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The boys look disappointed when I spin them back around, and my dad isn’t shy about his own distaste. I don’t know what he sees on her face because my back is to her, but he doesn’t seem impressed.
“Have you been to the booth with the watermelon-flavored ice cream?” I ask as we walk away.
The last thing I want is for her to feel overwhelmed. If she wants more of what we’ve been doing, I know she’s more than capable of asking.
Chapter 26
Madison
When things end in a relationship, it’s usually easy to look back and pick out all the warning signs of its impending implosion.
That’s not the case with whatever we were doing. Last Friday night, we rocked each other’s worlds. That isn’t my ego talking. We were breathless by the time we were done.
Saturday night, there wasn’t even a peep from him.
After that weird conversation at the ice cream social, my door hasn’t opened once in the darkness. He hasn’t crawled up my body.
It’s been a week.
I’ve opened my mouth a million times at the breakfast table to ask what happened, to demand to know what I did wrong, but that’s against that succinct list of rules we made.
When it’s over, it’s over, no questions asked. It wasn’t even written in fine print. It wasn’t something I agreed to under duress.
I have no leg to stand on, nothing to argue against right now.
It doesn’t stop me from feeling like an addict, from watching Chase with the boys and fighting the urge to pull him into a dark corner of the house and demand to know why I was so easy to quit.
I’ve tried not to make it personal. I’ve tried not to picture him with someone else, despite Hailey popping into my head more often than she probably should. I know she started working down at the store. Chase has complained about her once or twice this week because it seems she’s just as bad at stocking a hardware store as she was at waitressing at the bar.
Men are men and they probably don’t turn down sexual offers even if they are frustrated with the person doing the offering.
My stomach turns to think about what they could’ve gotten up to when Henry went to his appointment in Austin a few days ago, leaving them alone in the store.
I look away from the door after catching myself watching it for him the way Adalynn does for Cash.
“Thanks,” I tell Walker when he drops a drink off.
“Where’s Chase?”
I frown at the man. He isn’t the first person to ask me about him this week. It seems like the whole town considers us a couple or something, and it’s like salt in my already open wounds.
“I don’t know,” I snap. “I’m off until Tuesday morning.”
Walker frowns.
“He’s my boss, not my boyfriend. We don’t run our schedules by each other.”
He holds his hands up at his ears before walking away.
“That was pretty aggressive,” Adalynn says, concern in her eyes when I look at her.
“It’s starting to get old, all the questions about Chase.”
“Wouldn’t know what that was like,” she mutters, making me feel like an asshole for all the times I’ve given her shit about Cash.
I didn’t give her any details about the good times, so I can’t really talk to her about the fallout either. I know the NDA is in place, but it feels super icky not being able to talk to my best friend about the guy I was sleeping with. The threat of being sued keeps my mouth closed. Last week, I would’ve doubted that Chase would actually go through with a court case against me. Everyone in town is talking about us, after all, but with the distance this last week, now I’m not too sure.
We talk to each other when we need to. He hasn’t avoided questions about the boys and neither have I, but our mornings when he’s leaving for work and the evenings when he gets home feel like a shift change at the factory. It’s as if we’re tapping each other on the shoulder and walking away or stepping up to the machine that the boys have become.
