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I smiled. It was a real smile, too. I was flattered, and it felt good to know a real guy—a normal, nice guy liked me enough to want to try to make this work. But I owed it to him to tell the truth. “There’s something I should’ve told you from the start.”
Tommy’s expression fell a little, but he nodded. “That other guy, right? Tall, dark, and asshole?”
I grinned. “That one. I’m not dating him or anything, but… It’s complicated, and it wouldn’t really be fair to you if I didn’t put that out there. Actually, he royally screwed up, and I was hoping I’d be able to put him behind me. But the truth is I’m still sort of hoping he’ll find a way to make me forgive him.”
“You have feelings for him?” Tommy asked.
“I don’t want to, but… yeah. I think I do.”
“I had an ex once. We dated three years before she cheated on me. But I still couldn’t get over her. Not all the way. So I didn’t date for like six months, and when I finally started dating again, it was a weight off my shoulders. I realized there were other people, you know? One can seem special, especially when you push everyone else away for them. But at the end of the day, there are more people out there. Nobody is worth holding your heart hostage.”
I set the clothes down I was about to stuff into my bag and looked at him. “That actually makes a lot of sense.”
He shrugged. “Personal experience, or something like that.”
“You know what? Sure. We can get coffee and hang out sometime. I can’t promise that…” I trailed off.
Tommy nodded. “Like I said. Been there. But I’m willing to give it a shot anyway.”
I smiled. It might have just been the sun creeping out from the clouds outside, but I thought the Landon-shaped shadow hanging over the room faded just a little.
I spent the plane ride home trying to make less of a mess out of everything that happened. Mentally, I’d pull one string, thinking it could untie the whole muddled knot of emotions. What if I just talk to him? Tell Landon it’s over to his face? Maybe I’m having trouble letting go because I never really cut things off? But it was no good. Nothing was going to end in a clear answer.
I was starting to wish I could just fold in on myself and disappear.
Hello melodramatic, it’s me, Andi. I was beginning to get well acquainted with emotional angst, and if it got any worse, the next logical step was carrying around a little composition book dotted with skulls where I wrote angry poems about love.
Dear Landon
Roses are red,
Violets are blue,
Onions stink,
But so do you.
The problem was that I also couldn’t stop wanting to put onions on everything I ate, even when cutting them made me cry and smelling them made me nauseous. Oh, and I was still inexplicably sexually attracted to those onions, no matter how mad they made me.24LandonIt didn’t take much digging to find out when Andi’s flight would return. It also wasn’t too hard to make sure I was in the hotel lobby during the rough window of time I expected she’d be coming back from the airport.
I knew it wasn’t the time to talk to her—after all, I still needed to make a call before I had that conversation with her. I waited in the corner of the lobby and watched as she came in about an hour later. I’d never felt relief like I felt when I saw she was alone. No Tommy. No phone glued to her ear as she chatted up her new boyfriend.
It wasn’t a guarantee that they hadn’t decided to take things a step further, but it at least let me hold onto hope that she’d left whatever they had back in Florida.
Once she’d headed up in the elevators, I pulled out my phone. With a muttered curse, I put it back in my pocket and headed outside for my car.
I found my mom where she usually was. I could hear her coughing before I even got up the stairs to our apartment. Inside, she was on the couch with a show playing on the TV.
I clicked the show off, then sat beside her.
“I know that look,” she said. She set down a cup of the tea she was always drinking and wrinkled her forehead at me. It was a look I’d seen dozens of times as a kid—when I’d come to her for advice or when she knew she’d have to explain something difficult to me.
“I’m going to give the club and the hotel to Andi.”
I braced myself for the look of disappointment. I knew my mom was too good a person to show it openly, but I expected a flicker of something to pass over her features. I stared hard but didn’t see anything.
