I blink hard and sit back before I do something embarrassing.
“The flight’s short,” he says, nudging my arm with his elbow. “Want to talk about something? Anything we haven’t covered on our previous dates?”
“Fakedates,” I correct, raising a brow at him.
He smirks. “Sure. Fake dates.”
I think for a moment, then glance at him. “Does anyone else know about this whole fake engagement thing?”
“Nope,” he says, popping thep. “Just your friends and mine. Why?”
“I was just wondering. I haven’t told Julia or my mom. I can already imagine how my sister would take it, probably blasting it on Facebook before the plane even lands.”
He chuckles, shaking his head. “Yeah, Julia’s not exactly subtle. And your mom? She’d probably be thrilled. My mom would lose her mind with excitement if she knew I had a girlfriend—that I’m finally settling down.”
That makes me smile. “So why haven’t you?”
He leans back in his seat and turns his head to look at me fully. “What, you mean why is a charming, hardworking, devastatingly handsome, almost thirty-six-year-old guy still single?”
I roll my eyes, but I’m grinning. “Exactly.”
He exhales slowly, not joking anymore. “I don’t know. I guess I didn’t want to settle just to settle. And the truth is, I haven’t felt that pull toward anyone.”
My smile falters for a second. That answer is more honest than I expected.
“What about you?” he asks. “Why is a gorgeous, smart, overachieving skincare queen still single?”
I keep my eyes on my hands as I speak, fingers picking at the seam of the seatbelt buckle. “I was in a relationship for a few years,” I say. “He always said he’d move to Honey Springs with me, but when the time came, I guess he expected me to just stay in Florida with him.”
Esteban stays quiet, his full attention on me. It makes it easier and harder to keep talking.
“At the end, I realized he wanted a trophy wife. Someone who looked good beside him at dinner parties, smiled on cue, didn’t ask too many questions. And that’s not who I am. I want someone who’swithme. Who’sforme. I want someone who challenges me, who makes me feel things I can’t ignore.”
He’s still watching me, and when I glance up, there’s no teasing in his eyes. Just something softer. Something that almost makes me want to cry.
“I’m guessing you were okay after the breakup?” he asks quietly.
“Yeah,” I say with a small nod. “It hurt, but not in the way you’d expect. I felt… relieved. Like a weight I didn’t even realize I was carrying had been lifted. I was more upset about being lied to, about being deceived, than I was about losing him. In the end, it was the best decision I could’ve made.”
Esteban lets out a breath and shifts slightly, his arm brushing mine. “Yeah. I guess it was.”
I glance at him, surprised by the way he’s looking at me.
“You deserve the man of your dreams, Eva.”
His voice is low, almost reverent. Like it’s not a compliment, it’s more of a truth.
I don’t know what to say. So I just smile, letting the words settle over me like something warm and dangerous.
Because right now, the man of my dreams might be sitting right next to me.
For two whole hours, I was mesmerized by this man, silently wishing time would slow down. But I guess when you’re sitting next to the man you’re crushing on and maybe even falling for, it has no choice but to fly.
We talked about everything and nothing. We laughed. He asked questions no one had ever thought to ask me, and I found myself answering them with an honesty that surprised me.
I told him about my undergrad years, how I spent most of them alone because I was too scared to meet new people. I was shy and awkward, and it wasn’t until Ashton and Payton came to visit one weekend that I finally started breaking out of my shell. I confessed how much I’d missed Honey Springs all those years, how it always felt like something in me only made sense when I was home.
He shared funny stories from work, then he shared how he felt when Noah fell off the roof of a house during a job.How he tried so hard to be strong for Josy. He had to hold it together for her. But he was so worried. He said seeing him on the floor not responding broke him. He talk about Noah’s memory loss. How hard it had been to see Noah confused and scared. How Josy was pregnant at the time, and he couldn’t even remember her.
