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“Running is okay, but after a while you have to stop and feel the pain. That’s what my therapist told me, anyway. Take it for what it’s worth,” she said, rolling her eyes playfully.
Despite his unease, he laughed. He actually chuckled.
“How good is this therapist of yours? I’m probably long overdue for a session,” he admitted with a smile.
Bethenny shrugged. “I don’t know... I suppose you have to do what the therapist tells you to do for it to work. And I’m not great at taking orders, so...” She gave a lopsided smile.
He chuckled again. “I had a good chat with Mitch today. He told me, sheepishly, that he ordered you to go home last night.”
“He was doing his job, and he had an obligation to protect the search team. Admittedly, it didn’t look good for you.”
“But you still refused,” he said, searching her eyes.
“As I said, I don’t take orders well. And my gut is usually right. Usually,” she said, looking away.
The waitress arrived with the pizza, and Bethenny’s stomach rumbled.
He chuckled. “Hungry?”
“Starving,” she said, looking over her pizza as if inspecting it, for what he didn’t know. When she seemed satisfied, she took a piece.
He found even the little things she did intriguing. When she looked up, her eyes darted from side to side. “What?” she asked.
He grinned. “Nothing, you just looked like you were looking for evidence on your pizza.”
“Some habits are tough to break,” she said, chuckling.
She looked up at him now, their eyes connecting. His chest tingled, constricting a little. Her eyes were bright, dancing, and he realized how much he’d missed that.
The feeling of being connected to someone.
Of seeing their soul light up.
He’d protected himself from his grief by pushing everyone away, even those closest to him.
But looking into her eyes, he realized he’d been missing out on so much.
He inhaled deeply.
As beautiful as the moment was, darkness seeped back into his broken heart. He looked away, breaking the connection as anxiety rose in his chest like water in a sinking submarine.
He couldn’t allow himself to love like that again.
If something happened, he wouldn’t survive it a second time.
He took a bite of his pizza and washed it down with a mouthful of soda.
For a few minutes neither of them spoke, but despite his awkwardness, Bethenny didn’t seem uncomfortable. He was grateful for that. He had asked her to dinner as a thank-you for rescuing him, not to project his traumas and worries onto her on an awkward date.
“What do you like to do outside of work, besides running crazy miles?” he asked, picking up another slice of pizza.
Bethenny looked thoughtful for a moment, then looked around as if to see who might be listening. Thankfully, the other patrons were busy focusing on their own conversations.
“Honestly, I think I’ve forgotten how to live beyond my job. It was one of the reasons I came back here. I needed to feel,,, my roots again,” she said, shaking her head, looking down. “I don’t know if that makes sense, but I feel like I lost who I was. Work was my complete life. I even put it before my faith... before everything,” she said, her voice trailing off, like she couldn’t believe what she was saying.
She looked at him, giving him a sad smile. “But it was the last case that really broke me. Well, not the last case, but a cold case that was eventually solved. I thought I was so sure I knew who the killer was, and I refused to look at other angles because I knew that I knew. I thought I was trusting my gut, but... I was wrong. So wrong. I think there are many lessons there, and I think a large part of it was that I felt like I had so much to prove. I wanted—needed—to solve that case, so much so that if I’d had my way I would’ve ended up putting an innocent man behind bars and ruining his life. So that was that case,” she said with pained eyes. “But it was what happened after...” She rolled her lips over one another, clearly uncomfortable. Agonized.
“It’s okay,” he said with a gentle nod. He didn’t want her to relive it, but he wanted to hear what she had to say.
