Page 106 of The Rebound
“Beth!”
She claps a hand over her mouth. “I can’t help it,” she says, her voice muffled.
“I’m the bad person here,” I remind her. “I’m the one who should feel guilty and bad and awful. I’m the one saying sorry.”
“And I forgive you.”
“No,” I groan. “You have to yell at me. You have to be mad.”
“I’m not a very yelly person.”
My hands go to my hips as I glare at her. Then I realize I’m glaring at her and I stop. “And I’m not a very good apologizing person.”
“You’re really not,” she says gently.
“Well…” I glance around, at a loss. “Do you want to get a drink?”
She looks uncertainly toward the café. “I could open back up, I guess.”
I shake my head. “A real drink,” I say, and two minutes later we’re sitting in one of the back booths of Pete’s withtwo glasses of wine between us.
“I didn’t mean to say anything to him,” I say as soon as she’d taken her first sip. “I know that’s probably hard to believe but we were arguing and I was so mad at him and it just came out.”
“He told me how upset you were.”
“I thought you’d be furious at me.”
She wrinkles her nose. “Why?”
“Because I…” I gaze at her, flustered. “Because we kissed! I kissed him. You should know that. It wasn’t Luke at first.Iinitiated it. Not him. I’m to blame.”
“But honestly, Abby, it’s not like we were together or I had some sort of claim over him. I knew he didn’t feel the same way about me. I’ve always known. But I didn’t care. There’s not a lot of people to choose from around here and it’s not like I have the time to put myself out there and meet someone who isn’t in a one-mile radius. He was the perfect excuse for me. Here was a guy I could tell myself I had a crush on and then I wouldn’t have to risk everything again for someone new.”
“You mean like you did with Ross?”
“I tend to follow others,” she says. “Everyone thinks I’m a free spirit but I’m not. I’m a barnacle. I latch onto people. If people were boats,” she clarifies.
“I get it.”
“I followed Ross. I followed him all the way out here and when he left I was stuck because no one came along and picked me up. So I latched onto Luke.”
“But you still have feelings for—”
“I never said anything to him. Not once. And I don’t know if you’ve met me, but I say a lot of things to a lot of people. I’m not shy when it comes to people I like but I didn’t say anything to him because I knew that my feelings were… not that they weren’t real but that they were a reaction to my surroundings. And I liked how it was between us. I liked having him as a friend. Saying something would ruin that and that terrified me.”
“So I ruined it for you.”
“No,” she says with a small smile. “Would you stop beating yourself up? It was the first thing he said to me. That he didn’t want anything to change between us. He was really sweet. As usual,” she adds with a roll of her eyes. “I mean, yes, will I still look at his butt sometimes? Of course I will. But he listed all the ways we would be terrible together and I’ve got to say he makes a convincing argument.”
“He didn’t.”
“I don’t know if I should be insulted that he thought that much about it but I appreciate it nonetheless.” She smiles. “His main point was that he’s too structured for me. That between his course and the café and his parents he blocks out his day by the hour. That it’s the only thing that can clear his mind. He even schedules in his downtime. Can you imagine that?”
“No,” I say, taking a long,longsip of wine.
“He said I need someone who’ll drop everything at a moment’s notice and take me to Paris. Or go with me if I want to sell the café and move to Brazil.”
“Because you live intuitively.”
