He motions for me to walk down the porch stairs first, and he follows me as we walk toward Rex’s kennel across the property. “Your phone was plugged into the projector screen and you got a text from ‘my love’,” he says, sarcastically saying the last twowords. “Right then and there, I knew to put a stop to my little crush on you.”
“Wow,” I say. “So that’s why you were so cold to me the next day? You know you could have just talked to me.”
“I know…” he says slowly, kicking at a rock on the gravel walkway. “But it was also a good thing. It made me realize I can’t just flirt with every beautiful woman I see. I’m not that guy. I’ve got a business to run and a charity to run, and dogs that depend on me. I’m not into settling down and all that crap that Ethan wants, so me thinking you had a boyfriend was good. Trust me.”
“Right,” I say. All these mixed feelings in my body swirl around, kind of pissing me off. Do I want to date Caleb? No. Right? He said so himself—he is not into dating. Not into settling down. I’m a settling down type of girl. I want that. Not with my jackass of an ex at WLB Construction, but with someone. I kind of want to dump Rex’s bowl of cold water over my head. Maybe that’ll help.
Caleb reaches into the kennel and gets a leash. Rex is overly delighted to go on his nightly walk. His butt swings so hard side to side as we let him out of the kennel.
“So who is saved into your phone as My Love?”
Rex walks so fast I have to power walk to keep up. “My cousin, Tia. It’s a joke. I think I’m saved into her phone as Hulk Hogan.” He tilts his head curiously. “Long story,” I say. “We give people weird names in our phones.”
“So what am I saved as?” he asks, nudging me with his elbow.
“What makes you think you’re saved?”
“Oooh, okay.” He laughs. “I see how it is.”
“You’re saved as Caleb Alden.”
“Boring. Are there at least some little heart emojis around my name to signal how handsome I am?”
I roll my eyes. “Absolutely not.”
“Ow.” His hand grips his chest. “You do think I’m handsome, though, right? Most people do.”
“You know you’re handsome. You don’t need my confirmation.”
“No, but I would like it. I call you beautiful like a hundred times a day. You can’t return the favor?”
“No you don’t,” I say, pushing him with my hip and shoulder as we walk. “You’ve said that like three times.”
“In my head I do.”
A flirtatious silence lingers in the air. Sounds weird, but that’s the only way I can describe it. Rex sniffs everything he walks past, and his giant paws smack against the grass, but between Caleb and me, it’s a light, flirty silence. I know he’s watching me, but I can’t bring myself to look at him. As much as I don’t want to, I do have a stupid little crush on him. I’ve never been like this with a man I wasn’t actually dating. It’s fun.
It’s dangerous.
“So why do you refuse to settle down?” I ask.
Rex must smell something really good because he presses his nose to the grass, then pees on it. After sufficiently covering up the smell with his own mark, Rex takes off in the direction of the giant oak tree.
Caleb draws in a deep breath. “I don’t know. Fear, I guess.”
“Fear of what? Living happily ever after? Not being able to flirt with women anymore?”
“Of getting hurt again,” he says. All that former flirty silence turns stone cold somber.
“Ah…” I say a moment later. “I understand.”
“High school sweetheart,” he says after a long while. “We’d been together since junior high, actually. I thought we’d be together forever. My Grandma Nat loved her, and when she died, the whole family was shocked to learn that she left me her wedding ring in her will. Me. The second oldest. I thought it wasa sign to marry that girl, so I proposed at nineteen years old. The crazy thing was, my entire family supported me. Then while I was in police academy she hooked up with one of the firearms instructors."
“Wow.”
Rex sniffs his way straight to a ball in the grass. “How did this get left out here?” Caleb says.
Rex sits in his most handsome, perfectly well-behaved sit, begging for him to throw the ball. “Does Charlotte mind if you go off leash?”
