“What did he say after that?” Van asked.
How could I explain the look he’d given me after he said he wasn’t married anymore? Or how his hand had slid further up my thigh and squeezed my leg like he owned it? There wasn’t a way to. All I had managed to do was sit there looking at him while my heart ran a marathon inside my chest.
“Nothing, I just sat there and stared at him and he stared back at me, and then he drove us home. He parked his truck at his house, walked me home, and all he said was ‘Goodnight, Diana,’” I relayed the information back to her.
“Did you say something to him?”
“I told him thank you for the ride and goodnight?” It hadn’t been my finest moment. I hadn’t even looked him in the eye, but I didn’t tell Van that.
Either way, she still went with “What a chicken.”
“Chicken? Coming from you? Really?”
Vanessa scoffed. “What are you talking about?”
Did I really need to remind her about her non-relationship with her now-husband years ago? “I like him. I don’t know what to do, wah,boohoo,” I recapped.
Her response was a grunt. “Shut up.”
“It’s all right, Chicken Little. Don’t give shit if you can’t take it. At least I told him I sort of liked him before.”
“Now that you mention it, I seem to remember you telling me to quit being a pussy.”
“That was a completely different situation, you idiot.”
“How?”
“You were married!”
She thought about it for a second before huffing. “Whatever. Eat shit. What I want to know is what are you going to do about it?”
Wasn’t that the question of the century? What was I going to do? Dallas had kissed me. Really kissed me. Not this peck on the side of the mouth that you gave someone you were fond of… unless I’d gotten him totally wrong and maybe now that he was divorced, he was planning on making up for not dating for years.
That single thought left a huge lump of rotting crap in my belly.
Was that what was happening? He was taking his brand-new freedom card and using it on me?
He had to know it wouldn’t work. He had to. The more I thought about it, the more convinced I was that he wouldn’t do that to me. I’d made it clear to him time and time again that I was a crazy person. Plus, I had the boys. I couldn’t be doing that “getting around” crap. Plus-plus, we were neighbors. If he wanted to hit it and quit it, I was the worst option in the world, and he had to know that.
He had to.
I wasn’t going to believe otherwise. But that was the problem, what was I supposed to believe?
“Di?” Van’s voice came over the line, worried.
“Sorry, I spaced,” I apologized, shoving the thought of his reasoning aside. “I don’t know. He just got divorced. Does he want to date around? Does he want to date me? Did he only want to kiss me?I don’t know. We never talked about it. It always just seemed like this far-off thing that was never going to happen.” This felt like high school all over again. “We see each other too much for this to be something that will end badly. I like him too much for that to happen, too, I guess.”
“Okay, Negative Nancy. Ask him, or give it some time. I don’t know. You’re the one with all the boyfriend experience.”
All the boyfriend experience?This bitch. “I was almost nineteen when I lost my virginity, asshole, and I’ve had four boyfriends. I’m not exactly an expert here. I don’t know what the hell is happening. I don’t know what his plan is.”
The silence on the other end of the line said exactly what I knew was true. I was a serial monogamist. I’d been in four relationships my entire life and, with the exception of Jeremy, they had all been long-term. Jeremy would have been if he hadn’t been a piece of shit who needed to get stabbed in the kidneys repeatedly. I’d liked plenty of boys and men in my life, but I wasn’t big on dating around and playing the field.
And considering how much I liked Dallas—and felt even more than that toward him—my heart couldn’t handle disappointment, and at this point in my life, it wasn’t just me I was looking after. It was the boys too. They liked him and he was Josh’s coach. I wasn’t about to ruin a positive male influence for them by dating Dallas who had just gotten divorced after so many years.
He was going to date around.
And his neighbor across the street with two boys, who was always all up in his business and stuff, couldn’t be his first choice.
