AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“I don’t do that.”I do that.I thought about my breakup with Case, fallings-out with former colleagues or friends who had hurt me or crossed me. I thought about my old best friend. “I don’t.” I flashed over all the moments with Lear where I had shut down the possibility of anything more, telling him he only saw what I let him see.
I sucked in a breath, wiping my face again and willing my body to get it together. This was probably hormones and lack of sleep and stress, and not missing Lear Campbell. “For a while, it seemed like I could be the real me with him. The real me I am with you guys, and it would be... safe.”
“Girl, I love you, but it took a long time for us to get the real you. I spent our entire freshman year trying to crack my roommate’s shell, getting held at arm’s length and coming back for more.”
“I know. It’s hard to love me,” I acknowledged. “It’s hard to like me.”
“No. You’re not hard to love at all, but you don’t make it easy for people to figure that out. Maybe Lear hasn’t quite figured it all out yet.”
“I stayed with Case for so long because he didn’t try to change me. He didn’t mind that I was laser focused on work. He didn’t mind that I didn’t care if people thought I wasn’t nice. He didn’t mind all the things about me I really love. I mean, he didn’t mind until he did, but when I was with Lear, it was different. It’s like... it’s like he doesn’t just tolerate or ignore those things. It wasn’t that he just didn’t mind—I thought he genuinely liked those things about me, but he didn’t.”
“You said that was a hard day for him, right? The night you invited him up?”
I nodded, because mixed with my anger and shame was definitely guilt, knowing I’d made that day harder on him instead of easier. “Probably the worst day of his entire year, so maybe he’s right and I’m insensitive.” I shook my head and wiped my eyes again. “I’m just not cut out for the relationship stuff. It’s probably good it ended when it did.”
Britta was quiet for a moment and pressed her teeth against her lower lip.
“Spit it out.”
“I say this with love,” she said.
“No one says that before anything nice, either.”
“They don’t.”
I set my tissue aside, having forced my tears back into submission.
“Maybe you need to bite the bullet and use your words. You’re good at words, and your current tactic is to avoid communicating.”
“We talked at that last wedding.”
“Sounds like you didn’t so much talk as snap at each other after not talking.”
She was right, but the idea of opening up, of talking about my feelings and risking him shutting me down again, made my skin crawl. Being mad was easier. “What would I even say?”
“I don’t know. ‘I love you and I want more than just your body’? ‘I’m sorry I made you think I didn’t care’?”
I laughed. “I don’t love him.”
She didn’t respond but met my eyes through the screen, one eyebrow slightly raised, the same way I’d looked at her when she and Wes were first getting together.
“I don’t,” I repeated, butterflies in my stomach flitting about aggressively. “And I don’t like that you’re trying to lawyer me.”
“Is it working?”
I tapped my fingernails on the desk and then flattened them, looking at the polish, my signature color and the one he’d committed to memory. I glanced around my office at where the carnations had sat for weeks on my desk. “It might be working. So, what do I actually say?”
Chapter 46
Lear
THE PUZZLE PIECESwere spread across the table between us, and I mindlessly tried to sort the edge pieces by color, making piles, while my head was everywhere besides Uncle Harold’s dining room. It was on RJ and Sarah and the envelope I hadn’t opened and the feelings I’d kept bottled up that were threatening to explode.
“Somethin’ on your mind, son?”
“What?” I looked up, pulled from my thoughts. “No, nothing. Why?”
He pointed a gnarled finger toward my pile of pieces. “You seem distracted.”
