AllFreeNovel
Share Us
But Dean doesn’t seem fazed.
“I know you’re curious, and you have every right to know. Kim and I were together for three years, five years ago. I was ready to settle down, and she wasn’t. She didn’t like that I was pushing the idea of marriage and a family. And to answer your original question, I learned this at massage school.”
“Come on,” I say.
“No, really.”
Dean goes on to tell me that after high school, he floundered for a while, not knowing what to do. “My parents are both doctors, so they assumed I would go to med school, but I wasn’t interested.”
Boy, that sounds familiar.
“But I made them pretty happy when I studied pre-med. ‘You’ll always have a job if you’re in health care,’ my dad used to say. But when I couldn’t pass the test to get into med school, I stood back and thought about how my parents were always so stressed growing up. Yet I felt guilty not using my education in some way, so I enrolled in athletic massage therapy school. Got my certification and everything. Even rented a room at a spa and had my own practice for a while.”
“I feel like there’s a but coming,” I say.
“A big but. It just wasn’t my passion. I liked helping people, but I didn’t love my job. My passion has always been coming down to Fate on weekends to meet up with a group of guys I met online who were into that gameDragon’s Lair.”
That one I’ve heard of. My sister is obsessed with it. I nod, indicating he should go on.
“That’s how I met Rhys and Forrest. Other people in the group came and went, but the three of us were inseparable and ended up best friends. Meanwhile, I was dating Kim, who was the owner of the spa where I worked as a massage therapist. She didn’t know how to break it off with me properly, so she went and slept with one of the estheticians. Consciously or unconsciously, she let herself get caught by hooking up with the guy right there in one of the pedicure chairs. I caught them when I arrived early to work one day.
“I sulked for a while, quit my job. Then when this commercial space opened up, the guys and I kicked around the idea of opening a gaming store. And the rest is history.”
Dean rests my thoroughly massaged foot beside him on the bed and does the same magic to my other foot. He moves slowly and deliberately as we talk.
“It must feel pretty good to go after what you want,” I say.
“It took me years to figure out what I wanted, but yeah. Feels pretty good,” Dean says.
I let out a long sigh, tinged with regret. “We have similar backgrounds but ended up with opposite problems. I’ve always known what I wanted, but I don’t know how to verbalize to the people who matter most to me.”
Dean cocks his head. “What does that mean?”
I tell him the whole pathetic story about how I can’t stand up to my parents. About how I’ve been placed on the path to follow in my parents’ footsteps, but it’s not even close to what I really want.
“So tell them.”
“It’s not that easy.”
“Have you ever let your parents down before?”
I shake my head. “I never did drugs. I never sneaked out of the house, unlike my sister. I’ve always been the overachiever. My older sister has always been the one to say no, always been the one to carve her own path, giving them lots of heartburn in the process. I don’t know if that makes it harder or easier to tell them what I want.”
“And what do you want?”
He sets my other foot on the bed by his other hip, and I feel a flush hit me at the awareness of having him between my legs.
“I just want to find someone who likes me as well as loves me. Who sees me. And who wants the same thing. Someone who hears me when I speak. I want to be a mom and a wife. I want a trampoline and a tomato garden in the backyard. I want to take long walks, and I want to sit on my porch in the evening and watch the fireflies. I want to go to soccer games andbring orange slices. And I want to grow old with a person who appreciates me just for being me.”
It’s all out there now. Will he scream and run away?
Dean’s hand rests on my leg. “Is that all?”
“Yeah,” I chuckle.
“Then you should have that,” he says. “Let’s do it.”
“Dean, you’ve barely known me for a day.”
