And I wasn’t sure I could risk breaking twice.
The breath caught in my throat.“What?”
“Back in high school,” he said lightly, but he stopped casually swinging his legs.
I cut him off with a shaky laugh.“Tristan, you were...you.Confident.Lizzy’s older brother.I was barely functioning under the weight of teenage hormones and algebra.”
His mouth curved.“Translation: you thought I was out of your league.”
“Maybe a little.”I hesitated, the confession hovering.“Truth?”He nodded.“I had wanted to ask you out.Once.After graduation.But then life...rerouted.”
Silence stretched between us, soft and charged.The breeze off the highway placed a strand of my hair into his arm.
We sat there, wine between us, headlights cutting weak halos into the dark.
The stars blurred slightly and the warmth in my veins loosened something I’d kept locked down for years.
“Can I ask you something?”I said.
He angled toward me, legs brushing mine.“You can ask me anything.”
“Why didn’t you ever ask me out?”
The night paused.
There was no laughter, no deflection.He looked at me like I had cracked open a vault.
“I wanted to,” he said quietly.
My heart pounded, embarrassingly loud.
He stared out at the open road before turning his focus to me.“There are two reasons why I didn’t.”
I crossed my dangling feet at the ankles and turned to face him.
“First, and this one is probably the most important one, but Lizzie made me swear up and down that I wouldn’t date anymore of her friends after the fiasco that was Dingbat Denise.”
“Wait?You dated her?”
“Once, and she expected to go all the way on the first date, and I wanted nothing to do with her.I liked her, but not that way.Afterwards she made a big deal out of things and blew everything way out of proportion.”
“Wow.I never heard that side of the story.Lizzie just stopped inviting her to hang out.”
“Yeah.”His tone didn’t indicate that he was proud of the reasoning.“After the Denise Debacle, she made me swear I’d never date another of her friends.”He looked right at me and the corners of his eyes tugged downward as he sighed.
“Oh.I see.”I hung my head.“But you’d wanted to.”
“Yeah, because it was you.”
My chest tightened at his words, and the headlights from the passing vehicle on the highway made the blues in his eyes sparkle for a fraction of a heartbeat.Although the night air was chilly, I was suddenly warm enough to heat the back end of the van.Thank goodness it was dark and he couldn’t tell my face was hotter than an oven.
“And...This sounds truly terrible, but after you and Lizzie stopped being friends, I figured the deal was off.You weren’t her friend anymore and I could ...you know, ask you out...”
My heart skipped a beat.Hehadbeen interested in me.As much as I had been in him.
“But before I could, you were with him.”
Boom.My rebound—Gregory Adams—the one who became the father to my children.Gregory had been interested in me, and feeling brushed off and lonely as my final year of high school came to a crashing end, I accepted his date.He wasn’t well known, wasn’t part of any major social cliques, so we blended like oil and vinegar, until a few years later when we couldn’t blend together anymore.
