to let her wear her flower girl dress. She said it was princess-fancy, and Paige wouldn’t let her. But the day I told her, she put Evie in the dress, took her to the park, let her play in the sand and mud as much as she wanted, then shoved it in a grocery bag and mailed it back to Lauren.”
“Brutal,” I said, grinning. “I like Paige’s style.”
“Yeah, well, she didn’t love Lauren’s reasons. She took them personally.”
“What does that mean?”
He looked as if he were debating whether he wanted to explain, tugging at his earlobe a few times before he settled in favor of answering. “Lauren said she’d realized she wanted more than what our life together was going to offer her. She didn’t want to be married to a high school teacher, not even one who would eventually become a principal. She wanted someone with more ambition, someone who wanted bigger things than Mineral or even Charlottesville.”
“And why did Paige take that personally?”
“Paige thinks she’s the reason I won’t leave. She felt like Lauren was punishing me for trying to be a good guy.” He ruffled his hair, the tips of his ears going pink. “I sound like I’m trying to be the hero of one of those lame Nicholas Sparks movies she’s always making me watch. I’m not.”
“Maybe you’re not trying to be but you’re that good of a guy anyway.” Noah was good to his bones.
“Look who’s talking, woman who came home to take care of a sick dad.”
“Yep, we’re amazing,” I said lazily to make him laugh. It worked.
“Anyway, Lauren just got married to the law school guy,” he said, still smiling. “But that’s part of why I wanted to move out of Mineral. It was so small, and I was so tired of running into people who asked me questions about it, or just looked at me with pity. It made me feel even crappier. Paige needed a new start too.”
“Was Brooke’s wedding hard for you?”
“It would have been if you hadn’t flashed me your panties then entertained me the next day.”
