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I’m sad now, and that fact alone makes me feel angry. Angry at myself.
Ryan shouldn’t still have the power to make me feel like this. It shouldn’t matter to me anymore. I know I’m better off without him.
Better off without the guy who never texted or called me, who always sat back and expected me to be the one who ever made any effort. The only thing he’d ever be the one to initiate was sex.
But I know it’s not the loss of Ryan I feel sad about. It’s the loss of something I had in myself that I don’t have anymore. An optimism about love that’s been shattered. An eagerness to gather up my hopes and dreams and intertwine them with another person.
I look back, and I’m disgusted by how dependent I was, how easy it was for a man to take advantage of me.
But I’m also envious of how hopeful I was. How unafraid.
As I gaze out on the distinctly uninteresting scene in front of my house, my eyes snag on my car. And then Tuck comes to mind.
Thinking about Ryan and Tuck in such quick succession brings a hot, corrosive feeling to my chest.
I know they’re not the same person. Not by a long shot.
Tuck, for all his cocky swagger and playboy bravado, is actually nice. Caring. Even though he’s sometimes insensitive to the fact that his privileged background makes him look at things differently than other people do, he’s not inconsiderate.
The bottom line is, he’s a good guy.
He’s funny. He has an actual personality beyond hot, rich hockey player who people fawn over just because he’s a hot, rich hockey player.
But when I think about letting my guard down, about opening a door in the walls around my heart for Tuck to step through, every instinct screams at me to pull back.
It’s the same feeling I get standing near the edge of a cliff, or near the railing of a balcony high in the air, so close to the sheer drop down—the overwhelming urge to step back, to safety.
We haven’t really talked since we slept together at the hotel in New Hampshire.
Mostly because I’ve been avoiding him.
Okay, entirely because I’ve been avoiding him.
When we left to go to our cars, I told him that I wanted to keep what happened just between us. That we’d talk when we got back to Cedar Shade.
But instead of that happening, I’ve been studiously avoiding being anywhere I’m likely to run into him. I’ve been taking my time responding to his texts, and telling him that I’m busy each time I do.
I’m still not totally sure what he wants between us, anyway. Honestly, I’m kind of scared to find out.
If all he wants is to keep having no-strings-attached hookups, keeping himself open to do the same with any other girl who catches his fancy … the thought makes me feel like my heart’s in a vise.
Even though an emotional connection with Tuck is exactly what I’ve wanted to avoid. It’s a paradoxical, hypocritical reaction—but that doesn’t make it any less real.
And if he does want more than that … a warm feeling pulses through me at the thought.
But as soon as I feel that, fear comes hot on its heels. I go through the carousel of self-doubting questions. How long until he gets bored of me? How long until he remembers he’s not a one-woman man? How long until my heart gets broken again?
At least when Ryan broke my heart, I could retreat back here and forget about him. We didn’t share a campus. But if Tuck breaks my heart? Not only do we share a campus, but our best friends are dating. He’ll always be around.
That last fact reverberates in my mind.
I do want to be able to open up my heart again, eventually. I don’t want to give up on relationships.
But if I’m going to dip my toes back into that pool, is there anyone more high-risk than Tuck to do it with?
Summer and I sit down with our laptops and the books we’ve just bought. We’re at Last Word bookshop. It’s an incredible three-story bookstore in downtown Cedar Shade. The second and third floor are stocked with books, while the first floor is a café.
We both picked up a copy of Jane Austen’s Emma. After reading a couple of Summer’s romance books together, she proposed that I choose a book for us to read together. I thought Emma would be a good pick—it’s an all-time classic of English literature, while still being a love story.
