“I don’t want you to,” Jodi said distractedly as she continued to stare out the window, not really seeing anything as she kept running the conversation she’d had with Greg through her head.
He was wrong. At least, she wanted to believe that he was wrong, but maybe…
“If you don’t want me to keep apologizing, then at least tell me what’s wrong?” Danny asked, reaching over and taking her hand in his.
“Besides the fact that you beat the shit out of my best friend?” Jodi asked with a small sigh as she shifted her attention down to their hands.
“Besides that,” Danny said, waving it off like it was no big deal and making her lips twitch.
“Do you think…” she started to ask, only to shake her head and look back out the window. “Forget it.”
“No,” Danny said softly as he gently gripped her chin and turned her head so that she was looking at him, “I’m not going to forget about it when there’s something bothering you, sweetheart.”
She looked up into his beautiful green eyes and sighed. “Do you think that I have a habit of treating guys like they’re my brothers?”
“Yes,” Danny said with absolutely no hesitation as he gave her hand a reassuring squeeze.
“I don’t do it on purpose,” Jodi mumbled, wondering why she’d never realized this before.
“I know that, sweetheart,” he said soothingly.
She shook her head. “I can’t believe I never saw it before. I always thought…”
“That it was the other way around,” Danny said in understanding as he gave her hand a light squeeze as he gently tugged her up on her knees so that he could pull her onto his lap.
“Yeah,” Jodi mumbled as she laid her head against his chest and sighed pathetically.
“You give off a sisterly vibe,” he said, nodding slightly, “that much is true, but you play off it. You use it to push men away, but I don’t think you’re doing it on purpose.”
“Then why am I doing it?” Jodi found herself asking as she took his hand into hers and began tracing circles on his palm.
“Because you have absolutely no idea how to tell a guy that you’re not interested in him. So instead, you friend-zone him by acting like you’re his kid sister,” Danny said, pressing a kiss against her forehead.
She shook her head. “There were a lot of guys that I really liked, a lot of them that I could have really fallen for and-”
“And they’re your best friends now, aren’t they?” Danny asked, guessing correctly.
“Yes.”
“They weren’t for you, Tinkerbelle, and on some level, you knew it.”
“What about Jerry?” she asked softly.
“What about that prick?” Danny asked coldly.
“Greg said that I treated him like a brother, an unwanted brother, but I still encouraged him. He was a jerk, selfish and I…I didn’t love him, but I was still prepared to spend the rest of my life with him,” Jodi said, feeling her cheeks burn with mortification at the realization that she’d been willing to marry someone that she didn’t like, never mind love.
She was pathetic.
“You were settling, sweetheart. That’s all. Don’t try to make more out of it than that. You met some nice guys, but you couldn’t force yourself to want more from them and then you found an asshole who didn’t care how you saw him. You’ve been driving men away for so long that you were willing to settle even for an asshole.”
“W-What about you? Have I ever treated you like that?” Jodi had to ask.
He chuckled as he pressed another kiss against her forehead. “I pissed you off too much for you to waste the energy trying to push me away. Besides,” Danny said, pressing another kiss against her forehead, “it wouldn’t have worked on me.”
“No?” Jodi asked, smiling despite the fact that she felt like crying.
“No,” Danny said, pulling his hand away so that he could trace her jaw with his fingertips, “because there is nothing that you could do that would ever make me stop wanting you.”
