it does matter. If we’ll be working together for a while, I’d like us to not be circling each other.” Then, to her dismay, he took a step closer to her and in spite of her obvious anger with him, he touched her shoulder. It was nothing more than the whisper of his hand over her shirt, but it was as if sparks flew from his fingertips.
She clung to the door of the refrigerator, as if to regain her balance, then turned to him.
“Why does this matter now? Why didn’t it matter three years ago?”
“It did matter. What we had was everything to me. When we got together in Costa Rica, I thought we had finally come to the place you and I should have been years earlier. Instead you deserted me and ran to Dirk and married him.”
All she could do was stare at him. “Deserted you? How... Where...” She shook her head, trying to settle her confusion. “You were the one who did the leaving. I sent you text after text and all I got from you was rejection.” The old hurt spiraled up and she had to fight down the pain and, to her humiliation, the tears.
“Rejection? Texts? I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
The puzzlement on his face was almost her undoing. He seemed genuinely disconcerted.
“I feel like there’s this gap between us I don’t know how to bridge,” he said.
Then, to her dismay, he took that one step separating them and fingered a strand of hair away from her face. She closed her eyes, her own emotions in flux. Her hand twitched at her side, longing to come up and cover his. To reconnect with someone she couldn’t forget.
But then she heard Austin cry out and she was doused with icy reality.
“I should go check on him,” she said, moving away from him.
“Can I come with you? I haven’t seen him yet today.”
His casual request was like an arrow in her heart. How could he act this way around Austin? How could he simply relegate him to one corner of his life? Like he didn’t matter?
Her indignation and frustrated fury with him rose up. But behind that came a quiet question.
Maybe if he saw Austin face-to-face again he might relent. Maybe seeing him again would make a difference.
Really? If seeing him yesterday hadn’t, why would it now?
Her mind did battle with herself as she recalled his coldhearted texts of rejection. The replies she typed out with trembling fingers on her cell phone, alone, pregnant and uncertain of her future.
“Please?” he asked, the pleading note in his voice easing away her resistance.
“Of course you can,” she said, determined to be an adult about this, tossing out one last-ditch effort to make him own up to his responsibilities. “He’s your son after all.”
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