Always & Forever: A Sweet Romantic Comedy (ABCs of Love Collection, Books 1 - 4)

by Brenna Jacobs

  It will only take a second, David texted again.

  “Fine, fine,” Avery mumbled to herself before climbing out of the car. On her way inside, she hesitated when she noticed a black sedan with an Illinois tag that looked a whole lot like David’s car. If he had his car, why would he need her to give him a ride?

  She stopped right inside the theater door, looking for David’s blond hair. A bunch of people were funneling out of the hallway that led to the theaters, so she trained her focus there. It didn’t take long for her to find a familiar face, but it wasn’t David’s.

  Tucker was walking toward her, his arm around a petite brunette who wore a frightened expression on her face, whether real or imagined Avery couldn’t tell. Tucker hadn’t seen her yet, but he would, any second. A second is all it took for a flood of understanding to fill Avery’s brain. All the semi-weird behavior from Tucker she’d been dismissing and excusing suddenly made a new sort of cruel and ridiculous sense.

  He always wanted to stay in. Always came to her house and never brought her to his. He didn’t take her to the yacht club, or to any of the old restaurants or bars they’d frequented back when they were dating.

  Because they weren’t dating. She wasn’t anything but a side piece for Tucker. The woman on his arm? She was the real girlfriend.

  As they moved closer, Avery noticed the giant engagement ring on the woman’s finger.

  Fiancée, then.

  Avery wanted to crawl under the bench that sat behind her against the wall. How could she have been so stupid? Anger and embarrassment flared to life inside her. She wouldn’t hide. Hiding meant Tucker would escape unscathed. And there wasn’t anything fair about that.

  Avery took one step to the left, right into the path Tucker was taking to exit the theater. When their eyes met, he startled. “Avery,” he said, eyes wide.

  The woman looked at him closely, her eyebrows drawn down in question, but didn’t say anything.

  “Tucker,” Avery said. “Funny running into you here since you’re supposed to be traveling.”

  Tucker looked from Avery, to the woman beside him, then back to Avery. “I got back early,” he said cautiously. “Avery, I’d like you to meet Jessica, my fiancée.” He shot Avery a look, a clear plea for mercy, but she was done with his entitled behavior.

  Avery took two steps forward, stopping right in front of Tucker, but then turned and looked at Jessica instead. “Ask your husband-to-be where he was last weekend. Ask him, and don’t give up until he tells you the truth.” She looked back at Tucker then and called him a name that fifteen years ago would have made Melba threaten to wash her mouth out with soap. But in this instance, she was pretty sure even Melba would let it slide.

  Jessica turned on Tucker and pushed his arm off of her shoulders. “Who is this woman?” she hissed. “What is going on here?”

  Avery backed away, not wanting or needing to be a part of whatever drama Tucker had ahead of him. Adrenaline raced through her veins and she suddenly felt sick. She lowered herself onto the bench she’d only just contemplated hiding under and pushed her face into her hands. She was pretty sure their little confrontation had earned an audience—she could still feel eyes on her—but she couldn’t bear the thought of making eye contact with anyone. She wanted to disappear. To hide in her bedroom for two weeks, to shower over and over again until the feel of Tucker’s skin against hers had been scrubbed out of her pores and forgotten.

  What were the odds that she would run into Tucker at a movie theater she never even went to on the one night she happened to show up? And then the final piece of the puzzle clicked into place in her brain. Odds were pretty high, actually. Because it hadn’t been a coincidence at all.

  Avery stared at the floor long enough for Tucker and Jessica to make their escape. She kept sitting, unwilling to look up, to let anyone see her burning face or tear-filled eyes.

  A man sat down next to Avery on the bench. She didn’t have to see him to know that it was David.

  “You knew,” she said, her voice quiet, her tone even.

  David sighed. “Yes.”

  Avery swallowed. “How?”

  “I can’t really tell you that.”

  Avery scoffed. “You can’t? Or you won’t?”

  “I made an oath, Avery. I can’t.”

