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“So where does that leave us? We’ve got an attraction we know we shouldn’t act on. You’re leaving behind a job you love to take one you only seem interested in saving because of the past, and I’mpersona non gratafor jilting a groom...twice.”
“Twice?” I blink. That’s news to me.
She looks at me with wary eyes. “Oh yeah, did I forget to mention that?”
I slide my arm around her shoulders and pull her into me. She keeps herself covered but rests her head on my shoulder.
“My university boyfriend proposed to me when we were twenty-one. We were about to graduate and we’d both secured jobs working at a big recruitment firm. I thought it was everything I wanted.” She sighs. “But university was such a bubble that, when I got out into the real world, I realised I had no idea what I wanted orwhoI wanted to be with. I was so young and I got swept up in the fantasy of the white dress and diamond ring and buying a house together.”
“But you didn’t love him?”
“I cared about hima lot, but I wasn’t ready to be married. I hadn’t lived enough.” She cringed. “But I’d already said yes. We’d paid so much money for the reception and invited two hundred people...and it wasn’t what I wanted at all. He was making all the decisions and I felt myself getting lost in it.”
I stroke her head and listen as she spills the past out. The anguish in her voice breaks me, and I want to kiss her until those memories are so faded and so far that they can’t hurt her anymore.
“I tried to break it off a week before the wedding, but he convinced me it was cold feet. Bridal jitters. He was so good at that, taking my words and making them seem like they didn’t make sense. I know he cared about me, but there was this element of...control. He liked that he could convince me of things.” She pauses. “Kind of like Mike.”
“So what happened on the day?”
“I was so anxious that I threw up all morning. I made myself so dehydrated that I passed out and my mum freaked and called our family doctor. Then she took me to the hospital and they hooked me up to an IV. I called the wedding off then and there. I just...couldn’t do it.” Her voice is so soft and so small. Too small.
“That was your decision to make, Presley. Maybe if he’d listened to you, that wouldn’t have happened.”
“I think it’s why I let myself be blind to so many of Mike’s flaws. I couldn’t let myself do the same thing again, so I kept pretending that everything was okay when it wasn’t.” She shakes her head. “Drew saw through the bullshit right away. I almost lost her because I kept defending him, and that would have been the biggest regret of my whole life.”
“You made the right choice, even if it doesn’t feel like it now.”
“Your family hates me.” Her voice doesn’t waver and she states the words as fact even though I know it must be painful.
“I don’t hate you.”
“Great, I have full support of the black sheep.” She twists her head up to me and there’s a cheeky smile emerging. She’s a fighter, this woman. “I never meant to hurt them, honestly. They were always kind to me and I feel really guilty for putting them through that.”
“You had to put yourself first.”
She nods. “Yeah, I know that now. I spent so much of my life trying to be Little Miss Perfect, keeping everyone happy, that I forgot to think about whatIwanted.”
“And what do you want now that the world is your oyster?”
She cocks her head. “I want to go to Paris.”
“And what about after that?”
“I don’t know.” Her eyes are huge, like she’s seeing all the things that are possible now. She’s in charge of her own destiny. “Maybe Italy. Oh, or Spain! Then Japan.”
“You can see the whole world.”
For a minute, we sit quietly together. It’s easier to think about “what’s next” in terms of big trips and work and everything else, because the topic we’re both avoiding is what we do about us.
“I’m sorry I kept my motivations quiet about wanting to get dirt on Mike,” I say. “I know it was a shit thing to do.”
Not only was it shit, it was grasping at straws, because my family situation feels completely and utterly out of my control. I’m so driven todosomething that I manufacture action even when it’s pointless, because the idea of just waiting to see what happens feels like torture to me.
She presses a soft kiss to my jaw. “I put you in a bad position with your family by tricking you into being my getaway driver, so I guess we’re even.”
“Not quite, but I’ll take it.”
We know this can’t become anything. She’s right; her name is mud in my family. Our being together would kill any chance I have of repairing things with Dad because he’d assume it was nothing more than me trying to get one up on my stepbrother. Besides, I still don’t know if this is a rebound for her. Neither one of us is willing to risk ourselves by digging too deep.
