“So your cat lady bona fides are solid.”
Lauren laughed. “You could say that.” She started picking the clothes up off the floor.
“Well, this was…nice. Guess we have to go back to real life now.”
She stopped and looked at him. “Guess so.”
“Is this a thing now?”
Caleb felt like a dick for even saying that, but he didn’t see much disappointment on Lauren’s face, either. He kind of wanted it to be a thing, but maybe that wasn’t a good idea.
“A thing?”
“I just mean,” Caleb said, sitting up. “The ink on my divorce papers is still drying. And the whole process was…not pretty. I’m not really ready to date right now.”
“You’re divorced.”
“Yeah. This was great and, honestly, I want to do it again, but I don’t really have it in me to do anything romantic.”
“Well, I guess you’re in luck.”
He watched her futz around the room, unable to read her tone. Was she bitter? Honest?
She dropped her clothes in a hamper and said, “My ex-boyfriend just got married. It was… I don’t know. I’m still processing how I feel about it. I thought I’d marry that guy once, but it wasn’t meant to be, and now he’s married to somebody else. So I decided I’m going to focus on myself for a bit. Relationships…end. They don’t go how you plan. And rather than deal with the frustrations of that, or with dating, which I don’t really have time for, I’m prioritizing myself. Doing what makes me happy, what fulfills me. If the right guy comes along, awesome, but if not, I’ll be okay.”
Caleb appreciated that. He was still adjusting to being on his own—he and Kara had lived together since vet school, and before that he’d had roommates, so he’d never had his own place before. He hadn’t gone as far as prioritizing himself so much as just trying to find some kind of normalcy. It seemed remarkable for someone to choose themselves; Caleb had always figured that once he’d recovered, he’d date again, even if he planned to never get married again.
He must have been staring, because Lauren stared back.
“Like, I get it,” she said. “Breakups are the worst. Can I ask what happened?”
“She cheated on me, then closed the clinic we ran together without consulting me, and then the cherry on top was her running off with the guy to another state.”
Lauren winced. “Oof. I’m so sorry.”
“I’m…making my peace with it. But, like I said, things got messy, especially when we were dividing up our business assets, and I just… I can’t put myself through all that again. I know ‘it’s not you, it’s me’ is a cliché, but it really is me.”
“But it’s me, too, is what I’m saying.” Lauren sat at the foot of the bed. “Derek getting married really threw me for a loop. He and his wife knew each other for, like, five minutes before he proposed. My friend, Lindsay, says a lot of guys just hit a certain age and are suddenly ready to settle down. So it’s notmeper se. But I felt like it was me. I dunno. Sorry, you don’t need to hear all this.”
“It’s all right. I’m familiar with that feeling.”
“Bottom line is we don’t have a romantic future. And I’m okay with that.”
Caleb knew he had no business in a relationship while he still harbored so much bitterness toward Kara, but hearing Lauren state the situation so bluntly was oddly upsetting. Disappointing, even. Why would that be? Lauren was sexy and great in bed, but she was also kind of a presumptuous know-it-all cat lady who ran a business in which people sipped coffee and pet cats. They’d spent most of the time they’d known each other bickering. Even if he wasn’t still a mess over his divorce, getting involved with this woman seemed like a silly idea.
And yet.
Her robe was starting to slip off her shoulder to reveal the edge of her breast, and it was basically the sexiest thing he had ever seen. He wanted to reach into that robe and cup her just-more-than-a-handful breasts.
“Your eyes are all red,” Lauren said as she got off the bed.
“Yeah, my contacts have been in for a few hours longer than they should have been.”
“Aha. I thought I saw you wearing glasses.”
“I do a lot of the time, but dogs licking my face are occupational hazards, and it’s hard to get the smudges off sometimes.” He cleared his throat. “Even if we have no romantic future, this was nice. Just putting it out there that I’m incredibly attracted to you and would not say no if you wanted to take me back to your place and jump me again.”
“You kind of jumped me.”
