“Yeah. I still miss you, actually. It’s been a while.”
“It has. Sorry if you tried to call me. I never sorted my phone out.”
“Why not?”
“Everyone I want to talk to is already on this farm.”
It was a fair answer. And logic told me I was included in his bracket. That I could’ve sought him out anytime I liked these past few days without dicking about on the phone. But I hadn’t sought him out. And he hadn’t come looking for me either. Something had changed for him, and perhaps it was for the best.
“I missed you too,” he said when I didn’t speak again. “It was weird not having you eat my peas for me at the dinner table.”
“I’ve only done that, like, twice.”
“I know. But it’s been weird everywhere. I feel like you really belong here, you know?”
“That’s nice.”
Toby made an impatient sound. “Don’t do that.”
“Do what?”
“Pretend it’s not important to you. I know you like it here.”
“I do like it here.”
“And fucking around with me makes that a scary thing, doesn’t it?”
I blinked. “How do you know that?”
“I don’t. I’m making an assumption, but someone told me earlier, assumption doesn’t have to be literal to mean something, and I’m thinking he might’ve been right.”
“Who was it?”
“Angelo. We were talking about something else, though. Kind of. Actually, not at all, but it wasn’t this exact thing.”
“You’ve got me curious.”
Toby blessed me with another smile. “No need. I didn’t tell him anything. And don’t use that to deflect what I’m saying. You don’t need to do that.”
“What are you saying?”
“I’m saying that it’s okay for us to stop whatever we were doing. I know you’ve got too much going on in your life right now for other distractions.”
“You’re not a distraction.”
“I am if I’ve taken up residence in your bed every night. That was never meant to happen.”
Wasn’t it?But on the surface of it, he was right. Messing around with Toby had been a wild idea from the start. I’d had good intentions—though they’d never been entirely selfless—but I’d never meant to get to a point where he was frowning at me like he was now. I’d set out to help him feel good and to perhaps start believing how incredible he was, inside and out, even if I hadn’t known from the start how much that fucking mattered. “I like you sleeping in my bed.”
“Doesn’t mean I should keep doing it, though. I mean, we’d have to stop eventually, right?”
“Right.” Of course he was. But everything about that statement felt so, so wrong, even though I knew it couldn’t be. I had a daughter—a baby, for fuck’s sake—and a one-night-stand ex I had to live my life around for the next eighteen years. Maybe one day I’d have the headspace to have an actual relationship, but with a ton of work I needed to do on myself first, I was nowhere near that place.
It hurt more than it should’ve that Toby had figured that out for himself.
I leaned back on the trunk of the tree, conflicting emotions battling for dominance. Toby had taken my own words out of my head and turned them on me. I should’ve been relieved.
But I wasn’t.
