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After them, it was work.
Miller was easy. She simply burst her way into my life. Lincoln, too, just forced his way in. Quin was still my boss, still kept a professional distance, but talked to me more, asked about my day, my new schedule with taking an hour off each afternoon to go out to lunch instead of working at my desk like I had every day since I started. Finn had kept his awkward distance, but had thanked me when he had opened his gift, doing so with feeling. Hell, even Gunner had stopped being so gruff with me. Things weren’t exactly touchy-feely, but this was me and Gunner we were talking about here; no one could ever accuse us of being touchy-feely. We’d skewer them if they did.
The lone stranger in the office to me, incredibly, was Kai.
The one who had always been the closest thing to a friend I had there.
But since I left his place, all I had gotten from Kai was careful pleasantries.
He didn’t order me lunch, instead going out by himself. He didn’t come out to hang at my desk, bugging me while I tried to get work done, something I didn’t know I could miss until I was missing it.
It was a situation that constantly stole my focus away from work. I found myself obsessively thinking about it while I was typing, making me have to go back and delete, then retype it all, something I never had to do before.
But I couldn’t help it.
It was such a one-eighty from the Kai I had left just a few days before, smiling, telling me I could come back should I ever feel the need to, giving me the code to his place so I could let myself in at any time.
Now, well, he could barely look me in the eye.
It hurt.
Maybe I didn’t have the right to feel hurt after how much he had already done for me, but I felt it nonetheless.
It was a stabbing sensation to the gut.
I would sit there trying to figure out what had caused such a drastic change.
But all I could ever come back to was that he was over me.
It was the only thing that made sense, right?
He had – for all these years – built up some idea of me, put me up on this pedestal. And then he had gotten a chance to spend some time with me, real time with the actual woman, not the idea he had of me, and he simply… changed his mind.
That idea had been crippling.
Prior to it, I was planning to do it.
What Miller said.
I was going to make a move.
It made my heartbeat speed up just to think about it.
But I would swallow back that anxiety and I would do it. Make a move.
But there was no way I could ever get up the nerve to do it now that he had gotten so cool toward me.
There was no way to describe the sensation of disappointment I had felt.
All these years when I had been clueless or in denial or actively reminding myself why he was a bad idea even when my body and that constant chest-tightening thing said otherwise. And now that I was ready, that I saw things clearly, that I was done trying to lie to myself, that I was fully aware of my feelings toward him, he was no longer into me.
What a cruel, fickle bitch fate could be.
“Ugh, stop looking like a wounded puppy,” Miller demanded, having left, but run back in claiming she forgot her house keys, and that she didn’t want to have to crash at Lincoln’s because the chick he was currently seeing was an aspiring – and terrible – singer and Can you imagine dealing with that and a hangover at the same time?
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I lied, tamping down the guilt at doing so.
“Oh, please. You can’t lie to me,” she declared, moving down the hall toward her office, coming back waving her keys around her pointer finger. “Where was I? Oh, yeah. I thought you were over the whole denial thing. You know you want to jump him. Go jump him. Or, if you don’t like that vernacular, go and rub your bits over his bits until you reach very dignified orgasms.”
“I’m not denying I finally realize how I feel about him. But you’ve seen how he’s been with me since I got back. I think he got a little too much reality with me, and has changed his mind.”
“Oh, for the love of God,” she declared, looking up at the ceiling for patience. “Finding out you pick your nose and eat it wouldn’t make that man change his mind about you.”
“Then why can he barely look me in the eye lately?”
“He’s being Kai, dumbass,” she declared affectionately. Miller, as it turned out, often showed her love by calling you names. “He thinks you need space, need to figure things out, don’t need him complicating things for you. Yada freaking yada. He’s no less in love with you than he was when he drank himself to freaking oblivion in my living room the night that he found out about your engagement.”
