God do I fucking miss her, but hell if I have a goddamn clue what happened.
Work. Residency. Getting matched to the right hospital. That’s what matters. The right here and the right now and not fucking up after everything that has happened.
That’s what I need to be focusing on, not a new relationship when I’m diving head-first back into work.
Relationship?
Did I really just use the R-word? When did I start thinking of Blakely in those terms? And how is that even possible when we haven’t seen each other since the parking lot at the lodge?
I need to keep my head straight.
Then why do I keep looking at my phone every chance I get, hoping she’s called or texted?
It’s the exhaustion.
It has to be.
Blakely
“You doing all right?”
I look up to see Gemma standing with her shoulder leaning against the doorjamb. “Yeah. Sure. Why?”
She shrugs. “I don’t know. Just checking.” She moves into my office and perches her ass on the edge of one of my chairs. “Tom said he’s been texting with Slade. He asked maybe if we could all go out for drinks, but Slade said you’ve been so busy he’s not sure if you’d be able to go.”
The pang that hits me is real and raw, and I nod to buy time to find my words to respond. “He’s right. I’ve just been trying to catch up to speed on everything,” I lie.
Don’t say too much.
Don’t look her in the eye.
She’ll see right through you.
“You sure everything is okay with you two? You know I’m here if you need to talk.”
I plaster a smile on my lips and look up to meet her eyes and away from today’s daily text Slade left me. The one asking if we could talk.
“Yes. Of course. I’m fine. We’re fine.”
Slade
I stare at the ceiling of my bedroom.
My body and mind tired but thoughts running wild with the one thing I can’t stop thinking about even through the exhaustion.
Blakely.
My goddamn heart jumps out of my chest every time I so much as think her name.
It all begins and ends with the heart.
The irony.
She’ll come around. She’ll pick up the phone. She’ll . . . I don’t know what.
She has to.
This broken heart shit is for the birds.
Blakely
“You’re shitting me,” Kelsie says as she looks into my living room where I’m sitting on my newly plumped and fluffed pillows.
“What?”
“This is what he texts you?”
I jolt in awareness, and then shove the misery I’m trying to hide back down. “It’s no big deal.”
“C’mon, Blakely. I’m not going to give up until you talk to me. How long are you going to stay mad?” she says, reading his text aloud to me. “I mean, that sounds all kinds of sweet to me.”
“You call it sweet, I call it stalkerish,” I lie and give her a tight smile before taking a sip of my wine. The texts are getting harder and harder to resist, but his sweet-hearted nature only proves why I don’t deserve him. “Isn’t there some kind of rule somewhere that says don’t fall in love with your rebound?” I shrug. “And I didn’t, so sue me.”
She walks around the island and leans her butt against it as she studies me, the expression on her face one I know from years of friendship. It says she’s not buying it, and I’m not in the mood for a Kelsie lecture. Not when I’ve been miserable for the past seven days with a heartache that I keep trying to convince myself is because I’m doing the right thing for once.
And not for myself, but for him.
I can be unselfish.
That’s what I’m being.
And if I keep telling myself that, then maybe I’ll start to believe it.
Maybe.
“So sue you?” She chuckles. “What are you, ten years old?”
I lean my head on the back of the couch and look to the ceiling. It’s way easier to study the drywall than it is to meet her eyes and let her see how miserable I am.
“You don’t understand.”
“Huh.” She remains silent until I look at her. “What I don’t understand is why you won’t just save face, tell him your imagination went a little wild, that you overreacted, and apologize. You know, the truth.”
“The truth is I read too much into everything. I mistook the fun, no-strings-attached retreat, and made it more in my mind because he was the first man who made me feel good again since Paul . . . so, of course, it was easy to mistake feeling good for having feelings.”
“It is, and that was a whole mouthful of words where you mentioned the word ‘feel’ three times just to prove you don’t have feelings. If we’re going to talk like ten-year-olds, then here’s mine: ‘I spy a lie.’”
“Whatever.”
“Oh, there’s another juvenile response. We can do this all night, the back and forth, or you can tell me why you’re suddenly running away from one of the best things that’s happened to you like he has the plague.”
“I am not,” I assert.
“You are too.” She takes a sip of her wine as my phone beeps the second alert on the text. “And the only thing I can figure out is that you really, really like him and now that you realize it, you’re scared to death.”
“Aren’t you the one who was applauding me for hitting it and quitting it?”
“I was wrong.”
I do a double take, coughing on my sip of wine. “What was that?”
“I was wrong,” she says it so matter-of-factly that all I can do is laugh.
Kelsie is never wrong. Ever. Just ask her. She’ll tell you.
“Have some more wine. It’ll make you realize the error in your ways and comment.”
“No error.” She shrugs. “It’s the truth. I was wrong Blake. You really do like him, don’t you?”
Her stare is unrelenting, and
