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“No, you’re reliable that way. I think I made a great decision when I asked you to be my partner.”
Luke couldn’t be sure because it was getting dark, but in the soft glow of the porch light, he thought maybe Lydia flushed at Jack’s compliment.
“You know,” Jack was saying, “I’ve got more project proposals coming up. If you’re interested, I’d love to have you take a look at them, get your opinion.”
“For a sustainability review? Those usually go through Erik.”
“I was thinking more in general,” he whispered, reaching out to tuck a piece of hair behind her ear. “You’re full of good ideas.”
Jack leaned forward slowly, his head tilted slightly, his fingers still tangled in that lock of hair he’d smoothed behind Lydia’s ear. And then, like some sort of nightmare come true, Lydia pressed up on her toes, meeting him halfway, and kissed him. She pulled away after a moment, but that was all Luke needed to see to make his stomach feel like it was free-falling through the sky. More than he needed to see, actually. He’d intruded on a moment that would surely haunt his dreams for the foreseeable future.
Lydia hadn’t had some sort of desperate emergency. She wasn’t in trouble. She’d just blown him off to spend the day with Jack—the guy she really had feelings for.
“Luke?”
His head snapped up, meeting Lydia’s eyes through those sunset shadows. He turned on his heel. This wasn’t any of his business. He’d stupidly thought that there was more between them, but this was obviously why she’d always said it was a mistake. The sex was just sex. He was never anything more than a good time.God, he was an idiot, catching feelings when she’d never been anything but honest about their hookups being one-offs, holding a space for another guy to sweep her off her feet. He’d seen the way she and Jack had looked at each other. He knew about all the time she’d spent working on her proposal with him. Of course, this was inevitable. Luke had just been standing in the way, reading emotions into something that never really existed.
“Luke!” Lydia called, but he was walking a mile a minute, practically jogging to the subway. Racing away from her. She wouldn’t catch him unless she ran, and she’d already bailed on that today.
Twenty-Two
Lydia
Lydia threw her phone down on her bed as Luke’s number went to voicemail again. How in the hell had everything gone sideways in one day? She’d missed her run, finished the proposal by the skin of her teeth, kissed Jack, and then whatever the hell that was with Luke. She flopped onto her bed. She was trying not to let the overwhelming torrent of emotion free, wanting to get her thoughts straight, but she didn’t know what else to do. It had been almost two hours since Luke had stumbled upon her and Jack, and she’d lost count of how many calls she’d made since. All she wanted to do was explain that she hadn’t blown off their run for a night on the town with Jack, which was probably what it looked like, but besides showing up to Luke’s apartment and banging on the door until he answered, she didn’t know what else to do.
She couldn’t even imagine what he thought of her right now. She hadn’t realized he was trying to get ahold of her until she’d walked upstairs and charged her phone enough for his voicemail to come through. If only she’d heard that voicemail before letting Jack walk her home, this all could have been prevented. She didn’t want Luke to think she’d purposely been wasting his time today. Why wouldn’t he just answer his phone?
She scrubbed at her face. What made everything worse was the fact he’d probably seen her kiss Jack, and to Luke’s eyes, that had turned the day—the evening—from an averted work crisis to something romantic. But it wasn’t that... At least, it hadn’t started like that.
Lydia didn’t even know why she’d kissed Jack when he leaned in.
Well, that wasn’t exactly true. Some small part of her had wanted to know, once and for all, if there was anything between them. And to her surprise, she’d felt nothing. No spark. No overwhelming sense of desire. After the shock of it, the realization that this paltry crush she’d been harboring meant nothing had come as sort of a...relief, and she’d broken off the kiss as quickly as it had started. But what did that mean for everything else? For her life’s plan? When she dreamed of her future, when she thought about how she wanted her life to turn out, wasn’t Jack the one standing there, smiling back at her? Lydia replayed the evening in her head. The celebratory drink, the awkward, stilted conversation.
By the time they’d sat down in the pub, Lydia had run out of things to talk about. It was harder to feel connected out in the real world and the conversation lagged. She didn’t know why. So, she’d politely sipped her beer and peppered Jack with questions about work to keep the awkwardness at bay.
She was frustrated with herself, partly because she’d bailed on Luke and wasted his time today, only to have him turn up and see her on something that likely looked like the tail end of a date, and partly because in that hazy image of her future, Jack had disappeared. Or been replaced. Or... She didn’t know. Was the middle of the night really the right time to be having an existential crisis? And how was she supposed to sort things out with Luke if he refused to answer her calls? Lydia stripped out of her clothes and took the quickest shower of her life, popping the curtain open every ten seconds to see if she could hear her phone ringing.
She changed into her pajamas and got into bed, but anxiety filled her as she lay down, and when she closed her eyes all she could think about was the phone call that had started it all. The call where Jack had admitted the proposal wasn’t ready to be submitted. A stab of anger surged through her and all her frustrations surfaced at once—Luke ignoring her, Jack flaking out on the proposal and making her do most of the work—and the anxious beat in her heart was almost enough to make her nauseous.
Eventually, she picked up her phone and dialed.
“You know it’s midnight, right?” Ashley croaked after the second ring. “You better be dying because I just fell asleep.”
“My life is a mess,” Lydia said, her voice small and pathetic as she stared at her popcorn ceiling.
“On a scale of one to Armageddon?” Ashley asked immediately. Lydia could hear her getting out of bed.
“Definitely the apocalypse,” Lydia said.
Ashley snorted. “Tell me what happened.”
Lydia huffed. Ashley always wanted the facts. The problem was, Lydia didn’t know where to start, so she blubbered her way through everything, ending with that stupid kiss and Luke running down the street.
When she finished talking, Ashley was quiet for a long moment. Then she said, “Do you want comfort or do you want the truth?”
Lydia already felt like crap so Ashley might as well keep piling it on. “The truth.”
“Jack used you for your work. That’s why you feel so...unsettled. I think some part of you knows that.”