  She turned her face to the side, finally making eye contact. His posture mirrored hers, his elbows propped up on his knees, his body leaning forward. “So you saw him at the hospital then?” Another lightbulb lit up in her brain. “He went to the ER when he hurt his arm. And you were his doctor.”

  David didn’t say anything, but the steadiness of his gaze told her she was right. “And Jessica was with him?”

  Finally, David nodded. Apparently patient confidentiality didn’t extend to girlfriends. Wait. Fiancées.

  “So that’s why you called me here?” Avery said. “Because you knew they’d be here? How much spying did that take? Did you follow them here or something? Just waiting for a public place where you could reel me in and out them?”

  “I swear tonight was a total coincidence. I was already here and just happened to see them.”

  “Still. You lied to me. That’s your car in the parking lot. You don’t actually need a ride. Why didn’t you just tell me about her, David? Why go through all this trouble?”

  David squirmed, running a hand across his scalp and mussing his always-perfect hair. “Tucker is a King, Avery. He plays golf with the entire hospital’s board of directors. Gerald Stevenson, the doctor who hired me, came to see him while he was in the ER, checking to make sure I was taking good care of him. Tucker basically threatened to have me fired if I told you anything.”

  “And you believed that he could actually do that? Over something as insignificant as this? All you had to say was ‘Avery, I can’t tell you how I know, but Tucker’s engaged and you shouldn’t trust him’ and I would have believed you. You could have trusted me.”

  “I tried to tell you,” David said. “Or at least hint at it. But you always shut me down.”

  “Because you didn’t give me any information,” Avery shot back. “You just tossed out self-righteous judgements without any justification.”

  A group of people stopped just to the left of the bench where they sat. David stood up, taking a step toward them before looking back at Avery. Two people in the group were clearly a couple; the other was a woman who kept looking expectantly at David. Had he been on a date?

  “Oh my gosh.” Avery stood up. “You were on a date when you set all this up? What is wrong with you?” She was halfway to the theater exit when David called after her. “Avery, wait!”

  She turned around. “No. I don’t want to talk to you anymore. You just humiliated me in front of a lobby full of people. You embarrassed me in front of my ex-boyfriend and his fiancée. You lied to me. You manipulated me into a situation that I never would have chosen for myself. And worst of all, you completely neglected another woman who came into this evening believing she would have your undivided attention in order to set it all up. You screwed up, David. Big time. From now on? Please, just . . .” Avery’s shoulders slumped and she shook her head, the fire in her finally ebbing. “Just leave me alone, all right?”

  Back in her car, Avery gripped her steering wheel and took three slow, intentional breaths, feeling the need to calm down before trusting herself to drive. Fury over Tucker’s betrayal coursed through her, hot and thick. How had she let him back into her life? How had she forgotten all of the things that had led to their breakup in the first place? Then there was David. He had known that Tucker was engaged. And that betrayal almost stung as much as Tucker’s.

  David’s arrogance was maddening. She could almost see how a threat from Tucker regarding his career could coax him into silence, but there were so many other things he could have done to solve the problem. He could have just come home from the movie theater and said, “Hey, I saw Tucker at the movies and he was with someone. You might want to talk to
him and see what’s going on.” He could have trusted Avery to be tactful, to not bring David into the conversation at all. Armed with the right knowledge, she could have just dumped Tucker, no explanation needed. Was David really so insecure and socially inept that he couldn’t finesse a way around Tucker’s flimsy threat? Was he really so clueless to think that Avery would be okay with a public humiliation if it meant learning the truth about Tucker?

  Even worse, had he expected her to go running into his arms, grateful that he’d finally helped her see the error of her ways?

  Avery shifted her car into drive and pulled out of the movie theater parking lot.

  Maybe David could feel good that he’d bested Tucker without jeopardizing his career, though Avery was pretty sure Tucker’s words had been more hot air than actual threat. But she wondered if, in the end, he’d think losing Avery’s friendship had been worth it.

  Because Avery?

  She was done.

