by J. L. Berg
Now that I knew she didn’t want to see me, I wasn’t really in a talkative mood. Any scenario I had envisioned of our long-awaited reunion didn’t include her trying to dodge me in the middle of a crowd. I thought I at least deserved a, Hey, how are you, Garrett? Sorry I bailed on you right after you asked me to marry you. Yeah, that was a shitty thing to do.
Whatever.
“Garrett, are you going to introduce us?” Leah asked, turning to me with an expectant look.
She had Lily balanced on her hip, which was getting harder to do. Lily had just passed her first birthday, and she was a fidgety little thing.
“Gah!” Lily screamed her version of my name, clapping her hands. Then, she held them out to me, using the universal signal for, Take me!
I took Lily into my arms and turned back to Mia. She quietly watched, her eyes darting between Leah and me as, she bit her lip. I remembered she would always bite it when she was nervous. It used to drive me wild. Unfortunately, it still did.
“Leah, this is Mia and Olivia—two friends from my high school days. Mia and Olivia, this is Leah,” I said simply. “This dude right here is Connor, and the princess in my arms is his little sister, Lily.”
Mia was silent for a second longer than what would probably be considered socially correct, but she finally smiled. “They’re lovely, Garrett. Really, you have a beautiful family.”
Tears rimmed her eyes, and for one split second, I really wanted to just thank her and turn around to leave. I wanted to make her feel the pain I’d felt when I went to her house and found that letter along with that same pain I’d felt every fucking day because I couldn’t find a way to move on.
For one brief moment, I wanted her to think it had been easy for me to live without her. I wanted to let her believe that these children were mine and that the beautiful woman by my side was my wife. In this one second of hesitation, I believed it would all be so easy if I could just walk away, leaving her with the impression of the great success Garrett Finnegan had become.
I didn’t though. I wasn’t a jackass. But right then, I really wanted to be.
“Oh, I’m sorry. You misunderstood,” I said. “Leah is my sister, Clare’s, best friend. You remember Clare, right?”
She nodded, and I saw her squeeze Olivia’s hand.
“Leah is like a sister to me. We hang out quite a bit, but she is definitely not my wife. I’d consider taking this one though,” I said with a wink. I gave Lily a tickle in the ribs, which caused her to squeal.
“So, you’re not…”
“No, I’m not,” I answered.
More awkward silence filled the space between our two small groups. Connor started kicking a rock on the ground in front of me, and he gave me the look that kids would give when they wanted to leave. It was the look that basically said they were going to spontaneously combust if they didn’t vacate the premises immediately. I knew the feeling.
“So, Mia…what have you been up to since graduation?” Leah, the oh-so-nosy one, asked.
She knew who Mia was and knew I hadn’t seen her since high school. We’d had a few heart to heart conversations over the years. I hadn’t spilled all the gory details to Leah, but she was smart enough to put two and two together. Until she had some answers, she wasn’t going to let this woman leave.
“I went to college in Portland and ended up settling in Atlanta, but I just moved back to Richmond last week. Olivia is letting me stay with her until I finalize everything with my house loan.”
“You went to school in Oregon?” I said out loud before I had a chance to filter.
“Yes,” she answered.
I grumbled as I continued my fascination with Connor’s rock-kicking. I’d looked for her everywhere. We were supposed to go to a state school together. We had even gone apartment hunting, envisioning what our life would be like as we toured each place.
“What brought you back? Family? Work?” Leah asked.
“Um…I’m not really sure. I don’t have a job yet…and I don’t have any family anymore.”
My head jerked up in surprise at that last statement. Were her parents dead? They had moved shortly after she left. Her father had taken a prestigious position in New York City, and at that time, I’d started to wonder if she would ever come back.
“So, you’re looking for a job then? What do you do?” Leah asked.
“I majored in accounting, but I don’t think I want to go back to an accounting firm. I’m looking for something else…anything else.”
This was not the girl I had known. She looked similar. Her hair was the same color, her eyes were just as mesmerizing, and her body…shit. I thought she’d looked beautiful before, but when she’d left, she’d still had the body of a girl. Now, she was all woman, and I was honest enough to admit I wanted every inch of her.
Still.
Although her appearance was nearly the same, every word coming out of her mouth reminded me that the woman standing in front of me was not the girl who’d left me eight years ago.
“Well, there’s a job opening where I work at the hospital. Do you think you’d be interested?” Leah asked.
I shot Leah a look, and she glanced back at me sweetly, like she had no idea that she was meddling.
“Um, I guess that depends. What kind of job is it?” Mia asked with a hint of a smile.
It was the first time I’d seen her smile in eight long years and I was glad to know at least that hadn’t changed.
“Working the nurses’ station. Do you have any medical experience?”
“I used to work at the student clinic in college,” she answered.
“That could work. Why don’t you stop by on Monday? I’ll get you on the interview list and put in a good word.”
Mia nodded and thanked Leah, and we started to say our good-byes.
Just as Mia was turning to walk away, she turned back. “Leah, what department do you work in?”
“Oh, duh! Labor and delivery on the third floor.”
