Breaking Hearts (3 page)

“You too. I’ll expect to be an uncle soon.”

As he followed me out, I looked over my shoulder at him. “What was that about?”

He let the door swing shut behind us and shoved his hands in his pockets. We stood staring at each other on the sidewalk. “It’s their anniversary, and she’s going to meet Keaton at the bar tonight.”

“How lovely for them.”

He met my sarcasm with his usual shrug. “I need to talk to you. Can we take a walk?”

Something about his body language was off. He hadn’t touched me, kissed me, or so much as looked in my eyes. Instead of turning to walk beside him, I took a step closer, then blew out a quick puff of air when he stepped away.

“Simon?”

Finally, it dawned on me…the downcast gaze, the nervous stutter step, Joss wishing him good luck. He was going to ask. After all this time, all these years of waiting, he’d finally decided to make an honest woman of me, and I was ready.

“Let’s go for a walk, Dani.” Without waiting to see if I’d follow or fall in step beside him, he started across the street to the park. Bypassing the picnic tables and chess sets, he veered over to the playground equipment and sat on a swing. On any other day, he would crook his finger and we would engage in a public display of affection that could be considered inappropriate by most non-porn watching individuals. This day, he stared off at something far away only he could see. Probably getting the words organized in his mind to make it the proposal I’d always dreamed of.

I clasped my hands in front of me. Waiting. Heart beating a few thousand thumps a minute. I swiped my palms down my jeans. No way was I having sweaty fingers when he went to slip that ring on.

“Take your time, baby. I’m not going anywhere.” For as long as I lived, I’d be right there by his side, until death did we part. “This is
the
Friday.” I would have clapped as an exclamation point to my sentence, but I didn’t want to interrupt his thought process. This moment was one I would cherish. It needed to be perfect. I couldn’t stop the smile spreading across my face when I plopped down into the seat beside him.

“Friday?” He shook his head and continued staring at his shoes.

“Our Friday. The Friday I will remember for as long as I live, so you better make it good.” After a few minutes of staring at everything but me, he met my eyes, and I wished he hadn’t. There wasn’t happiness in his whiskey-colored gaze. It was something far different and it scared me.

“Simon, what’s wrong?” My heart stopped. This wasn’t a proposal. No. It had to be. We’d been together for more than eight years. It had to be a proposal. I wouldn’t survive anything else. “What did I do?” I couldn’t fix what I didn’t know I’d broken. I might have blamed him, but historically, the mistakes in our relationship belonged to me, so I went with the odds.

“It’s not you, Dani.” He ran his hand through his long, golden hair. “I didn’t want this to happen.”

I stood, hoping my weakened muscles would hold me. “What happened?” Okay, maybe it was nothing. Not the images I imagined, anyway.

His tongue ran over his bottom lip, and my normal flutter of attraction skittered through me. “I never wanted…I mean… I don’t want to hurt you.”

My throat closed and the air in my lungs evaporated. No conversation that started that way ever meant anything good and I knew it. This couldn’t be happening. “Then don’t.” Had manipulating him into missing me backfired? My stomach churned at the thought. What had I done? More importantly, what had he done?

His gulp echoed on the eerie quiet of the park. It was as though everyone in town had shut themselves in to avoid the devastation our break-up would leave behind. In the romantic notions of my mind, it made sense the town would suffer through my broken heart right along with me. The truth, however, was quite different. No one would care but me. No one would even know unless Simon or I wanted them to, or he told his sister. Then it would be picking a side. Who would dare go against the golden Simon? Devastation was not too strong a word. It didn’t even come close.

“I’ve… I haven’t seen you at all lately.”

When I opened my mouth to explain, he held up his hand.

“Please, just let me get through this.”

I snapped my jaw closed, but he didn’t continue speaking.

He blew out a breath instead, scrubbed his palm over his face, and held a single blink for ten or fifteen seconds. “You know I went to California with Gatlin, right?”

“Yeah.” A ball formed in the pit of my stomach, then went for a roll trying to make its way out my mouth.

“Maybe we need some time apart.”

A piece of my heart froze and an image of ice cracking flashed through my mind.

“You’re the only girl I’ve ever been with, Dani, and when I talked to Kelly, she suggested…”

I didn’t give a damn what she had to say. “Kelly Devlin? That-that”--I scanned my brain for an insult I could apply to her and came up empty--“Kelly Devlin?”

