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God, I hoped he loved peanut butter pie. With a chocolate cookie crust and a smooth, rich peanut butter filling, it brought together his two favorite dessert flavors in the best way possible.
I’d made the dessert, taken a shower, and gotten myself ready. Of course, I did all of this in between bouts of tears. I tried telling myself it was because my shin still hurt so bad, but I knew that wasn’t it.
Those tears had been for what I did to Jack.
Realizing there was nothing left for me to do to delay this, I threw on my boots, jacket, and scarf, and picked up the pie. But the minute I opened the door, I saw Jack walking up the stairs toward me.
Butterflies danced in my belly at the sight of him, and my heart was pounding in my chest.
For several long moments, neither one of us said a word. We stared at one another in silence, but I wanted to scream out my frustrations and apologies.
He’d come back.
Why did he come back?
And was it even possible for him to see the remorse I felt written on my face?
Unwilling to leave it to chance, I parted my lips and said, “I’m so sorry.”
“I’m sorry.”
“You’re sorry?” I replied. “You have nothing to be sorry for. You didn’t do anything wrong. I’m mortified.”
Jack shook his head. “No, Dakota. I need to apologize to you as well, because this isn’t all on you.”
I didn’t see how he could think it was any other way, but I wasn’t going to fight him on it. If he was willing to take some of the burden—hell, if he was willing to speak to me at all—I was going to listen to what he had to say.
“How can you say that?” I asked.
Jack didn’t hesitate to respond. “Because I know, probably better than most people, how long it can take to heal from a previous relationship, and sometimes, you never fully recover. I’ve had years, and it still hurts if I allow myself the time to think about it. You’ve had what? A couple of months? I think my expectations of you were unreasonable in this situation, and I feel awful for even attempting to make you feel bad about doing whatever you needed to do to protect yourself.”
Wow.
With Jack still standing in the open doorway and a peanut butter pie in my hands, I felt nothing but warmth move through me. I loved the sentiment he’d offered, and I appreciated the way in which he was willing to look at this from my perspective. He didn’t even know what I’d been through, and he was still willing to consider putting himself in my shoes. I thought that said a lot about the kind of man he was.
In fact, I thought that the simple fact that he’d come back over here to offer an apology to me when even I didn’t think I deserved one said a lot about the kind of man that Jack was.
But despite how kind he was being toward me, I couldn’t stop myself from wondering what he went through. He said it had been years since his relationship ended and that it was still painful after all of this time.
Maybe Jack and I were a lot alike when it came to matters of the heart. Had we both been hurt by our exes to a point that we’d always remember the worst of those relationships?
I didn’t know, and I certainly couldn’t say for sure that it was the case with him since he hadn’t exactly shared any specifics, but I thought if I had any chance of getting him to reveal anything about his past, I was going to have to do the same.
So, I held up the pie between us as I took a step back. “I was on my way to you with a peanut butter pie and an apology. Would you like to come inside, so we can talk?”
A small smile formed on his face. “Are we having pie while we do that?”
I nodded.
Jack stepped inside, closed the door, and took off his boots. While he did that, I took the pie over to the coffee table. I set it down, stripped out of my layers, and took off my boots, too. Then, I grabbed some plates and utensils before I joined him on the couch.
“It’s a peanut butter filling on a chocolate cookie crust,” I told him.
“My two favorite flavors,” he noted.
I offered a sheepish smile and explained, “I wanted to put in as much effort as necessary to get you to know how sorry I was, so I thought this might be a good place to start.”
Jack let out a laugh, and I took that as a good sign. “Well, if I hadn’t already been spending the last three hours thinking about the whole situation and how we could get back on track, this definitely would have worked,” he assured me.