Mia looked stunned for a moment, but she quickly recovered and thanked Leah again before leaving.
Leah, the kids, and I walked back to the car.
“Well, you handled that one like a pro, Goober. Were you even going to talk to her? You could have at least asked her out to coffee? Asked for her phone number? You should have done something to make sure she wouldn’t walk out of your life again,” Leah said as she strapped Lily into the backseat.
“I think you just took care of that for me, didn’t you, Miss Meddler?”
She grinned. “That’s Mrs. Meddler, thank you very much, and you’ll thank me later.”
I wasn’t too sure about that. Having Mia back in my life sounded like a bad idea. The last time had left me in ruins. I wasn’t sure I could survive a second round.
Chapter Three
~Mia~
“So, that happened,” Liv said.
It was later in the afternoon, and we were sitting around her living room, sipping tea. She really had a thing for it. She had an entire cabinet devoted to the beverage. She probably kept some exotic tea company in business. The girl was kind of psycho when it came to the stuff.
No tea bags for hippie Liv.
She hated it when I called her that, so I had decided to make it my mission to do so as much as possible.
She considered herself evolved.
Whatever. When you had canisters of tea leaves, didn’t eat meat, and bought organic everything, the word hippie might fly out of my mouth on occasion.
“Yep. Sure did,” I answered from my seat on the couch.
I hadn’t moved in hours. I was just sitting there, like a pathetic wounded deer. I was drinking the mugs of tea Liv had brought in, eating the cookies she’d stuffed in my hand, and staring into space, like a zombie.
“You got anything stronger than tea?” I finally asked, having had my fill of tea for the next millennium.
“You mean, like, coffee?”
I looked up at my friend with pure shock and h
orror written all over my face. She was grinning from ear to ear and had her arms wrapped around her front, looking smug.
“You better be kidding,” I threatened.
“It got your attention at least. Of course I’ve got booze. Even hippies drink,” she said, emphasizing the word she so loathed.
“Why don’t I go make us some drinks, and you go order us a pizza? We’ll meet back here in five.”
I nodded and started looking up the phone number to the locally owned pizza shop down the street where we’d ordered from a few days ago. I ordered a large veggie pizza and cheesy bread, and then I waited. After a minute or so, I was bored. What did people do before smartphones? Stare at walls? I’d been doing that all day, and I was over it.
I picked back up my iPhone and did the one thing I’d sworn I would never do. I stalked Garrett on Facebook. In all the time I’d been gone, I had never looked him up—not on the Internet, Twitter, Instagram…nothing. I hadn’t wanted to know if he had a girlfriend or a wife. I hadn’t wanted to take the chance of possibly seeing wedding pictures or vacation photos with his kids. Not knowing had been the key to my survival.
But now, I knew, and like a dam bursting, I wanted to know everything. Did he go to college, like we’d planned? What does he do? How is his family? Is he happy?
My search turned out to be a bust when I found his profile was locked down tighter than Fort Knox. The only thing I could see was his profile picture, and that was enough to set my heart into double-time. I hadn’t thought it was possible, but he’d grown even more handsome since the last time I saw him. All those boyish features I remembered had been replaced with hard, lean muscle, broad shoulders, and a gaze that could set my panties on fire.
“I wondered how long it would take you,” Liv said, reentering the living room with two large drinks.
She handed me one, and I instantly took a sip, not caring in the least about what it was. As long as it was alcohol, it was my kind of drink tonight.
“Are you sure?” I said through tear-stained eyes. “We can wait. We don’t have to do this now. You know what everyone will say.”
He looked into my eyes, finding a path into my very soul with a single glance.
“I don’t want to wait, Mia. I’m ready now, and I don’t care what everyone will say. I know you’re the one, so why wait? We’ve already started our lives together. Now, we just have to make it official.”
“He was perfect,” I blurted out, staring at the picture of him still lighting up my screen. “He asked me to marry him.”
“What? When?”
“The day before graduation.”
“And you said…no?” she asked hesitantly.
I put down my phone, shutting off the screen and severing my view of Garrett and his many lickable features. “I said yes.”
“Oh. So, why did you—”
“Leave?”
She just nodded. It was one of those things I wasn’t ready to share yet.
“Mia—I mean, Amelia…fuck. I’m calling you Mia, okay? I can’t look at you and call you anything else. You’re just going to have to deal.”
“Okay.”
“Okay? That’s it? I figured you’d put up more of a fight than that, but okay. You know, if you’d changed your mind, you could have just told him. You were eighteen. Getting married is a huge deal at that age. Hell, it still is at our age. The idea scares the shit out of me. That’s why I’m planning on never going down that road. I’ll never let a guy get that close.”
I remembered the night Garrett had asked me.
We’d parked at the edge of the river, and we were lying on an old blanket that he always stored in his trunk. For hours, we’d been staring at the stars while talking about our new life. We were scared and excited. Everything was changing, but we were together, and we knew we could do anything if we had each other. We were so young and innocent, yet we were full of grown-up emotions we hadn’t been prepared for.
Right in the middle of our conversation about apartments, he said, “Stand up.”
“Why?” I asked.
