Page 78 of Not Since Ewe
“I wanted to ask you something else, but now I’m reconsidering the wisdom of it.”
She rolled her eyes. “Let me guess—you want to know why I never got myself a husband and settled down, right?”
“I was trying to say it in a less shitty way, but yeah—not that everyone has to want that, but…did you ever want that?”
She laid her head back down on me. “It wasn’t like a life goal or anything. Not that I was opposed to it either. If a situation that felt right had ever presented itself, I like to think I would have been game. But maybe the fact that I never felt that strongly about anyone means it wasn’t something I wanted after all. I don’t know.”
I wished I could see her eyes, to get some sense of what she was thinking and feeling behind the casual indifference of her tone. “You never even came close?”
She snorted. “The longest relationship of my life is with Microsoft Excel, and it’s love-hate at best.
My fingers toyed with her hair. “There’s really never been anyone serious?”
“There was someone I was with for two years. For a while I thought maybe we’d get there…but we never did—or at least I never did.”
I frowned. “Is that the asshole who called you passionless?”
“Yes.”
“I hate that guy. If I ever meet him, I’m going to kick his ass for saying that to you.”
“Really?”
“He’s not an athlete or a bouncer or anything, is he?”
“No, he’s an environmental engineer,” she said on a yawn.
“Does he do CrossFit?”
She shifted, making herself more comfortable on me. “His idea of exercise was walking to the coffee shop.”
“Okay, then yeah,” I said. “I’ll totally kick his ass for you.”
“That’s very sweet, but unnecessary.”
I cuddled her closer and kissed the top of her head. “I don’t think you’re passionless,” I whispered. “In case there was any question about that.”
“Good to know,” she murmured sleepily.
After a while, her breathing slowed the way it always did when she fell asleep. Her limbs had grown heavy and limp on top of mine, her skin giving off warmth like a sunlamp.
I always tried to stay awake until she fell asleep because I loved seeing her relaxed like this. Knowing she felt safe and comfortable sleeping in my arms. But tonight I didn’t need to fight off sleep. My brain was too twitchy to rest.
Something inside me felt brittle. Uneasy. I was ninety-nine percent sure I’d already fallen in love with Tess. Hard. And a thousand percent sure she wasn’t there yet. Which was fine. It hadn’t been that long. Not like I’d expected her to lose her head and fall head over heels this fast. The fact that I had was my problem, not hers.
It was just…it felt like I’d been living in a fog the last few years. Barely living at all, really. And then Tess had come along like a flare of sunlight and burned all the haze away. She’d reminded me what it felt like to be truly alive. To want something so bad it was all I could think about. To need someone as much as I needed to breathe.
But what if she never got there? Never felt the same way I felt? The woman had built up a hell of a lot of walls. Would she ever really let me past the barriers?
I wanted to think so. She just needed time, right?
CHAPTERTWENTY-FOUR
DONAL
“I think she looks exactly like you in this one,” I said, elbowing Tess.
We’d been flipping through photo albums with Erin for the last hour. Tess and I were currently on our second pass through Erin’s baby book while she flipped through Tess’s old family photos, snapping occasional pics with her phone.
