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“I was being hypothetical.”
“Oh,” he said with a shrug. “Pardon my honesty then.”
“I don’t like myself with her,” I blurted, wanting to believe it.
“Bullshit,” he said, licking his teeth as he reached for his drink. “I’ve never seen you so pleasantly distracted.”
“I don’t want to be distracted. I want to be cold and calculating and good at my job.”
He rolled his dark green eyes. “Said no one on their death bed ever.”
“Things were about to get messy.” I tried to imagine telling Maddy how I really felt about her, imagined what the result of that admission might be. What if she didn’t feel the same? Or what if she did and then something happened to her, something I couldn’t fix or protect her from? It was too awful to think about.
“Messy is good,” Tanner said. “Messy is real.”
“Life is messy enough when you don’t get attached to people.”
“Can’t argue with that,” he said. “But take it from someone with siblings, it’s easier to clean up messes when you have an ally.”
“Relationships aren’t alliances. Their obligations.”
“Not the good ones,” he said. “The good ones don’t feel like a chore.”
I shoved some fries in my mouth.
“Did caring about Maddy start to feel like a chore?”
I kept chewing, too embarrassed to admit the truth, which was that it was never a chore. Ever. It was a joy. A joy I felt powerless to resist. Perhaps that was the problem. Caring about her made me want to control more while making me feel less in control than ever.
“Because if it didn’t, I don’t get why you would break things off,” he continued. “I thought you were happy.”
I clenched my jaw. “I was. Happier than I’m comfortable with.” Happier than I deserve.
“Wow.”
I furrowed my brow and watched him take two swills from his bottle of Honker’s Ale. “What?”
“I thought she was the one that was going to make you hang up your melancholy for good.”
“You’re so dramatic.”
“Dramatic is turning your back on the best thing that’s happened to you in years because you’re too set in your ways to know a good thing when it’s right in front of you.”
My stomach knotted. What if I’d betrayed myself as badly as I’d betrayed her? Except the light she brought into my life was too bright, bright enough to expose the dark corners where I hid my unhappiness. And that was uncomfortable. Painful.
Before I started spending time with her, it was easier to ignore the areas of my life where I was settling, like my discontent at work and with my father. But Maddy made me look at the world differently, made me want more.
Pushing her away was supposed to make that feeling stop, except it hadn’t worked. And not only did her absence make me feel like I was being eaten alive, but my cravings for her company hadn’t gone away. She was still all I could see every time I closed my eyes or heard a woman laugh or saw a couple holding hands. Only unlike before, she wasn’t smiling when I pictured her anymore. She was hurting. Disappointed. Lonely. And it was all my fault.
I thought it was freedom I wanted, the kind of freedom that accompanies bachelorhood. That lightness a guy feels when he doesn’t have anyone in his life to disappoint. But what I really wanted was freedom from the fear that I might not be enough for her, freedom from the suspicion that I might not be capable of loving her the way she deserved.
But I wasn’t free at all now. I was in a prison of my own making where the only thing I was free from was her affection, and that freedom hadn’t made anything easier or better. That freedom was a curse, not a blessing.
Besides, she wasn’t the problem. She was never the problem. I’d been my own enemy this whole time. For years. And now karma had served up a cold slice of reality that looked a helluva lot like a bespoke cupcake whose sweetness was no longer available to me.
I’d chosen my pride—my comfort—over my undeniable feelings for her, and if my shame was anything to go by, the latter was all I had left.
