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“Yeah, and she hasn’t said anything.”
“I’ve got to give her time. She’s scared. The last guy she trusted ended up with her best friend, and now she’s alone.” He shrugged. “I can wait.”
“I’m worried.”
“Stop it,” he said. “I’m not going to lose it. This is not that situation.”
Ryan sighed, cutting up his beef. “Hear me out. What if you’re so desperate for a family, you see Annie as an easy option?”
Caleb’s hands clenched into fists. “Are you fucking serious right now?”
Ryan shrugged. “I’m worried about you, man. Look what happened to Melissa.”
“Oh, for fuck’s sake. You’ve got to get over what happened with Melissa. I didn’t lose my shit because I lost her. Don’t you get it? The shit she said to me on the breakup, I … I believed that crap—that I forced her.” He lowered his voice and looked around the restaurant. “She pretty much called me a fucking rapist, Ryan. That kind of shit doesn’t bode well. It messed with my head. That’s all.”
“You are none of those things.”
“I know that now, but it doesn’t stop that kind of shit eating away at you. Melissa had that way about her. This with Annie is fucking different. She’s in here.” He pressed his hand to his heart.
“But it hasn’t been that long.”
“Damn it, Ryan. You’re my best friend and I know you’re only looking out for me, but you have to give me some fucking credit, man. This is bullshit. I know it. You know it. We all know it. Melissa shit was a long time ago. Look at me now. I know the crap she pulled, but if you had someone in your life eating away at your soul, chipping away at your entire being, you’d lose your shit if someone did what she did. I pride myself on being a gentleman. What she did fucked with my head. It made me sick to my stomach. I’m not that same man.”
Ryan nodded. “I’m sorry, man. I won’t bring it up again.”
“And while we’re on the subject of timing, how long did it take for you to realize that Katherine was the one?” he asked.
Ryan sighed and started to mumble.
Caleb put his fingers behind his ear. “I’m sorry, I didn’t hear that.”
“It was one date. Okay, fine. You win. It was one date. One amazing, life-changing, incredible date.”
Caleb laughed. “Yeah, because Katherine changed your whole world. She wasn’t pulled in by your cheap pickup lines. If I recall, you told me you’d been at dinner for an hour when she told you to stop. That the only reason she was on the date was to appease her family. That she didn’t find you attractive and the more you tried to get her into bed, the more she hated you.”
Ryan sighed. “Yeah, wow, that was some date. You know, I thought I had it in the bag. Figured I’d give her a damn good date, and after that, I’d wait for her to come crawling back.”
“Did she?” Caleb asked, very much aware of what happened.
It was the first time he’d seen his friend lose his cool over how a woman treated him.
“No, she didn’t.”
Katherine didn’t call Ryan back. Not the next week, or the week after that. In fact, Katherine never called him. Ryan had to call her. Over and over again. They went on a couple of dates, all of them ending disastrously. Ryan hated it. He considered himself to be the king of suave, but he ended up looking weird. It was only on the last date, when he got completely drunk because everything was going horribly wrong, and he somehow ended up in the hospital and Katherine was there to keep him calm, that things changed.
“Fuck, man, you’re right.”
“And you and Katherine are happily married. Pregnant again. Annie is different. I know she came in as a client and she wanted help with Tara, but I don’t care. I love her. I feel it in here, and I want to spend the rest of my life with her, and if that means I have to give her time after what she’s been through, so be it. She’s not like Katherine. She doesn’t have any other friends to talk with. What I’m asking is a huge commitment.”
And he’d already started to see little signs of her moving in with him. He loved it. The pink, fluffy rug in the bathroom. Her mugs alongside his in the kitchen, as well as some of her pots and pans. She had emptied out her fridge already and only went grocery shopping for both of them. He’d set up her laptop in a position near the window so she had a nice view over the city.
They were living together.
He knew it and he had a feeling she knew it, but they were not putting any labels on anything. He was determined to take his time with her—to ease her into moving in with him.
