Yikes.Bad news?he asked.
No, it’s good news. Stop being a jerk and come to dinner.
Fine, fine.
He sighed, wondering what the news was. There were a dozen possibilities, and he briefly wondered if any was Paige-related, but he decided probably not. In fact, he’d bet cash money Lauren spent much less of her day thinking about Paige than Josh did.
He wondered what Paige was up to now. Was she running new events at the café? Was she getting better at working with kids? She’d told him not to contact her for a while, so he was honoring that, but he missed her palpably. He wanted to see her, talk to her, hold her. He’d worked actively not to feel that pain in his chest, but he was starting to realize that maybe he had fallen in love with her. She hadn’t dumped him, merely asked him for more time, so it was possible she’d come to her senses and recognize that, actually, they belonged together.
Because it couldn’t be possible for him to have gotten a taste of life with Paige only for her to leave him. He could not accept that.
But he would respect her wishes, so he would bide his time for now. But as Provost had just told him, he was on his way to becoming a great litigator, and as such, surely he could craft the argument that would win Paige back. He just had to find that argument.
Chapter 22
Paige had often thought of her time as a single person as a kind of baseline. A relationship might pull her away from that baseline for a time, but she always reverted back when that relationship ended.
Only this time, she didn’t seem to be reverting. Something had definitely changed when she went out with Josh.
Oh, the routine was the same. Her home was the same—she went to work every day, and she spent time with her friends. Walking into Pop to meet the usual gang one evening felt routine; Paige said hello to the bartender by name on the way in. But it was different, too, because Paige couldn’t help but think about Josh being here with her.
She’d never regretted her decisions where men had been concerned before. Oh, a few breakups had left her feeling sad for a few days. But for the last couple of years, no one had made it past the second date, so she’d moved on without much thought. With Josh, she’d told him not to contact her, and he hadn’t, but part of her still kept checking her phone to see if he’d texted or hoped it was him whenever her phone rang. She couldn’t sit at the corner table in the Cat Café without thinking about him sitting at the table with her. She couldn’t cook at home without wishing he was sitting at the island, making witty banter while she finished dinner.
This was love, wasn’t it? Or it was the end of it, maybe. This ache she felt in her chest whenever she thought of Josh, wondering if she’d done the right thing, this sure felt like heartbreak.
She looked at her friends gathered around their usual table and thought that she had done the right thing, because she couldn’t possibly lose this. Was there some universe where she could have both? She didn’t know, but it hadn’t seemed that way.
She sat at the table with Caleb, Lauren, Evan, and Lindsay and ordered her usual and listened to them gossip about whatever had happened that day. And she couldn’t help but imagine if Josh were here to add a joke about something insane that had happened with one of his less savory clients. He’d never come to drink night, but she’d hoped to invite him once Lauren knew about their relationship. Instead, everything had fallen apart.
“Brace yourselves, guys,” said Evan after everyone’s drinks arrived. “I was wrong about something.”
“I amshocked,” said Lauren.
“That has never happened before,” said Paige.
“Dogs and cats living together! Mass hysteria!” said Lindsay.
Evan turned to Caleb. “You see the abuse I put up with?”
“What happened, Ev?” asked Lauren.
“Will the cookbook editor from that dumb singles thing Lindsay tricked me and Paige into attending actually called me. We’re going out Friday.”
“What, really?” said Lauren.
“What happened to Darius?” asked Caleb.
Evan pursed his lips and shook his head, his expression reading as though something unfortunate had happened to him.
“They broke up a couple of weeks ago,” Lauren stage-whispered.
“Wait, I thought you said that the cookbook editor was hung up on another guy,” said Paige.
“And so I thought, so I confronted him about it, and apparently this Brian guy he has a crush on is married and works in his office, and so is very off-limits, and he promised to work on not talking about him so much.” Evan shrugged. “Time will tell, I guess.”
“Good luck,” said Lindsay. “And what about you, Paige?”
“The guy I met at the single’s thing hasnotcalled, and I don’t think he will. Which is fine, because I don’t think we’re very compatible.”
