Noisy-ass cardinal kept hopping around and chirping in a nearby tree. Distracting as hell. Definitely the main reason he wasn’t meeting Molly’s gaze.
Even from the corner of his eye, though, he spotted her wince. “Ouch.”
He shrugged. “Should’ve realized then it wasn’t going anywhere. Didn’t, though. All those endless breakups, I always figured we’d get back together sooner or later. Until...” Dammit. The next part still sucked, even twenty years later. “She left for Johns Hopkins. First time she came back to Harlot’s Bay, she made some shit really fucking clear.”
Her soft blond hair in a neat, pretty French braid, she’d laid things out for him. Not cruelly. Matter-of-factly. Like a teacher reciting information he should’ve already known.
“She was going somewhere with her life. Literally. Metaphorically. I wasn’t. So she was done ‘playing around,’ as she put it.” Stiffly, he raised his knees. Lowered them again, restless and slightly sweaty. “Which was when I realized she’d beenamusingherself with me, killing time until we graduated. I wasn’t her goddamn boyfriend. I was a placeholder for someone better.”
After that, he’d only dated locals who didn’t intend to move. Once burned, twice no-way-in-hell-that’s-happening-again.
Molly would’ve been his lone exception. To that rule and most others too.
She still was. And he still couldn’t force himself to look directly at her.
“Becky was my first girlfriend. First everything.” Kiss. Lover. Heartbreak. “What she did hurt, and how she did it was humiliating. Which is why I didn’t tell you we’d broken up in one of our email messages. Stupid wounded pride. Also...”
He sighed, then bit the damn bullet and met Molly’s sympathetic blue eyes.
“I was scared you’d hear the story and agree with her.” There. Now she knew the worst of it. “Tell me I wasn’t good enough for you either. I’d been into you since that day in Principal Evers’s office, and if you’d rejected me directly, it would’ve fuckingdestroyedme. So I tried to come at it sideways instead. Gauge your interest before explaining the situation. But I’m clumsy at that sort of shit, so I screwed it up.”
With each word he spoke, the real driving force behind his sense of urgency—hisneedto keep Molly in Harlot’s Bay and have her commit to stay here,right now, before she got the chance to see California again—became clearer and clearer to him.
Yeah, he was worried about her guard going back up as soon as she’d put some distance between them. But that wasn’t the possibility that twisted his gut and kept him up at night, was it?
Once she was gone, part of him fully believed she’d realize she could do better. Just like Becky had.
Weird how someone he truly didn’t give a single crap about anymore could warp his thoughts so badly. Even after two decades filled with nothing more intimate between him and Becky than hand waves and occasional, awkward chitchat he cut off as soon as possible.
“I’m confused.” Molly’s forehead had crinkled. “If you were into me since Mr. Miller’s class, why didn’t you ask me out? Before you started dating someone else?”
The answer to that question? Almost as embarrassing as the Becky story.
“Too chickenshit.” His fingers closed on a handful of grass beside the blanket. Tugged fretfully. “Certain you’d turn me down.Then I’d have to run the hell away with my broken goddamn heart and join a cult. Or a circus. Didn’t quite settle on which before Becky made the first move and askedmeout.”
The lines across her brow only deepened. “I see.”
But she didn’t. Not clearly. At this moment, the woman had no way of knowing just how much he’d wanted her back then and how much he still did now.
That’d change shortly, though, when they got to today’s final, terrifying game. Athena and Matthew were fuckingruthlesswhen it came to communication.
“Okay.” Molly’s pen tapped against her notepad as she thought for a moment. “From my perspective, here’s the fundamental story you just told me and how I interpret it.”
He braced himself. Accidentally ripped up a patch of grass in the process.
“You started dating a girl in high school,” she began, her voice maddeningly neutral. “You dealt with her honestly, treated her well, and loved her as best you could, even during tough patches. She ended the relationship after a major life change, most likely becauseshewas changing too, and did so in an unkind way. Knowing Becky, she maybe didn’t even realize she wasbeingunkind. Nevertheless, you were hurt and embarrassed and didn’t want to talk about the circumstances of the breakup, which I can understand.”
Somehow, it didn’t sound so embarrassing when Molly explained it like that.
“But, Karl...” She leaned forward then. Laid a warm hand over his socked foot. “You had nothing to be ashamed of, either then or now. I hope you know that. You’re”—air quotes—“‘good enough’ for anyone, and you always were.”
He ticked off his counterarguments on his fingers. “No college degree. Barely ever left the goddamn state. Bad with words. Not exactly an athlete or supermodel.”
And if who and what he was hadn’t been sufficient for Becky or the other women he’d dated, how the hell could he possibly be enough for Molly fuckingDearborn?
Her hand left his foot, and she sat back against the tree with an audible thump.
Dramatically, she raised her own right thumb. And when she spoke again, her voice sounded less neutral and more pissed off.
