Page 34 of No Apologies
Chapter Seven
“You just broke my heart and you’re grinning like an idiot. What’s on your phone?”
Skylar forced her gaze up from the small device that kept pinging with messages, not bothering to hide the grin that wouldn’t stop as she resettled herself on the couch after her quick trip to the bathroom, “What?”
“We’re kind of in the middle of a breakup. Could you please pay attention?” Trey grinned right back at her and she laughed.
“Oh, I heard you and I did not break your heart. You broke up with me!”
Trey chuckled and kicked his feet up on his coffee table, “Preemptive strike.”
“Mmhmm.”
“Were you or were you not preparing to let me down easy?” Trey raised a dark slash of eyebrows and then smirked when she winced, “Yeah, my point exactly. We can call it a mutual decision to part romantically but remain friends if it makes you feel better.”
She laughed, “I don’t care either way but saying it was mutual works better for you. No reason for my brother to start swinging if you didn’t break my heart.”
“Your heart was never anywhere near me, princess.”
That awful nickname he knew she hated sobered her good mood and Skylar put the phone down. So far, this breakup had been nothing but amicable. They’d made it through dinner without anyone becoming any wiser about their impending implosion.
Her father had proudly boasted about Trey’s fishing prowess. Her mother had kissed his cheeks and invited him back to dinner. Owen had glanced between them a few times as though he sensed something was going on but he’d kept his mouth shut and hadn’t said a word before ducking out for the night.
After leaving her parents’ house, she’d followed Trey home so they could talk. He’d cut her off at the pass and done the unthinkable, ending their relationship before she could utter a single word. They’d talked and agreed that neither of them had truly thought it was going anywhere, that they were better friends than lovers and that it was long past overdue.
It had been bittersweet but friendly because that’s what they were. Friends. And they both wanted to stay that way. He’d poured her a glass of wine, retrieved himself a beer from his fridge, and they’d been talking easily ever since. It might actually go down as the best breakup ever.
Without the tension of their doomed relationship hanging over them, they could laugh and really talk. Skylar didn’t feel the need to shut him out or keep him at arm’s length. And as it turned out, Trey was really easy to talk to when she wasn’t hiding the fact that she was in love with another man from him.
If she’d known it was going to go this well, she would have broken up with him a long time ago.
“I really am sorry I didn’t say something sooner.”
“Nah,” Trey took a long swing of his beer and shrugged, “Don’t be sorry. I get it. I’m gone half a month at a time for work, sometimes more. It makes it hard to keep anything steady going.”
It did. He was right about that. She knew that a lot of the guys that worked the oil rigs enjoyed that aspect of their job. They were constantly moving from area to area and changing girls as easily as zip codes. But the good guys, guys like Trey that wanted something solid and real, found it difficult to pin down a girl willing to be alone for long periods of time.
It was a hard life. It was hard to keep a relationship afloat that way. But that wasn’t the real problem between her and Trey and they both knew it. She’d liked that he was gone for weeks at a time. It made it easier to keep him at arm’s length. But she didn’t think he needed to know that, not now, or ever.
“It is.” She agreed instead and watched him scrub a hand over his handsome face.
“Even when I was in town, we had to feel our way back out every time. Try to realign our lives for each other so there was space. We never really fit. There wasn’t a good time to get into it or I probably would have said something sooner too.”
“Still, I should have ended things the moment I knew my heart was somewhere else.”
Trey raised a skeptical eyebrow, “You mean the moment you knew your heart was withsomeoneelse?”
So far, neither of them had acknowledged the elephant in the room, at least not by name. Trey wasn’t an idiot. He knew exactly what she meant. Even still, Skylar felt the blush color her cheeks and hid behind her glass of wine, staring at the floor instead of meeting his dark gaze.
“Yeah.”
“Since we’re still friends and all… when did you figure that out?”
“Not nearly as long ago as you probably think.”
“You didn’t know from the start then?”
She jerked her gaze back up to his when she heard something that sounded like hurt in his voice, “No. Not even close. I mean… I knew I had feelings for him but I thought it was just friendship, maybe a little bit of a crush.”
