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The bastard.
I didn’t know what he was doing to me or why he was so good at acting like a boyfriend when he’d never been one in real life, but I needed time to catch my breath, so even after he got seated and Hillary had the kitchen send out food, I kept off to the sid
e and caught up with her.
“But wait – how did this even happen so fast?” she asked in a hushed voice since we were within earshot of Drew’s booth. “I feel like I liked a picture of you and Mike on your Instagram like, a month or two ago, and suddenly this? How?” she whispered excitedly while playing with a lock of her dark brown hair.
“I mean… the media thinks we’ve been together for longer but it’s pretty much been since after the whole Mike thing,” I improvised. “I didn’t know what to do with myself, and I guess Drew did. He picked up the pieces of me, he put them back together and then… boom.”
“Love,” Hillary nodded.
“Yeah. I guess when you believe in it, it has a way of finding you,” I said, making Hillary’s face crumple with emotion just before one of the chefs in the kitchen called for her attention.
When I returned to the table, Drew was already laughing.
“Impressive crock of shit right there.”
“I was acting,” I said tartly, sliding into the other side of the booth since I wasn’t sure I could handle sitting so close to him again just yet. “That said, I don’t think it was a total crock.”
“So if I believe in love, it’ll find me?” Drew smirked.
“Yes. I think so,” I huffed, taking as sip of my mimosa. “I think if you were more open to the idea of love and trust – platonic or not – you’d have more of it in your life.”
Drew stared at me as he chewed for what felt like a full minute.
“I’ll pass,” he finally said.
“You don’t love your parents?” I challenged.
“Not the way most people love their parents.”
“What does that mean?”
“I have good memories of them. I text them back. I keep pictures of them in my house,” Drew said, showcasing that long torso as he leaned back in his seat. “But I don’t trust them. I would never rely on them for comfort. Or happiness.”
I could feel my eyebrows rising higher and higher.
“That’s… insane.”
“Clearly, we have different definitions of that word.”
“And were you always like this?”
“No. But I wasn’t always a professional baseball player.”
“Again, what does that mean?”
His lips hardened to a line as he eyed me with irritation.
“It means I appreciate my mom and I like my dad okay, but he treats me like an ATM and promises business loans on my behalf to people he barely knows, just because he wants to feel like the king of La Palma, Florida,” Drew answered, drumming his long fingers on the table. “Before I even got drafted, he took out a million dollar line of credit in my name and maxed that shit out in three months. I said something he didn’t like in an interview and he told my entire hometown I was on drugs. Tell me I should trust him.”
The drumming stopped and he looked up at me with those intense green eyes. My mouth opened and shut.
“Okay. Yup. Definitely not someone I’d trust,” I relented. “Sorry,” I frowned, wondering why I of all people had the nerve to criticize his relationship with his family. “Really. I didn’t mean to sound judgmental. I actually know all too well how that family stuff feels.”
Drew’s eyebrows pulled tight for a second and I thought he was going to ask me about myself.
But he didn’t.
