Page 15 of Heartache & Playdates
No harm. No foul.
But then what?
Would I spend the next two decades with her and the memories of what we had haunting me?
No.
I knew that I couldn’t let this moment pass me by. I had no idea when or if I would ever get the chance to see her again. Despite my legs not wanting to work, I managed to make my way across the bar and stood behind her left shoulder, just like I had all those years ago in the cafeteria.
The bartender nodded at me in greeting, but I ignored him.
I lowered onto the barstool beside her. “Thanks for saving me a seat.”
6
PEYTON
“Thanks for saving me a seat.”
I knew that voice. It was the one that had haunted me for twenty years.
Slowly, I turned my head, and my eyes met the same brown eyes I’d fallen in love with when I was sixteen. The eyes were the same, but the surrounding area had changed. There were tiny lines around them that women would pay hundreds of dollars in Botox to get rid of but only served to add to his sex appeal.
Maddox Cruz was no longer a boy. He was a man. A very handsome, very sexy man.
His square jaw was peppered with scruff, not clean-shaven like he was in the picture on his website. His chestnut brown hair, which he’d kept short in high school, was now longer and my fingers itched to run through it. He’d filled out his frame, his shoulders were noticeably wider.
His eyes weren’t the only things that were the same, though. The scent that drifted through the air, the fresh, masculine scent that was uniquely him hit my nostrils and I was transported back in time to the first time I smelled it when he hugged me after joining me for lunch.
I wasn’t sure if I was having an allergic reaction to his sexiness, but suddenly, I couldn’t feel my face, my hands, my arms, or my legs. I felt like I was floating away.
“Breathe, just breathe.”
It was the same words he’d whispered in my ear after the first, and only time, we had sex. It was the first time for both of us and I had expected it to be painful, awkward, but it had been the opposite of that. To this day, it was still the best sex I’d ever had. It had overwhelmed me and I suddenly forgot how to breathe.
Looking back, I’m sure the knowledge that I was leaving had a lot to do with me hyperventilating and having a near panic attack, but it was also how incredible being with him had made me feel.
As I sat beside him now, I stared into his eyes just like I had when we’d lain in his bed at the group home he lived in and inhaled through my nose and out through my mouth.
When I was able to speak, I said, “Maddox.”
Hearing his name come out of my mouth after all these years was both foreign and familiar. I hadn’t spoken his name in twenty years. It was too precious. Too special. Too sacrosanct.
The only person who ever brought him up was Leo and he only ever referred to him as The Elephant. I’d never actually told my GBF his name because I was scared he’d do something that he would think would be epically, cinematically romantic, like look him up and try to reunite us, which I knew could never happen.
Except it was. Now. The Elephant was sitting in front of me.
I wanted so badly to reach out and touch his face, just to prove to myself that this was real and I wasn’t dreaming. But I knew that I couldn’t do that.
“Hi,” he said with the same mischievous bad-boy half-grin he’d worn the first time we met. And just like that, all the anxiety I was feeling dissipated. It was the exact same thing that happened two decades earlier when I was sitting at that lunch table, alone feeling overwhelmed with the social anxiety that starting a new school created in me. With one smile he’d put me right at ease.
“I see you’re still using the same pickup lines,” I teased, trying to lighten the heaviness of the air around us.
“What can I say?” His smile widened. “It has a one hundred percent success rate.”
An unexpected jolt of something hit me square in the chest. I had no clue what it was for a second but then I realized it was jealousy. It was a foreign emotion, one that I wasn’t very familiar with, but I recognized it because it was the same feeling I’d gotten when Maci Reynolds asked Maddox to the Winter Formal, which was a dance where girls asked the boys in a sort of role reversal.
We’d been seeing each other for about six weeks, and she’d done it right in front of me. He’d put his arm around me and said that he already had a date, that he was going with me.
