“The boobs?” I joke. “Seriously, what is it?”
Long pause. And then…
“She saw me painting in the desert, and she stopped and asked me what I was painting. I told her it was life. And she was hooked. She said the rich boys she’s dated are all the same—boring and spoiled. She said I was interesting, and she and her father asked me out to dinner. So I went.”
My breath catches in my throat.
“So there I was,” he says. “Sweaty, needing a shave, angry at my father, trying to paint my way out of a bad mood. I was standing there in the middle of the loneliness of the hot afternoon desert sun, and Gigi appeared out of nowhere. She said…” He pauses, and for a second I think he’s going to say something different, before he finishes with, “She said she thought we’d be good for each other.”
My heart comes into my throat.
Logan stops abruptly, and I reach over to touch his hand.
He grabs mine and holds on before letting it go. “Does it bother you a lot?” he asks me.
I shrug.
“‘Cause it would bother me,” he says.
“I don’t know what you mean.”
Even though I do. I know exactly what he means.
“It would bother me if you got engaged out of the blue like this,” he says. “It would hurt. Honest, if you got engaged at all, it would wreck me.”
I don’t answer him. But I feel better knowing that he feels it, too. The separation from something that never was. Because despite all our unspoken moments together, Logan and I never went on a proper date.
But never dating doesn’t make this any easier for me. If anything, it hurts more. To know that we never tried and failed; we just never tried at all.
“I thought about us,” I say into the night air.
“What do you mean?”
“When you were away in West Texas, I thought about what it would be like if we…”
“If we what?” he prompts me.
“If we tried dating. I was going to ask you, but…”
There. I’ve said it. My secret is out.
“Are you serious?” He curses under his breath. “I’m sorry—of course you’re serious.”
“But obviously our timing was off,” I say in a bright tone. “You’re happily engaged, and that’s that. I shouldn’t have told you.”
“No.” Logan reaches for my hand again and squeezes it once before letting it go. “You should have. I’m glad you did.”
The back door opens with a bang. I jump and sit up, certain it’s going to be Gigi thinking I’m hitting on her fiancé.
But it’s Ben, whose eyes widen when he sees who I’m with. “Hey, Small Woman.”
“Small Woman?” Logan says, still on his back.
“Mace here is Small Woman in the Queen Austen play.”
“For one night only,” I say. “Just opening night.”
“You’re Small Woman?” Logan laughs. “But you can’t act.”
