Page 94 of The Meeting
“So how did all of this happen?” Derek asked. “Was it a prank, or did Cindy stick her nose into your business and misunderstand something and you two didn’t bother to straighten it out?”
Kailynn smiled as she stroked Buttercup. “It was a prank.”
“Neither of you will ever hear the end of this,” Derek said, laughing softly. “This is precisely why I don’t bring my significant other around.”
“You have a girlfriend?”
“More or less. But no one knows except you now. I prefer my parents not knowing. Chase was brave to bring you here.”
Kailynn suddenly wished she could see Derek’s face to wonder what facial expressions he was making—to know if he was teasing or serious, because she couldn’t tell by his voice alone.
“Oh yeah? Why is that?”
Derek chuckled. “For one, the entire town already harassed you last night, and then you got grilled this morning about having babies.”
“That’s true.”
“And now everyone thinks you two have eloped. It’s bad enough that everyone is flipping out over Chase being with you so soon after Allison.”
Kailynn frowned.
There it was again. Allison.
Chase assured her he was over Allison long before it ended, but maybe he wasn’t. She had always heard that even if a marriage was over, the transition from married life to single life was usually a hard one filled with several emotions over the entire process and losing someone you used to love. Did Chase grieve? Did he wish he were still with her? Was Kailynn his rebound?
Her relationship with Drew was almost as long as Chase’s relationship with Allison.
Just because she and Drew hadn’t gotten married didn’t change anything. Kailynn was painfully aware that she had taken little time to grieve.
It’s true her relationship with Drew had been on a downward spiral for years, but they were still together. She went from breaking up with Drew to crushing on Chase within a day.
Maybe they had rushed it. Maybeshehad rushed it. Chase at least had several months of grieving time. Kailynn hadn’t really taken any.
She swallowed the lump in her throat.
“Did you like Allison?”
“I did. She was a nice person, but she was wrong for Chase. We all knew it. It was just a matter of time before they split, but after a while, we all thought we were wrong. They were together for so long trying to make it work. Eventually, we thought they would be together forever. Chase didn’t talk to us much about it—you know, because of the gossip flying rampant around here—so we were all blindsided when they actually filed.”
Kailynn shifted uncomfortably and took a deep breath. His family didn’t even know he was about to split from Allison. Maybe that meant that it happened suddenly, and it wasn’t a thought-out process.
She must have stayed silent long enough, because Derek began speaking again.
“He’s different with you. He’s much happier.”
“Oh yeah?”
Part of her wondered if Derek was only saying that to cover up everything he said—to smooth things over.
Derek walked out of his stall and over to hers, putting both arms over the bars, and leaned on it, facing her.
“He is. I’ve never seen him in as good of a mood as he is with you. He wasn’t like that with Allison.”
She gave him a small smile and went back to attending to Buttercup.
“Don’t let what I said affect anything between you two. Sometimes I just say too much. It’s pretty rare when I meet someone new and it’s nice to just say things out loud rather than in my head all the time.”
She turned toward him. “I understand.”
