Page 88 of Hottie on Her Shelf
Hallie…wasn’t squeezing him back. “I’m not this upset about the election.”
“Then what is it?”
“It’s us, Fitz. You and me.” She pulled free and walked down—aka, the length of the room away from him—to the shelves full of wig heads. “Our secret…whatever this is. It’s no good.”
No. No. Fitz wouldn’t let her give up on them. Hallie just needed to clear away all the distractions and focus on how well they did work together. “Uh, I think what we’ve got going on is very good. Extraordinarily good.”
“In this about-to-expire secret bubble of ours, sure, but we’ve clearly got no future together. Your parents don’t accept me as just a member of their town. If they found out we were dating, they’d go nuclear with their disapproval.”
No point in lying. “They’d be surprised. Bottom line, though? They want me to be happy. And God, Hallie, you make me happy in ways I didn’t even know I needed. They’ll come around.”
“It isn’t just your parents. Lots of people in Swan Cove look down on Crow Harbor. There’ve been hecklers at the events attacking with that.”
“Yeah, they do, and that bias is wrong. We’ll work on that, as a community. It’s also generalized. Has anyone specifically been rude to you at the library since you were hired?”
“No.”
Fitz pushed his point harder, because he knew there were good hearts inside perhaps a shallower veneer of most people he’d grown up with here. “Sneered at you? Said you weren’t good enough because you were from Crow Harbor?”
“Well, no, only since I started running for mayor, but—”
“Sounds like you’re holding on to this prejudice with a death grip. My parents were total jerks, but once they get to know you, it’ll be different. Same with anyone else who you call a snob. I get that you’ve been the victim of it, but times—and people—are changing. You’ve got to allow for that to happen.”
“You’re very optimistic, whereas I’m realistic. We were kidding ourselves. There’s no point continuing to pretend. You and I just won’t work. The mayor and the librarian who lost the race to him? No.”
Fitz couldn’t lose her. He couldn’t let her walk away from him, not over something that wasn’t even about the two of them. “See, you’re conflating the election with our actual lives. It’s a blip, a two-month experience that’s about to end.” Desperate, Fitz threw out a compromise. “Why not hit pause until after the election? Let the dust settle, and in a few weeks we’ll start fresh?”
After picking up her purse, Hallie shook her head. “That’s simply postponing the inevitable. No matter who wins, things won’t be any different for us after.”
And then she walked out the door.
It was over.
They were over, before they’d even had a chance to really begin.
Which was proof enough that being a Montgomery didn’t mean getting everything you wanted…
