Total pages in book: 97
Estimated words: 96046 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 480(@200wpm)___ 384(@250wpm)___ 320(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 96046 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 480(@200wpm)___ 384(@250wpm)___ 320(@300wpm)
I shook my head. “I don’t fault you for coming. There’s no reason to apologize.”
Dorian let out a frustrated breath. “Fuck, Rosebud. I just need the truth.” He looked around. “No one else is here. It’s just you and me. Nothing you say to me right now will ever leave this room. I want to know what’s going on in your head and how you were doing before you knew I was here. Rewind to last week before I showed up. Pretend I’m a fly on the wall. Tell me what your life is really like.” He lowered his voice to a whisper. “Please.”
The look of pain in his eyes gave me no choice but radical honesty. “My life…is that I’ve pretty much dived headfirst into being a mother. It makes it easier not to deal with the things I haven’t wanted to.”
“Like?”
“Like the fact that things aren’t perfect in my relationship. I love him, but it’s different from what you and I had.”
Dorian tilted his head. “Different in what way?”
“Less passionate. But I trust what I have with him more than I’ve trusted anything. My feelings for Casey have grown authentically and gradually over time. So has my trust. Sometimes things that grow fast end just as fast.”
Dorian nodded. “You believed that I’d abandoned you. So safety was what you were looking for. I understand.”
“Yes, of course.”
“Why have you waited so long to get married?”
“I wasn’t sure marriage was really necessary.”
“But you ultimately decided it was?”
“I ultimately decided it would be best for my daughter if her parents were married.”
“What about what’s best for you?”
“I had no plans to leave him, so I figured there was no reason to keep putting it off.”
I cringed. Had no plans? I needed to be more careful with my word choice.
“But you’re not sure you want to be married?”
“I’m not a hundred-percent sure it’s the right decision.” I swallowed. “But that could also just be fear of failure. A marriage can’t fail if it never happens.”
Dorian searched my eyes. “Would you have said yes if I’d asked you to marry me before things changed with us?”
I’d been so hopelessly in love with Dorian that I would’ve said yes in a heartbeat. Yet, I responded with, “The answer to that question is complex.”
“How so?”
“Because while I would’ve said yes to you, I’m not sure that matters. I’m older now, more mature, and don’t think it’s a good idea for someone to agree to marry that fast. So, in retrospect it wouldn’t have been wise to say yes, even if that’s what the person I was back then would’ve done.”
He kept nodding and looked like he wanted to say something.
“What?” I asked.
“I want to give you advice, but I also recognize that I’m biased. I don’t want to steer you in the wrong direction to suit my own needs. Even so, I think you need to hear this.”
I straightened in my seat. “What advice do you want to give me?”
“Making a decision out of fear won’t ever suit you. Doing anything but following your heart will catch up with you eventually.”
“What if my heart isn’t sure of the right thing?”
“The right thing is irrelevant. The heart always knows what it wants, wrong or right.” His stare burned into mine. “What do you want in your heart of hearts, if hurting others wasn’t a factor?”
Adrenaline rushed through me. Because any answer besides “you” would be a lie. But I didn’t feel right admitting the truth. I felt myself shutting down. “I can’t come here again.”
His brows drew in. “Okay…but why? Because you don’t want to or because you feel like you shouldn’t?”
“I don’t want to lie to Casey when he asks how my day was. I’m not a liar. It’s not in my nature.”
“So why can’t you tell him the truth? We’re not doing anything except talking.”
“It would still hurt him.” My voice shook. “I don’t want to hurt him.”
“Why would he be hurt if I’m not a threat to your relationship?”
My mind didn’t want to go there at all, so my walls just grew taller.
When I stopped answering him, Dorian posed the question a bit differently. “If what you want is to go back to the way things were before I showed up, what does he have to worry about?” He paused. “Then you just explain that an ex-boyfriend came back to town to clear his conscience over something that happened in the past. Any man who’s confident in his relationship shouldn’t have a problem with that.”
Maybe I was underestimating what Casey could handle. Or maybe I didn’t trust myself, didn’t trust that my feelings for Dorian were a thing of the past. They sure as hell felt very much like a thing of the present.
Rather than address Dorian’s very fair question, I turned the tables on him. “What is your next move here? How long are you planning on staying in Ohio?”