  Chapter 16

  David pulled into Haley’s driveway and cut the ignition. He should say something, anything to try and fix the horrible turn the night had taken, but what could he say, really?

  “So, tonight was really horrible,” Haley said.

  Well, then. That about covered it.

  “I’m so sorry, Haley,” David managed. “I got distracted and then I . . . I don’t know what happened. I lost my head.”

  “That’s actually what surprised me the most,” Haley said. “After watching you in the ER, I thought it was impossible for you to seem flustered. But, wow. Did you ever prove me wrong.”

  David almost laughed. His social self couldn’t be any more different than his doctor self. “It’s different at work,” he said. “At work, I’m in control.”

  “But you’re not, really,” Haley said, turning slightly in her seat. “You never know what’s going to come through the ER doors. It’s more like the opposite of being in control. It’s trusting your instincts and making split-second decisions without second guessing yourself.”

  “But those split-second decisions are made based on the knowledge and experience that I’ve gained. It’s not as if I’m just guessing.”

  “But sometimes you do have to guess.”

  “But only if I’ve eliminated every possible solution otherwise. I’m not guessing blind, because before I guess, I’ve used deduction and reasoning to narrow my options down so significantly that the guess is less like a guess and more like a calculated risk.”

  Haley raised an eyebrow. “You do all that deductive reasoning even if you only have five seconds to make a call?”

  “My brain works very fast.”

  Haley shook her head and laughed. “So smart, and yet you still screwed up tonight in such a big way.”

  David nearly winced at her words. “Screwed things up with you?”

  “Me? No,” Haley said. “I’m a nonissue. You’re nice and all, but I more than recognize my cue to bow out gracefully. You’re clearly hung up on . . . Avery? Was that her name? I’m not stupid enough to hang on when you’re clearly into someone else. I mean, you must be in order to do what you did.”

  “Then you understand what I was trying to do,” David said, suddenly hopeful that maybe he hadn’t just made the most colossal mistake of his life. “I was just trying to help. And since I couldn’t tell her, I just wanted her to see.”

  “Wait—I didn’t say I understood. I mean, I’m only piecing details together here, but from what I gathered, you knew the guy she was dating was cheating and rather than just tell her, you had her come to the movie theater so she could see for herself?”

  “I couldn’t tell her,” David reiterated, though the more he said it out loud the less he actually believed it. He could have told her. He should have told her right from the start. “I only knew about the guy’s fiancée because I treated him at the hospital. And he . . . he threatened me.”

  “Sounds stupider every time you say it out loud, huh?” Haley said, her tone flat.

  David looked up, surprised by Haley’s candor. “Thanks for the pep talk, Haley. This has been really fun.”

  She smiled at that. “Look. I can almost see where you were coming from. Your mistake is that you plowed forward with a plan without any consideration for Avery’s feelings. You thought about how you would feel if she knew her boyfriend was cheating. You thought about how the truth might help you out. Because she can’t date you as long as she’s dating the other guy. But did you ever really stop and think about how knowing might hurt her?”

  “You work in medicine, Haley. You know that if we only prescribe treatments that don’t hurt, we’d lose twice as many patients. Sometimes the right course is the most painful one.”

  “But when it’s really going to hurt?” Haley said. “We use anesthetics. We numb people so they don’t have to feel how much it hurts to get better.”

  David paused, trying to understand Haley’s point. “So you’re saying what I just did to Avery is akin to performing surgery on someone who’s still awake,” David said, a statement, not a question. He didn’t need Haley to confirm because he felt the truth of his realization all the way down to his bones. Logically, knowing was the best thing for Avery, even if it hurt in the moment. But he hadn’t done anything to prepare her, to protect her, to ease the pain of learning that truth.

  “Exactly,” Haley said.

  David shook his head. “I’ve really ruined things, haven’t I?”

  Haley shrugged. “Tonight was definitely not your best work. But I don’t think I’d give up if I were you.”

  “No? She told me to leave her alone from now on. That feels pretty final.”

  “She was angry,” Haley said. “And rightly so. Just give her some time.”

