Total pages in book: 73
Estimated words: 69858 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 349(@200wpm)___ 279(@250wpm)___ 233(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 69858 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 349(@200wpm)___ 279(@250wpm)___ 233(@300wpm)
I take a deep breath as I set my beer on the coffee table. “What if I’m missing out on something?”
Thomas continues to gaze at me steadily, patiently waiting for me to finish my thought, but I don’t even know what my thought is, or where it’s coming from. And I definitely don’t know why I’m telling him.
“Missing out on . . .?” he prompts softly.
“I don’t know.” I close my eyes and shake my head and laugh. “Seriously, forget it. I think just seeing you and my mom in the same space. Worlds colliding and all that.” I mash my fingers together in an explosion, then pick up my beer again.
Thomas sets his own beer on the table, barely touched, and clasps his hands. He stares down at his fingers, linked between his knees, looking deep in thought. Finally, he looks over at me again. “You know, I’m almost always thinking and acting with Future Thomas in mind.”
“Yes. I’ve noticed.” I smile.
He smiles back, but it’s distracted. When he continues, his voice is lower. “But lately I’ve been wondering if I haven’t missed out on something pretty fantastic by not living in the moment. By not trusting instinct over plans. Doing things your way.”
A strange buzzy feeling has taken over me, surrounded me. I’m listening to what he’s saying, I am, but more than I hear it, I feel it.
I don’t know if I’ve moved even closer, or if he has, or if I’m just now aware of his proximity, or the fact that we’re alone, or that he was surprisingly nice to my mother.
That he’s so nice to me . . .
But suddenly I’m uncomfortably aware of him. Of those eyes, his mouth, his nearness . . .
His words replay in my mind:
I’ve been wondering if I haven’t missed out on something pretty fantastic by not living in the moment.
Is he talking about . . . us?
And just like that, all my maudlin musings about what I’m missing out on fade away, and there’s only right now, me and him, living in the moment.
I lean in a little more, moth to a flame, pulled to him against all reason.
“Thomas.” My voice is a whisper, confused. Frustrated. Wanting.
I lean forward without meaning to, my gaze drops to his mouth.
His drops to mine too, I know it does, because I can feel the heat of it, I can sense the tension in him, a delicious, masculine sort of vibration that makes me want to melt into him, to peel back all those proper, polite layers and discover the man beneath . . .
In the next minute, everything I thought I knew about men, everything I thought I understood about reading the moment comes to a crashing, awful halt.
Thomas leans away—not obviously, but enough to feel like a slap in the face, and clearing his throat, he stands. “This was a mistake. Me coming here, this whole complicated mess we’re in—”
He runs his hand through his hair. “I apologize.”
His voice is stiff, formal, as though he’s talking to a stranger, and that alone makes my stomach hurt.
“Wait,” I say, standing a little clumsily, my face burning red. “I’m so sorry, I misread. And Anna—”
The magnitude of my blunder crashes over me, and I want to die.
I put my hands over my face and let out a wounded groan. “I’m so sorry.”
“It’s not—it’s—” He looks as frustrated as I feel. “It’s fine, Mac. But I have to go.”
And he does. He leaves, and I flop back onto the couch in a pile of humiliated regret.
Though it must be more than regret.
I must be all-out hurt, which makes me do insane, stupid things.
Like pick up my phone and ask the hunky trainer Kris Powers if he wants to meet up for a drink.
And then, because the night is merely okay, after one too many whiskies, I do something even stupider:
I invite Kris to join me in Vermont for a couple’s bachelor–bachelorette party.
Not so much because I want him there.
But because it feels like a distraction is the only way I can survive an entire weekend of having to see Thomas with Anna.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Friday Morning, September 30
Thomas doesn’t show up at our office the next day. Or the next. And not on Friday either and I’m hit by the obvious emotion:
Relief.
But another feeling wiggles in there as well:
Disappointment?
I don’t want to see him, because: Failed Kiss Horror.
And yet, I also can’t escape this strange, unfamiliar sense of . . .
Missing him? As though my day without him in it isn’t quite right, isn’t quite full.
That can’t be right. Can it?
It doesn’t matter, anyway, because I don’t hear from Thomas aside from a few formal work emails, and Christina was copied in on all of those. There wasn’t even a hint of what he was thinking or feeling.