Page 154 of Buy Back My Love

None of that changed the fact that I didn’t want to picture him sitting across from some woman on Valentine’s Day, so I blocked his ass too.

Holly lifted her head and looked at me.

“Don’t. I already know it’s childish.”

She blinked a couple times before putting her head back down.

“Thank you.”

I plugged my phone into the charger, turned it facedown, and slid farther under the covers.

Valentine’s Day could kiss my ass.

Van

I’d been giving Lee space since the gender reveal. She never asked me to. I just knew when to fall back.

The pictures started showing up that same day. She and JB were standing together cutting into that big-ass golf ball cake in one, then he was behind her with his arms around her in another, his hand resting on her stomach while blue confetti went everywhere and everybody around them celebrated their son.

I knew pictures didn’t always tell the whole story. I also knew Lee had been telling me from the beginning that her situation with JB was complicated.

Then she didn’t invite me to the reveal. I didn’t take it personally, but I wasn’t stupid either.

She was pregnant with that man’s baby, they had fifteen years behind them, and whatever they were trying to figure out clearly wasn’t finished yet. I wasn’t going to stand around forcing myself into the middle of it, so I fell back.

Lee and I still talked here and there, but I stopped being the one always checking on her or finding reasons to come by. That didn’t mean I stopped liking her. I just figured if she wanted me around, she knew how to find me. Apparently she did, because she called me three damn times tonight.

I had been sitting across from a woman I’d gone out with before, halfway through dinner, when I checked my phone and saw two missed calls from Lee. Before I could decide whether to call her back, her name popped up again.

Three calls back-to-back from Lee weren’t normal. I excused myself from the table and stepped somewhere quieter before answering.

She said nothing was wrong, but I knew better. The second I told her I was on a date, her whole attitude changed. Then she rushed me off the phone, told me not to call her back, and hung up before I could figure out what the hell had happened.

I went back to the table and finished dinner, but my mind wasn’t really on it anymore. I kept thinking about Lee calling three times and the way her whole attitude changed as soon as I told her I was on a date.

The woman I was with didn’t seem to notice at first. On the ride back to her place, she kept her hand on my thigh and leaned over the console every time she laughed. When I pulled into her driveway, she was close enough that I already knew where she thought the night was headed.

She kissed me before reaching for the door, then looked back at me. “You coming in?”

Any other night, maybe, but tonight my head was somewhere else.

“Nah, I’m heading home.”

She looked surprised. “You sure?”

“Yeah. I had a good time, though.”

She watched me for a second before nodding. “All right. Text me when you make it home.”

“I will.”

I waited until she made it inside, then pulled away from the curb and called Lee before I even made it out of the neighborhood. The first call went straight to voicemail, and when the second one did too, I sent her a text just to see if it would go through.

The text didn’t go through either, and it finally hit me. This woman had called me three times, caught an attitude because I was on a date, told me not to call her back, and then blocked me.

I shook my head and kept driving. Nah, we weren’t doing that.

It was almost midnight when I pulled into her driveway. Her house was dark except for the porch light, and for a second I wondered if she had already gone to bed. I rang the bell anyway, then rang it again when nobody answered and followed it with a knock.