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“I shouldn’t have said that,” I admitted harshly.
Her face was even, and the look in her eyes was filled with so much understanding, it made me want to scream. “No, you shouldn’t have,” she agreed.
“I don’t know how to do this,” I said again in a low, urgent voice. “And I don’t want to ruin this, but it’s hard for me to just … pretend we have some easy road ahead of us.”
“I know we don’t,” she spoke softly. “But we can start small.”
How many chances would this woman give me? Howmany emotionally stunted transgressions would she forgive before this was over? Before we figured out a normal that, at the moment, felt like it was as out of reach as jumping from my truck and somehow landing on the moon.
With a small, incredulous shake of my head, I risked a glance in her direction. “Like what?”
She stared down at the box of candy, then slowly tucked it away in the bag. “Well, now I know that you really only like cookies if you’re craving something sweet. I didn’t know that before. And you know I like sour candy. If I’m having a bad day, you show up with these, and I’ll love you forever.” At the slip in her words, my eyes flashed over to hers. She blew out a slow breath. “Sorry, poor choice of phrasing. I’ll be eternally grateful,” she said carefully.
“Candy,” I said slowly. “That’s the basis of our friendship?”
Poppy shrugged. “I mean, to your point, it’s either that or the sex, and that might not be the best place to start. It honestly would’ve been so much easier for me if you were bad in bed, but…” Her voice trailed off when I gave her an incredulous look. “What? You didn’t have to be such an overachiever.”
I leaned my head back against the seat and sighed. “You’re right. We should stick with the candy.”
Her laughter filled my truck, and I wondered briefly if the sound would absorb into the seats, something that would imbue the space with just a little bit of the happiness she always seemed to carry around with her.
“Are you coming over for dinner?” she asked.
I grimaced. “Can’t say no to Sheila, can I?”
She grinned, that dimple peeking out again. “It’s really best not to try. She’s relentless.”
“A family trait,” I muttered under my breath.
Poppy smacked my chest, and I rubbed at the spot like she’d actually wounded me.
She tucked a piece of hair behind her ear, one of her nervous tells. “Dean will be there too,” she said. Her big eyes watched my face carefully.
Ahh. Right.
This was one of those moments, wasn’t it? Where you prove whether you’re as good of a person as you’d like to think you are. When you’re faced with the hard thing and you have to make a decision how to react. I’d already proven that I was capable of frustration laced bursts of emotion. That I was more than capable of unthinkingly offering up solutions that didn’t actually help anyone.
But could I do this thing?
Meet the guy who’d filled a space in Poppy’s life that I never had. That I’d never allowed myself to fill.
“A vet, huh?”
She nodded. “Mom played matchmaker for a while before we finally met. I think she might have done too good of a job talking me up.”
I hummed. “Not sure that’s possible.”
Poppy’s cheeks flushed a pretty pink, and she gathered the small bag in her hands. “He knows you’re coming too.”
“He gonna play nice?”
“I don’t know,” she answered, eyes so open and honest that it was almost hard to meet them. “He was … shocked, to say the least. I think,” Poppy paused for a moment, glancing out the front of the truck. “I think it was harder to hear about you than it was when I told him I was pregnant.”
“Why?”
Her lips edged up in a rueful smile. “Because you’re you, Jax. You’re the man I compared everyone against.”
I shifted uncomfortably in the seat. “Lucky for those guys.”
