Page 54 of Heartache & Playdates
“Maddox, what we had, it was…special.” Special didn’t come close to encapsulating what we’d had, but that was the only word I could come up with. I wasn’t sure one had been invented to actually summarize what we’d shared. “But we were young, and as much as I care about you, and I do, that was my past.”
“It doesn’t have to be.”
“Yes. It does. I’m with someone.” This had gone so much better in my head. Now that we were sitting here everything that came out of my mouth sounded lame and utterly ridiculous. Probably because it was.
“With someone.” He repeated as he lifted his coffee mug to his lips and took a sip.
“Yes. And I can’t just blow up my life because of…” I searched for the right word.
“Everything.” The intensity in his stare stole the oxygen from my lungs.
“What?” I asked as I tried to breathe.
“You said that’s what I make you feel. Everything. You can’t just blow up your life because of everything?”
I closed my eyes and when I opened them said, “This was a bad idea. I shouldn’t have come.”
My legs were shaky as I tried to stand. Maddox lunged across the table and wrapped his hand around my wrist. “Stay. It’s just dinner. We don’t have to talk about us. About anything.”
With my pulse racing a mile a minute and my chest aching as I started to hyperventilate my fight or flight instinct was in full gear. But looking into Maddox’s eyes, feeling his touch on my arm started to calm me down.
Slowly, I lowered back into my seat and he did the same.
His lips curled in a half-grin. “Just breathe.”
So that’s what I did. I breathed. And had the most romantic dinner of my life with the love of my life who I could never spend my life with.
21
MADDOX
“Can I have one?”Hannah asked from the backseat as she held the Sweet Temptations box on her lap.
“No can do, Peanut. Those are for your teacher.”
“Mrs. Kim?”
“No, remember, Mrs. Kim is going to have a new baby so she’s not going to be your teacher anymore. You’re going to have a new teacher.”
“What’s her name?”
“I don’t know if it’s a her and I don’t know what their name is.”
“My teacher is going to be a boy?”
“Maybe. I don’t know.”
Lizzy was supposed to do drop off this morning, but she wasn’t feeling well. She was the one who told me the new teacher started today. The school had sent out an email over the weekend announcing the new hire, but Lizzy had been under the weather, so she hadn’t opened it and neither had I.
This weekend I’d been totally distracted. All I’d been able to think about was the dinner with Peyton on Friday. Something was wrong. I was missing something, and I had no idea what it was.
I’d been trying to tell myself that I didn’t really know Peyton. Not adult Peyton, at least. So who was I to call bullshit on the speech she gave me?
Still, I knew it was bullshit.
There was more to her story than just that we were in the past and she was with someone. There was something she wasn’t telling me. My imagination had run wild. I’d considered every scenario, from her secretly being married already to Trent or to someone who had mob ties and had threatened her and her family if she ever left.
I was sure the actual truth wasn’t quite so dramatic. It was probably just that her childhood had caused her to have commitment issues as well as abandonment issues, which was why she always left without saying goodbye, because goodbyes were too final for her. And why she was satisfied being with a man who she wasn’t even exclusive with for ten years.
