“Dumb me,” he mutters.
“No, it’s never dumb to love someone. And you—you’re such a nice guy.”
He snorts. “Nota nice guy.”
“Yes, you are, and it makes me so mad that someone would do this to you. You deserve better. Do you hear me? Don’t ever settle for anyone who makes you feel like this.”
He’s quiet for a long time again.
“Not a nice guy,” he repeats quietly.
“I didn’t say you wereperfect. I said you werenice. And you are to me.”
More silence, but this silence comes with his arms tightening around my hips, like he’s clinging to my belief in him, which is crazy.
Heisa nice guy.
But then, the world thinks I’m a vegan and sugar-free fitness freak.
What if he has just as many secrets and failings as I do?
He sucks in a big breath. “Never told her I like the Vikings better than the Packers.”
A surprised laugh bubbles out of me. “If you can’t tell the woman you’re dating that—”
“Not dating.”
I wrinkle my nose at him.Okay.So maybe he’s right. Maybe he’snota nice guy. “You havemultiplepeople that you’re seeing?”
Wow.
Glowers really glow in the dark. Or maybe the sun’s starting to come up.
“I said I’minvolved.” He’s not slurring his speech anymore, nor is he singing, but I honestly wish he were. Instead, he’s turned his face back into my hip, and his voice is undulating grief muffled by my leg as he speaks into the spandex of my jogging pants. “I’memotionallyinvolved with someone who’semotionallyunavailable. I’ve seenLove Actually, and that movie fuckingsucks. That dude who shows up to tell his friend that he loves her after she’s married? He’s a dick. Julia Roberts inMy Best Friend’s Wedding? She’s a dick. I’m not a dick anymore. I try really hard tonotbe a dickever. I used up all my dick on the dick meter a long time ago, and I don’t have any dick left. I don’t break up married couples. I don’t make my friends’ lives more complicated because I can’t deal with my feelings. And I don’t date other people to fill a void.”
It takes me a minute to find the right words.
And while I’m searching, he rubs his nose against my sweaty hip. “I didn’t know I loved her until she was gone. And now I can’t tell her. Couldn’t tell her either. Maybe I don’t love her. Maybe I just love the idea of her because she was easy and there and she didn’t judge me when I deserved it.”
And then I find my voice, but not my brain.“You turned down a blow job because you’re in love with a married woman?”
“I want a tomato.”
“That’s not an answer.”
For like amonth, I’ve avoided Dylan Wright like the plague after he gave us hot water in the school locker room showers for the first time since we arrived in Tickled Pink.
I was standing there with him, in the locker room showers, and he turned on the water after squatting and bending and using all the tools on his tool belt to install the new water heater, and he has averynice ass andverynice thighs, and the way he grinned at me when I shrieked with joy and started tearing up over having hot water after living in the school without it for weeks—I thought he liked me.
I thought it was us taking the flirting to the next level after the flirting I thought we’d been doing at the bar the three or four nights before that.
I dived for him and kissed him and then squatted and reached for his belt buckle, thinking we had this connection and also that all my acquaintances in New York and LA would die if they knew I wanted to go down on a plumber, until he put his hands on my shoulders, made a noise, backed up, and said, “I prefer payment in cash.”
I was impulsively trying to show my gratitude—wrongly, I know,I know—and he was all, “I prefer cash.” Gently, but he still said it. He had to, because I was completely and totally wrong.
And then he added the kicker. “And I’m involved with someone.”
I shouldn’t have been upset or offended. I shouldn’t.