“Just do it!” He grinned.
He bent down on one knee, and I giggled, thinking that was something men only did in movies. I knelt with him on the blanket. The frogs croaked, and the water rushed by as I held his hands. We both laughed and cried as he proposed.
He curled his fingers into my hair and kissed me softly until I said, “Yes.”
Then, he completely surprised me by pulling out a ring. I had thought the entire thing was spur-of-the-moment, but he had planned it, every single minute. He placed the ring on my finger. It was a delicate white gold band with a small diamond placed in the center.
“It’s not much, but you already own my heart, so this is just a placeholder for that.”
“It’s perfect.”
And it had been.
I briefly touched the spot on my left hand, now ringless and empty. “I didn’t change my mind about him.”
“Then, what made you run?”
“I didn’t deserve him.”
I still didn’t.
~Garrett~
Dropping Leah and the kids off, I briefly stopped inside to say hi to Leah’s husband, Declan.
Then, I headed into the office. I didn’t have to since it was Saturday, but this was what workaholics did. It was what anyone with an addiction did. I had to feed it constantly. Otherwise, the pain would start to surface again, and I’d be forced to deal with it. So, when everyone else was as far away from the office as possible, hanging out with friends or playing with their kids, I was scanning my corporate key card and taking the elevator up to the floor holding the Richmond office of the pharmaceutical company I’d been working for since college.
There were two types of workaholics in my opinion. There could be more. I hadn’t done an official study. Psychology was always Mia’s thing—or at least, it used to be until she’d apparently decided to become an accountant instead. But as far as I could see, people either worked themselves ragged to get to the top or they did so to avoid their own pathetic lives. I was the latter pretending to be the former. I played the part well. As the young team leader, I was known as a rise-to-the-top, do-anything-to-succeed corporate star. Honestly though, I couldn’t give a rat’s ass about this place.
I hated my job—like, really fucking hated it.
No one would ever know it by the way I acted. I would take on every project and account I could get my hands on. Someone couldn’t work late? I’d take it. Michelle needed to cancel her trip to Dallas because her kid was sick? Sure, I’d go for her. To my coworkers, I was their saving grace and a team player to the end, and all my hard work had paid off. I had been promoted faster than any other sales executive my age. I’d made more deals and earned more bonuses, raking in more cash than anyone else in the company. Within a few years, I would be running the entire Richmond office, if not somewhere larger.
Did I want to? Hell no.
So, why was I still here? It kept my mind occupied.
It was the workaholic logic. As long as I was working, as long as I was immersed in something, I could keep my mind off her, and I would be fine.
When I’d been about to graduate from college, I had hoped to get a position at an architecture firm, but everywhere I had looked, I had been turned down. It had been my major and my dream in college. Unfortunately, the country had been in an economic shithole, and building and construction had hit an all-time low.
I had been forced to look outside my field. I’d taken the first job I could find—pharmaceutical sales. I had the face for it, doctors loved me, and it paid well. I had become addicted—addicted to the hours, addicted to the mind-numbing nothingness it gave me. So, my design work had become nothing more than a pastime, and I’d become Garrett Finnegan, pharmaceutical salesman extraordinaire.
The elevator dinged, and I exited on the fifth floor. I took a right toward my office, and I walked past the sea of cubicles, now dark and full of lengthy gray shadows
. Offices were always a bit creepy in the off-hours. During business hours, there would be so much noise that the air was thick with it—phones rang, keyboards clicked, people chatted and shuffled around. But in the late hours, when it was just me, it would be dead silent and eerie, like the building recognized an intruder and silently watched me as I swiftly made my way through.
I unlocked the door to my office and immediately went to the coffeemaker in the corner. Coffee was an overworked man’s best friend. I was selfish, and I had bought my own coffeemaker a few years ago. It was one of those single-cup fancy things that could make tea, cappuccino, probably hot-wax my car, and build a spaceship. All I knew was that it was easy, and it made the shit fast. The girls in the office were always telling me I should get the fancy shit, like some caramel-and-hazelnut-drizzled-coconut crap. Did I look like I wanted coconut in my coffee? If I could put an IV into my vein and pump this stuff directly to my heart, I’d go for it—as long as it was black.
While I waited for my wake-up juice to brew, I booted up my computer, and I looked out the window into the city, tapping my foot. This view always used to calm me. I loved this city. I’d gone to college about two hours away, but I’d immediately moved back after I graduated. My parents lived just outside the city limits in a quiet, beautiful neighborhood with aged trees and white fences. When I had moved back, I’d wanted to be in the midst of everything, so I’d picked an apartment within walking distance of tons of great restaurants, bars, and anything else I might need. I could take the bus to work if I wanted, and I could walk or ride my bike to practically anywhere. The city that usually relaxed me was now setting me on edge. Suddenly, my favorite place to be was making me feel uneasy and nervous.
She was out there somewhere.
I never expected her to come back.
I never expected her to come back and not want to find me.
The gurgling sound of the coffeemaker caught my attention, and I turned to find my computer was ready as well. With my freshly brewed cup in hand, I sat down and got to work, pulling up my email, reports, and various other things.
