Total pages in book: 127
Estimated words: 122219 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 611(@200wpm)___ 489(@250wpm)___ 407(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 122219 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 611(@200wpm)___ 489(@250wpm)___ 407(@300wpm)
“That’s it?”
“That’s all.”
“Okay. I can get behind this secret society of two. Is this our first official meeting?”
She held the bat out toward me. “It is.”
“Okay.” I took the bat and swung. “So how does the conversation start?”
“Should your mother be worried about you?”
I glanced back at her and saw the seriousness in her stare. I considered lying, but that wasn’t exactly the point of the OSS club. “Sometimes. Yes.”
The corner of her mouth twitched as she frowned. “Should she be worried about you right now?”
I shook my head. “No. Right now, I’m good.”
“Happy?” she asked.
“Right now? Yes. But I don’t strive for happiness. It’s a temporary, fleeting thing.”
“What do you strive for?”
“Contentment,” I replied. “It’s a longer-term state of satisfaction. Happiness is fleeting. Contentment is stable and solid throughout life.”
“I thought I was content in my last relationship.”
“Oh.” I shook my head. “That’s different. One should never be content in love.”
“Why’s that?”
“I don’t know. I just feel as if love deserves a word, a feeling bigger than that.”
“And what word is that?”
“Don’t know yet. But once I figure it out, I’ll be the first to inform you.”
She smiled a little, but then fell once again into a worried frown. “But you’re okay, right?”
“For someone who isn’t my friend, you sure show a lot of friendship tendencies.”
“What can I say? I’m a good person.”
“Yes,” I agreed. “You are.”
She grew bashful and snatched the bat from me to shake off her nervous energy. “Anyway, you didn’t answer my follow-up question.”
“Before we move on to if I’m okay, don’t I get to ask you the same question about whether your father should be worried about you? Should I be worried about you?”
“Oh no. Today’s OSS meeting isn’t about me. It’s just about you.”
“That seems unfair.”
“What can I say? I don’t make the rules.”
“That’s funny because it feels as if you do, indeed, make the rules.”
She bit her bottom lip. For a second, I thought about biting it, too. Then those moist, full lips parted, and she said, “Why are you single?”
“What?”
“Pretty straight-forward question, Coach,” she replied. That was the first time she called me Coach, and it did things to my lower region. A twitch in my crotch area from a five-letter word. She wasn’t lying. She didn’t hate me as much anymore.
That was refreshing.
“I just haven’t found the right person,” I said.
“Are you looking for the right person?”
“No. I’m not.”
She nodded with her lips puckered out as she pointed the bat at me. “You know what that is?”
“What’s that?”
“Hyper-independence and a fear of intimacy. A classic case of Older Sibling Syndrome. You think that no one will be able to love you on a deep level because you haven’t even managed to love yourself on said deep level, and you have a fear of letting go of the reins in your life, because you don’t trust others to guide you.”
Well, damn.
Okay, Dr. Phil.
I cocked a brow. “How did you get past it?”
“Oh. I didn’t.”
“Bull. You had a whole fiancé. You were minutes away from being married. You had to let go of some of that independence to get there.”
“Yeah, that’s the thing…I didn’t. Wesley and I had a very scholarly relationship. When he asked me out, he used a pie chart and told me the statistics of a woman like me being paired with a man like him. When he proposed, he asked me with three different rings because he knew I liked to be in control of the outcome. At least, that’s what I told myself. Looking back, I think it’s just because he didn’t know me well enough to know what I’d want.”
“How long were you two together?”
“Three years.” She almost smiled, but it fell short. “Turns out you can sleep in the same bed as someone for years and still not know who was lying beside you. Ask me three things that he and I had in common.”
“What are those three things?”
She shook her head and shrugged. “I’ve been trying to figure them out over the past few days. I also have been trying to figure out why I don’t miss him more. I feel like I should, you know? I should miss him.”
“Maybe you’re still processing the whole situation.”
“Maybe,” she agreed. She bit her bottom lip. “But can I tell you a secret?”
“I’m the best with secrets.”
“When I called off the wedding, I was upset. Devastated, even. But after a little time, there was a moment when I felt…relief.”
“You loved him, though.”
“Yes, but that’s the problem. I think I loved him up to my self-enforced limit of love. Which isn’t saying much at all.”
“Well, look at us. Two broken peas in a pod.”
“I hate peas.”
I smiled. “I know.”
We stayed on the field for a while longer, then headed back to my house to call it a night. I watched television for a while before deciding it was time for sleep. While heading to my bedroom, and I knocked on Avery’s door. She’d just hopped out of the shower. She had a towel wrapped around her body and one wrapped around her hair as she opened the door. It took everything in my power not to allow my eyes to move up and down her figure.