  It wasn’t lost on David how ridiculous it was to be having a conversation about working things out with Avery at the end of a date with another woman. Particularly when he’d treated her so badly. He’d walked out of the movie twenty minutes before it ended so she could find him in the lobby with another woman. That was the kind of bad date you tell stories about.

  And yet, she was still being nice to him. Giving him advice. Helping him sort out his feelings.

  “Thank you for being so understanding,” David said, hoping Haley recognized his sincerity. “I’ve been awful to you. I want you to know I realize that. You deserved a better evening, a better date.”

  Haley unbuckled her seatbelt and reached for the door handle. “Honestly? It’s fine. Lucy begged me to give this a chance but dating doctors has never really been my thing.”

  David tried not to feel affronted. Not that he wanted to go out with her again, either. But to be dismissed over his profession? “No?”

  “It’s not personal. Work just already consumes so much of my time. I want to date a teacher. Or a botanist, or something. Someone that doesn’t also smell like the hospital when they come home. Does that make sense?”

  It made total sense. Avery smelled like sun and salt and sand and the giant gardenia blooms that lined the side of her house. He’d take that over the smell of the hospital any day. “I get it. So, I’ll see you around the hospital?”

  Haley opened the car door. “Sure. Good luck with Avery,” she said before climbing out. “I think you’re going to need it.”

  David drove home in silence wishing he could rewind the last three hours of his life and live them all over again. How had he been so stupid? So clueless to how his impromptu ambush would feel to Avery? Haley’s analogy, about surgery without anesthetic, had driven the point home hard. Good doctors didn’t just solve problems and make diagnoses. They solved problems while also caring for the emotional well-being of their patients. They made eye contact. They explained what they were doing and why. They answered questions and made each patient feel comfortable and secure in their doctor’s competence and ability to take care of them.

  David had treated Tucker’s presence in Avery’s life like a disease that needed to be rooted out and eradicated. But he
failed to treat Avery like a patient—like someone who deserved communication and respect.

  He owed her an apology. Big time.

  Haley had said Avery needed time, so he resisted the urge to walk straight to her house once he’d pulled into his own driveway. But the idea of doing nothing didn’t sit well either. He felt antsy and uncomfortable, like he’d never be able to settle down if he didn’t do something to fix things.

  He needed to apologize, yes. But not just with words. He needed a gesture. Something that showed Avery he realized he was wrong and was sorry he’d hurt her. A gift, maybe? Or a letter? Back when he was a teenager, his parents had taken him to a therapist to help him work on his social anxiety and awkwardness. One of the things his therapist had told him was that if he struggled to express himself in person, he might try writing letters. Letters could be revised, after all, so it meant there was no reason to stress about saying the wrong thing. It had worked before, so maybe he needed to write Avery a letter.

  At the very least, that was something he could do now instead of later. And he wasn’t sure he’d be able to sleep until he’d done something.

  Chapter 17

  Avery heard a knock on her door just after eight on Sunday morning. She tiptoed into her living room and peeked through her blinds. She’d honestly been surprised David hadn’t shown up the night before, anxious to try and talk things through. She was prepared to ignore everything—knocks, texts, calls—but she hadn’t heard from him at all. It had been a blessed relief. She was in no mood to try and navigate his bumbled attempts at apologizing.

  Through the blinds, she did see David, but he was walking away, already down her steps and crossing the lawn back toward his own house. Curious, she moved to the front door and swung it open. On her doormat, there was a huge basket tied up with a giant bow. She hefted it—the thing probably weighed twenty pounds—and carried it into the kitchen. A watermelon filled up the left side; that’s what had made it so heavy. Next to the watermelon, Avery found three beautiful navel oranges, a box of fresh donuts from the downtown bakery she loved, a gift card to the Darling Oyster Bar, and a to-go box of Darling hushpuppies. The hushpuppies and the donuts were both still warm. The donuts she could understand. The bakery opened at six-thirty every morning. But how had he managed fresh hushpuppies? At eight in the morning?