“We think--”

“As if it’s not enough that damned Jocelyn is always trash talking me, now I have to worry about Miss Congeniality, too?”

“Don’t, Dani. This is about us. Not anyone else. Kelly and I talked for a long time and she, I mean, we”--he shook his head--“I think we need some time to figure out if we belong together or if we’re just comfortable.”

I pictured him and Kelly, perfectly wonderful Kelly, lying on a beach, running through the surf, holding hands… The longer I stood, the worse the pictures became. “Time? It’s been eight years, Simon.”

“Dani, this doesn’t mean we’re finished. It just means we’re taking a step back to make sure.”

“A step back.” Another piece of my heart chipped off. “Go. Be with Little Suzy Happy Pants if you want. We don’t need a break. We’re finished.”

I spun away, then whirled around, anger and pain warring inside me. I never let blind fury beat me, but I couldn’t stop it. The sharp stabbing was too intense, and I clung to my rage to escape the grief already killing me, one aching cell at a time. I wanted to scream at him, to hold him accountable for my heartbreak, but I couldn’t summon enough anger to overpower the grief. “That’s what all the trips to California have been about, right? Not surfing with Gatlin, but screwing Kelly.”

“I didn’t sleep with her. I would never cheat.”

I laughed, the sound as bitter as the taste. “No? You keep going out there behind my back to see her, to be with her when you belong here with me.” Oh, God. The tears were coming, threatening to spill with just one more blink.

“You told me to go whenever I asked you.”

“Because I thought absence would make your freaking heart grow fonder.” I shook my head. “I was giving you space. I didn’t think you’d go out there and fall in love with someone else.”

He held out a hand, and I jerked away, lifting my hands in the motion for surrender as I backed up a few steps.

“Dani, we can still be friends. I don’t want to lose you.”

I bit my bottom lip. “When you brought me over here, I actually thought you were going to ask me to marry you.”

He reached out again.

This time, I sidestepped to avoid the touch I longed for, but my pride wouldn’t let me accept. “Don’t. Just don’t.”

“You’re gonna find a great guy.”

I swallowed the lump in my throat and took three steps, then a fourth. “That’s a great idea. I’m gon-gonna go home and get ready to go ou-out or something.” I stumbled over a divot in the grass and caught myself before I could do any more damage to my flailing self-respect.

“Are you okay?”

“Oh, yeah. I’m great.” I turned and fled, literally ran away from the scene of the crime. Only when I found myself alone in the dead silence of my apartment did I let the tears break free.

I would have liked to have been the hero in the aftermath of our break-up, or at least the person taking the smallest amount of blame, but looking back, I had moments which should have made me hide my head in some sort of windowless box so no one ever had to witness my shame.

Case in point…

“So, what happened with Simon?” Keaton Shaw bent over the pool table to line up his shot. A blue button-down stretched tightly over broad shoulders and tucked in at his narrow waist. He’d flipped his tie over his shoulder so as not to interfere with his already lousy pool skills. His jeans fit snug, hugging his long legs and slightly rounded ass. The denim appeared as though it had been smoothed by time and a few hundred machine washes. I didn’t exactly tingle to touch it, but I admired him with the healthy kind of respect, which would earn me a few extra Hail Mary’s for coveting someone else’s stuff. And there was no mistaking--Keaton Shaw belonged to someone else.

He’d been beautifully perfect since he arrived on the scene in eighth grade, but the sadness in his eyes lowered his total handsomeness score. Not by much, but enough. I knew Keaton--worked with him, dated him in high school, then dated his BFF for the last eight years--and he’d never admit to sadness or validate the idea of trouble in his perfect life with the equally flawless Jocelyn. Only someone who knew him well or suffered the same affliction would be able to tell.

We had the same shoulder slump, identical too-much-sadness glances that tried too hard and came away weak. Yeah. I could tell.

We shared a hurt delivered by people who’d divvied up their DNA to become two halves of a matching twin set. I’d been tossed away earlier in the day, but Keaton’s agony was much fresher, deepening the lines of his face, hunching his spine in a way I’d overcome already…until I had to breath the words, “Simon wants Kelly.” Then mine burned anew.

