Page 33 of Heartbroken Husband
“That’s not the same thing as you loving it,” he said. “I did tell you we were meeting up for pizza, right? Are they lactose intolerant or?—”
“It’s not that.” I smiled. “It’s just that in three days’ time, my entire household will be taken out by some new viral plague, but until then, yes. This is perfect.”
Also, I might’ve beennoticingyou before.
Obviously, I didn’t add that.
He frowned, the confusion really settling in now. “What?”
“You think I’m joking, don’t you?” I said.
“I’ll admit that I’m trying to determine if you are.” He pushed the door open a little further and waved me inside. “Are you? Joking, I mean.”
“I’m not,” I said as I stepped past him. “That’s all part of the experience.”
He followed me in, then paused, looking mildly unsettled as he looked around. I didn’t blame him for being overwhelmed, or for not getting that we were all going to be taken down by some terrible virus from the germ factory these places were.
As far as I’d seen, the guy was a bachelor. He would be giving up a full life if he was even considering the arrangement our families were hoping for, and that life didn’t include large groups of children existing in noisy, rarely sterilized environments.
I glanced at him as we walked in. “You’ve never done this before, have you?”
“Pizza?” he asked.
“No, not pizza,” I said, gesturing vaguely as a child ran past us screaming for absolutely no discernible reason. “This.”
Zach seemed slightly bewildered as he glanced at the kid, but then he pulled himself together and shook his head. “Not like this, no. I thought they frowned on adults showing up to these places without children.”
“They do. But good. It seems we’ll both be suffering equally.”
He frowned. “I don’t feel like I’m suffering.”
I arched an eyebrow at him. “Give it ten minutes. I guarantee that you’ll be suffering.”
That stoic expression lasted ten more seconds. Then he cracked a smile and finally gave me a nod. “Yeah, you might be right.”
We fell into step side by side, and for a second, it felt unexpectedly easy being next to him again. We found a booth near the back where we could see the playground but weren’t right in the middle of the chaos.
The girls ran over, hands out for money to play games. I gave them each twenty dollars to start, and they ran off breathless and giggling, pulled into the orbit of flashing lights and games.
Zach shot me a questioning look. “Should we go with them or something?”
“Nah, they’ll come when they’re hungry,” I said.
“Or when they’re out of money?” he asked.
“That too.” I smiled, but then the eight years we’d spent apart settled between us, not even the screaming, laughter, and flashing lights enough to distract me from the weight of it.
Those green eyes bored into mine from across the table, and I really thought he was going to go there. The future was staring us both in the face, after all, but the past was so unresolved and I knew we would have to talk about it at some point.
But then he leaned back and the tension visibly eased from his features. “Tell me about the girls. I’m getting an idea of what they’re like, but I feel like I’m going to need hints to be able to bond with them. Lu especially. What does she like?”
“Control.” I felt another smile spread across my lips, pretty surprised by how pleasant this outing was so far.So what if we’re avoiding stuff?“She also likes books and being right.”
He glanced at where she was pressing buttons on a game with an expression so serious on her face, it almost looked like she was in the middle of a national emergency. “Yeah, that seems about right.”
From there, it got even easier to talk to him, both of us still pointedly ignoring the heap of history between us, but it was really fun just to actually talk to him again. Before we’d fallen in love and started dating, we’d been friends.
Best friends.
