Page 16 of Working For Her Curves

“Hey,” Maggie says.

“Hey.” He’s looking at me. “Can we talk?”

The concrete is cold through my jeans, even though it’s summer. Marty sits beside me on the porch, close enough that just moving an inch would mean I could touch him, and I want to so badly my fingers ache.

I also want to shove him off this porch because he’s an idiot.

After a long silence, Marty says, “I told Dale I was interested in Wyoming.”

“Marty,” I sigh heavily, “in case you’ve forgotten, I was there.”

“I need you to know why.”

“I already know, Marty.”

“You don’t.” His forearms are on his knees, hands laced, knuckles white. “Every woman I’ve fallen for has chosen her career over me. I heard you tell Dale maybe, and I went cold and I grabbed the first exit I could find.”

I turn to look at him, but he’s staring at the pavement. “So your answer to eavesdropping is to leave first.” My voice is low, and it shakes with anger and hurt. “You heard one word—one word, without context—and you didn’t come talk to me. You didn’t ask what I meant. You just made a blind assumption about what it meant, then went cold and started planning your exit. Did it ever occur to you to just fucking ask me?”

“What was I supposed to think, Poppy?” His head comes up. His eyes are red-rimmed, but his jaw is set. “I heard you tell Dale you weren’t sure about staying. I know what maybe sounds like. I’ve heard it before, and it’s never meant yes.”

“So you decided for both of us. Based on things that have absolutely nothing to do with me?”

“I decided for me. Before you could.”

The honesty of that hits me and makes me pause.

“I kept waiting for you to say something, anything, and you’re just—polite. Professional. Like everything between us didn’t happen.” My eyes are burning. “Do you have any idea what that did to me?”

“Yeah, I do.” He’s not flinching from this, and that’s worse than if he were.

My throat is so tight I can barely swallow. I want to be angrier, but I can’t because I can hear the hurt in his voice. He’s not making excuses. He’s telling me what he did and why, and the why is exactly what scared me when he said yes for a job in Wyoming.

“That’s not good enough,” I say, but the edge is fraying. “You panicked, and your panic chose a direction that you had to know would hurt me.”

“I know. And at that moment, I wanted to hurt you.” His voice drops. “I handled it wrong, and I’m sorry. I really am. I should have walked into that trailer and asked you what maybe meant instead of assuming it meant what I was afraid of.”

A car passes and the headlights sweep across us and then we’re back in the dark again.

“I’m not planning leaving,” I tell him, and my voice cracks on it. “I told Grandpa maybe because if I just say yes he’ll fixate on it and start ordering business cards before I’ve caught my breath. I still need to clean out my apartment by the university. Would I love to work with him? God, yes. But saying yes means closing other doors, and no matter how much I want to work for Grandpa, there are still things I have to consider.” I wrap my arms around my chest and hug myself tightly. “The maybe had nothing to do with not wanting it. It’s also that I didn’t know what was happening with us, and I’m not sure I’d want to be here if you were gone. If we weren’t together.”

Marty turns to look at me, his eyes soft and the anger gone from his face.

“You were—are—part of the reason I want to stay,” I say. “That’s what scared me. Not any plan I’ve made for my career, not Grandpa, not the job. You. The fact that you were already so tangled up in my decision that I couldn’t see where the work ended and we could begin.”

“So we were both running.” His voice is barely there. “Just in different directions.”

I press my lips together and nod. The blood is loud in my ears, and the urge to touch him is so strong that my thigh muscles are shaking.

“I turned down Wyoming,” he says.

“When?”

“This afternoon. I called Dale and told him I’m not going.”

“Before or after you came here?”

“Before.” His little finger brushes my thigh. The contact is the lightest touch, but his breath changes when he does it, shorter, rougher, and any frustration I still had dissolves in an instant. “I turned it down before I knew you’d talk to me. I turned it down because the thought of being twelve hundred miles from you made me sick and no job is worth that.”