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“Cry. I’ll wait. It’s not like I had anything better planned for tonight anyway.”
Wiping her eyes, she turned her head and gave him a wobbly smile through her tears. “You’re such a jerk.”
“I know.”
And then she turned the rest of the way toward him, and he opened his arms and widened his knees to fit her inside them so he could hold her.
He didn’t know if it was the right thing to do. Probably not. She felt too good in his arms.
But it was what she wanted, and after what he’d just done, he wasn’t about to deny her anything.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
May removed the tags from her new clothes. She peeled off inspection stickers and checked care labels.
Soap into the barrel, quarters into the slots. Cold water for the colors. Warm water for the whites. Delicates in to soak.
Regardless of whether she continued to stay with him—which was obviously, objectively, a bad idea—or whether she came to her senses and booked herself a hotel room, she would need clean clothes.
So. Laundry.
She dropped her purchases into the right tubs, where the water saturated the fabric and stole whatever magic they’d possessed.
She hoped it would come back. She’d liked those clothes.
Damn it, she’d liked Ben, too, and she fully expected warning flags to be flapping. Alarm bells to be ringing in her head. If May told her mother or Allie about his temper, the divorce he wouldn’t talk about, the kiss …
Run, May. Run fast.
Instead, she was doing his laundry, mingling their clothes together. She didn’t fear Ben. She feared her own disappointment. Her bad habits and where they led her.
When he’d kissed her, the kiss wasn’t what she had hoped it would be. What else was new? It was the story of her whole blasted life, this gap between what she hoped for and what she got.
It wasn’t the world’s fault. It was hers. She spun fantasies, but she had to live in reality. The habit was too old, too deeply ingrained to do anything about except notice it. Nod her head. Ah, yes. Screwing myself over once again.
That was what had happened with Dan. He’d always been himself—the self-indulgent boy-man she didn’t like quite enough on the morning of their first meeting—but she’d invented a thousand reasons not to notice, because he’d picked her. In exchange for doing her the great favor of wanting her around, she’d given him everything—her love, her attention, her faith.
There was an old schoolhouse in the countryside south of Green Bay, a mile or so past where the paved part of the Fox River Trail ended. She knew which room would be hers and Dan’s, which one for the baby, which one for the older child. She knew where the garden would go and what kind of dogs they would have.
When Dan took the offer from the Jets, she’d mentally moved the schoolhouse to New Jersey. She’d expected to have a big old diamond on her left hand by the time she flew home to Wisconsin for Christmas.
Pathetic.
She didn’t know how to turn it off—how to fling these rose-colored glasses she wore onto the pavement and stomp them until they shattered. Somehow, she’d convinced herself this weekend with Ben wasn’t just one more fantasy. That it was an interlude, not an illusion.
She’d convinced herself that she’d drawn a line through her life and stepped over it, and any decisions she’d made about Ben were new decisions made in this new life.
Ha.
He’d kissed her, and her heart had dropped out of the clouds, right into her stomach. Because she’d wanted him to kiss her, but not like that. She’d wanted a beautiful moment, or at least something she recognized as genuine connection. Passion.
And instead you got a sidewalk, and the taste of borscht and orange juice. Ben’s erection poking you in the stomach and his tongue in your mouth.
The sad thing was, it hadn’t even been bad. When he’d pulled her close enough to feel him getting hard, lust had fired between her thighs. She could still feel it, a lingering slippery warmth despite all the blocks they’d walked since then and all the tears she’d cried.
She’d liked the way he smelled up close. The pressure of his lips on hers.
She just hadn’t liked the reason he’d done it.
