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“Make sure to adopt, don’t shop! There are a lot of babes out there who would change your world for the better.”
“Yeah,” he said, his blue eyes looking into mine. His dimples deepened. “I bet there are.”
I had to look away from him because whenever he stared for too long, my stomach filled with butterflies. I began picking at my fingernails to distract myself. “You know what saying I’ve always hated?”
“Do tell.”
“Men are dogs. Why would people disrespect dogs like that? Dogs are loyal, even on your shittiest day. You can yell and scream at them, and they still are going to crawl into your lap and love you. Sure, maybe they have accidents in the house or chew your shoes, but you see the real guilt in their eyes from making the mistake. And they learn. Dogs are loyal and they learn! Men are just…men. And that’s the worst thing I could think to call them. Not pigs. Not rats. Not snakes. Men are men.” I looked toward him and offered an unapologetic smile. “I mean, no offense.”
“None taken. You can include me in that group.”
“But you don’t treat women badly. You actually avoid getting involved with them and wasting their time. That’s different. Jason gaslit me. He said the right things in the beginning until he thought he had me locked in. After I moved in with him, he showed me his true colors. It was always a game with him. You don’t play games. You don’t even enter the ring because you don’t want to waste a woman’s time. That’s noble.”
He waved his hand back and forth. “Er, I’m not sure if it’s nobility or just blatant fear.”
“What in the world could you be afraid of?”
He smiled. “A lot, Red.”
Gosh, those dimples should’ve come with a warning. Connor Roe was almost the perfect package. He had the looks, he had the personality, he had the charm. The only thing missing was his commitment to having actual relationships.
“I lie to myself on the regular.”
“About relationships?”
“Yup. I mean, I do work a lot and I am a workaholic, but if I wanted to, if I really wanted to, I could be in a relationship.”
“Then why are you single? You could get any woman you wanted. You’re far from a jerk. You’re charming, giving, and I’ve recently learned you are TikTok famous. You’d probably go all out and record your partner’s TikToks for her and make her famous, too. So what’s the reason?”
“Do you want a bullshit excuse or the truth?”
“I think you and I do truths best.”
“I haven’t found love because I haven’t been looking,” he explained. “I think love is beautiful. Hell, that’s why I live for flashes of love in my life. But the forever kind terrifies me, because I know how much it can hurt when it goes wrong. My mother almost died twice in my lifetime. It wasn’t a sudden thing, either. She had two battles with cancer, and each time I watched her suffer. I had to come to terms with the idea that I wouldn’t have a mother at a young age.
“That nearly killed me. I never wanted to go through losing someone I cared about that much again, so I don’t let myself get close with others on that personal level. I’m afraid of the forever kind of love because with love comes loss, and nothing truly lasts forever.”
Throughout our interactions with one another, we’d shared many pieces of us back and forth, yet I felt like Connor’s current information was actually the rawest he’d ever been with me. He was sharing things with me that I was almost certain he hardly shared with himself.
“It’s funny,” I replied, combing my fingers through my hair. “I think I’m the opposite of you. I chase after love because I’ve never had it. If I had a chance to have a mother, I would scoop it up, even with the idea of losing her. Having love once, to me, is better than never having had it at all. The problem with the way I chased love, though, is I ended up with people like Jason and my ex before him, Mario. I gave myself freely to people who probably didn’t deserve me at all.”
“Wow.” He breathed out, shaking his head back and forth as he slow-clapped.
“What?”
“It’s just nice to hear you finally realizing what I realized from the first moment I met you—that you’re a prize.”
I crinkled up my nose and shrugged. “Only took two men cheating on me, a failed marriage attempt, and a pretend life coach to get me here.”
“Doesn’t matter what it took as long as you arrived. Is it my turn for a deep question?”
“Shoot it my way.”
“Did you ever try to find them? Your parents?”
I pushed out a short-lived chuckle. “Yes, and I always ended up with dead ends. I gave up a few years ago, because what was the point? How long could I search for someone who wasn’t searching for me?”
“How unlucky of them to have never known you.”
