It was a pretty curt invitation. She wasn’t sure she should accept it. “If you wanted to talk to me, you’d talk. At some point in the last year, you’d have texted me or shown up on my doorstep and said, ‘hey, there’s some things you should know.’”
“Did you come here to pick a fight about me not talking?” He frowned. “What do you need, Jess?”
“Why did you leave?” The question tore out of her, rawer and more anguished than she meant it to.
His face twisted. “I told you. I needed time to think.”
“About what?”
“What kind of husband I wanted to be.”
Bullshit. She shook her head. “Maybe you just don’t want me to know who you really are. Maybe we were always meant to be strangers, and for a while there I got in close, but that wasn’t right for us.”
“We’re not strangers,” he ground out.
“No?” She held his gaze, and he let her.
It was hard to look at him. Hard to see the pain there, pain he would never verbalize to her.
“When I saw you on Saturday night, and you saw who I was with—you looked…” She laughed. “I thought you looked all torn up over the fact I had brought a date, but that wasn’t it, was it?”
Bullseye. His face drained of colour.
She nodded. “Yeah. That’s what I thought. You hit on my friend,” she said coolly. “At the gala. And that’s a hell of a thing to find out about your ex, I gotta say, although I know it’s none of my business. Genuinely, I do. I just—”
I’m just hung up on you, and maybe if you tell me that you’re into men now, I’ll be able to move on.It was a stupid thought. Moving on had to come from inside her, not from some release he could give her. And now, shockingly late in her plan, she was realizing with a horror how much it would hurt if Brent said he wasn’t attracted to her anymore.
That would hurt more than she could bear.
So she did the only reasonable thing under the circumstances, and she ran away.
Brent called her name as she wrenched open the kitchenette door, but he didn’t follow her. And she didn’t look back. She kept her chin up and her eyes fiercely glued on outside, on freedom.
The tears didn’t fall until she got all the way home, the home she once shared with him.
The home that still smelled like his favourite laundry detergent at the most unexpected of times—like when she threw herself on the bed and burst into tears on a fresh pillowcase.
Fuck.
* * *
As soon asBrent got off from his shift, he went by her place, but her car was gone and the house was dark.
He went to pick up some food for dinner then tried again. When the house was still quiet, he pulled out his phone to text her, but the long chain of unread messages from her shamed him and he put it away.
He’d made a fucking mess of things.
And that guy—that fucking guy she’d been with. He hadn’t helped. Brent hadn’t done anything wrong.
That resentment chewed at his insides all night. He didn’t sleep much, tossed and turned more than anything. And when he got up in the morning, and Jess’s place was still dark, he did a quick search on his phone for Go West Winery.
He’d asked around at the gala. He couldn’t help himself. People were more than happy to pretend they knew Evan West personally, and rave about him.
So he knew who the guy was, and where he worked. Dialling the number on their website, he put on his crispest, do-not-fuck-with-me voice when a woman answered. “Hello?”
“Is Evan there?”
“Not yet, but I expect him shortly,” the too-trusting person on the other end of the line said cheerfully. “Do you want his voicemail?”