I coughed to hide a pending sob, and my feigned strength faded. Simon’s words had broken me into a thousand tiny shards of gloom and despair, each one labeled with a happy memory I would have to drink myself into oblivion to forget. Hence, my reason for being in the bar. That was what I told myself, anyway.

“Little Kelly Devlin.” Keaton zinged the six-ball into the corner.

I nodded and concentrated all my energy on draining the cold beer in my hand to block out the intensity of the stinging in my stomach. I couldn’t lash out at Simon. Well, I could have, but it wouldn’t have been fair. He’d been honest. More so than I cared for. He couldn’t help if his heart wasn’t as emotionally invested as mine. Probably.

In a desperate effort to end my suffering, I’d called Grace, master plotter and revenge seeker, to lay out my tragic tale--complete with mistaken hope for a proposal--and in true best friend style, she said to hit him where it would hurt. And that meant going after
Jocelyn.

If we’d been in a superhero comic,
she
would have been my arch nemesis, my kryptonite, the anti-me. The idea of taking
her
down made me smile. On the flip side, it would involve Keaton, the boy who’d been my friend even when it hurt him. Vengeance would never be more than a pleasant, daydream kind of fantasy. Grace’s plan would destroy
Jocelyn
, but it had the potential to kill him. I couldn’t do that.

And Speaking of
her
… “When did Joss say she’d be here?” Saying her name made my beer bitter. She wasn’t just anyone. She’d been Keaton’s wife since he graduated college. Most interesting to my cause, she was Simon’s sister, the person he loved more than himself.

I’d spent eight long years tolerating her, calling a truce to our war because I loved him. Yeah. The idea of hurting her sounded better by the minute, and I almost went with it. Then I caught a glimpse of Keaton…broken, drunk Keaton, whose eyes glittered with tears.

He was too wrapped up in his misery and probably the rumors of his doomed marriage circulating Storybook Lake to notice me right in front of him.

“About an hour ago.” The pool stick clattered across the felt cloth covering the table and rolled to a stop resting against the eight ball. His shoulders slumped. “I don’t know why I’m so anxious for her to get here. She’s going to ask me for a divorce…leave me, anyway.”

I imagined the pieces of his heart fracturing more by the minute.

Life hadn’t been kind to them recently. They’d lost a baby. His picture perfect dream crumbled, but so had mine. Still, chatting about his heartache, helping him, felt infinitely better than wallowing in my own. “You want to talk about it?”

“No. I want to drink until the words won’t hurt anymore.” His half smile slid into a grimace, and he lowered his head as his shoulders shook. He really loved her, and I almost picked up my bag and went out to find her. I would have loved to unleash my last twenty years of frustration in a butt-kicking she needed. Instead, I handed him one of the hundred proof shots I’d bought on my way in. When he finished his, he handed me his empty glass, snatched mine, and smiled as he tipped it back.

“You better slow down, golden boy. The she-bitch isn’t gonna wanna come in here and find you all drunked up.”

“Don’t you get it, Dani? She doesn’t care enough to come in here and find me at all or she would have been here already.” A lone tear fell. “She’s gonna leave me.”

“No, Keats. You’re her Romeo.” They were the original star-crossed lovers, doomed to eternal misery.

“Not anymore.” His tears came freely, and I took three steps closer invading every square inch of his personal space. He rested his ass against the wooden edge of the table with one hand braced on each side of his hips. Before he could shrink completely away, I cupped his cheek, forcing him to look at me.

“She’s a fool, Keats. I would fight for you with every breath in my body.” I gave him a little shove. He swayed, then hunched forward, putting us at eye level. His head dropped again, and I moved between his legs, then leaned down to press a kiss to the nape of his neck. “I hate seeing you like this. If she doesn’t realize what she has, then it’s her problem. You deserve someone who will love you for what you are, not what she wants you to be. Let’s get out of here.”

He didn’t flinch, but tilted his chin slightly to the left and looked at me from beneath droopy eyelids. “Yeah?”

I couldn’t be sure whether he meant it as a question or encouragement, but I knew which way I took it and continued nipping, then soothing his sensitive skin with kisses. To be held, to share the freshness of my suffering with someone eased my broken heart. Every fiber in my body needed someone to look at me, to see
me
. No matter how wrong, Keaton was there.