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I frowned, thinking about something we probably needed to discuss. “You know why I don’t do relationships but I don’t know why you were looking for one on an app.”
“Mmm…” she mumbled and her nose scrunched. “You know how they say don’t go looking for love, let it find you?”
“Yeah…”
“I learned why in real time.” She frowned a little and sighed. “I went through the ‘about to be thirty, no man, no kid’ thing. I started actively dating. That’s how I met my ex…”
The inflection in her tone had me holding her protectively closer but again, no space was between us. “You two didn’t end well?”
She shook her head. “He was a decent guy I guess, but because I wanted something I thought I needed so badly, I saw him as the person I wanted him to be. I overlooked a lot of things. We weren’t a good fit.”
“Something happened?” I almost frowned, feeling like I would find and hurt the guy if he’d hurt her. She smiled and kissed me again.
“Nothing like what you’re thinking. We just didn’t work or at least not for me. I stayed longer than I should have because I thought maybe it’s just me expecting too much.”
“Nah, it wasn’t you.”
She smiled and shook her head. “It wasn’t but it wasn’t him either. It wasus. We weren’t a good fit.”
“So how did it end?”
“A miscarriage.”
“Shit, I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be. I’m okay but I wasn’t when it happened. The crazy part is I was devastated and relieved.”
“Devastated that you’d lost the baby but relieved you wouldn’t be tied to him,” I said with understanding.
“Yeah and I struggled with both for a while. Sometimes I still do because I don’t want it to seem like I was happy about losing my child. I wasn’t…”
“You don’t have to explain. I get it.”
She nodded softly. “I knew I couldn’t stay with him. When I told him, he argued all the reasons why we worked. Said I was just emotional because I’d lost the baby but it wasn’t me being emotional. It was reality slapping me in the face, telling me I wasn’t where I needed to be. I stood firm on my decision.”
“Then why the app? If you said you didn’t need to look for love. That it needed to find you.”
“That was my best friend Dreeya. She loves me and wants me to be happy. She set it all up. I tried, it didn’t work, and now there’s you… Which I’m not all that upset about.”
I chuckled and brushed my thumb over the curve of her jaw then her lips. One more thing plagued me and I hated to ask but after my mother, I needed to know…
“Do you want kids?”
When she tensed I almost pulled away or maybe I did but her hand made its way to the side of my neck as if she felt the need to ground me or bring me back. “I want to fall in love with an amazing man who makes me happy. I want to build a life with him and if that life includes kids then yes, that’s what I want. If it doesn’t, and it’s just us, then I want that too. I can’t really explain it any way other than that. I could say I don’t want kids or that kids are not in the cards for me but if they are, I want it all. I want to be happy and in love.”
She’s not my mother.
Something settled in me. “You work tomorrow?”
“Nope.” She grinned. “Work life balance. Dreeya is a real hard ass when it comes my balance.”
“Yeah?”
“Yep. Before I had BookNook I worked in sales. I had really high dollar accounts which meant working sixty sometimes seventy hour weeks. I traveled all the time and barely had time for myself or her…” She smiled widely. “When I told Dree I was going to quit and open BookNook she was all in. She was right there with me through the entire process but with one condition…”
“Work life balance,” I said and she nodded.
“Thirty hours a week max is what I’m supposed to work. I usually stick with it but it doesn’t always work. I’m near the college and employ mostly college kids. They’re not always reliable but for the most part I do okay and can stick to my thirty hour schedule. My location is also really good for business.”
