It Takes Two (21 page)

Shane felt a twist of frustration. She was assuming a lot without input from him. She’d suddenly decided that he was bad for her and her health and the best thing was to end their relationship without talking to him about it. He hadn’t even known there was a health problem.

His frustration grew to irritation.

“I didn’t want to say no,” she told him.

“Exactly. You liked all of it as much as I did. A lot of it was your idea. In fact, you claim that you’ve been researching new sex ideas to keep things interesting for
me
, but I think you’re just as into all of that for yourself.”

And again, the whole spy game with the pendant came to mind. Maybe
she’d
been worried about getting bored during this trip too.

She huffed out a breath. “I never said that it wasn’t fun with you. But I need to be smart and cut back now. Eating cream-filled donuts for breakfast every day is also fun, but not good for me, so I don’t do it. Drinking margaritas and going skinny-dipping is fun…and dangerous, so I don’t do it. Staying up all night to read a novel from start to finish is fun, but makes for a bad day at work, so I don’t do it.”

Dammit, he wished they weren’t driving. He wanted to pace and gesture and maybe yell a little bit. He didn’t have a temper problem but when he argued, it was like everything else—he gave it all he had.

“But you’re not even trying.”

She looked over at him. “What are you talking about?”

“You’re blaming how you feel on me…and Emma. On having too much fun, on staying out too late, but you’re eating like shit.” He gestured to the half-empty bag of chocolate-covered pretzels. “You stay up late watching
House
re-runs some nights. You get up at the crack of dawn to work out before you go to the office. And don’t deny you love your mojitos.”

She gripped the steering wheel so that her knuckles went white. “What’s your point?”

“That it’s easy to say ‘Shane’s the problem’ instead of facing all the things that
you
need to change.”

“I’m not saying that it’s your
fault
, Shane. Just maybe that you’re not…good for me. Or we’re not good together.”

“That’s bullshit, Iz,” he said sharply. “And quitting me isn’t going to be enough. Then what are you going to do? At some point you have to take some of this responsibility.”

“I
am
. You think the idea of changing the lifestyle I have with you is easy on me?”

Maybe getting her riled up while they were driving down the road at sixty-eight miles an hour wasn’t a great idea, but he couldn’t hold back. “But why is that the only answer you’re focused on? Are you taking vitamins? Trying anything new in your workout program? Maybe it’s the kick-boxing that you do twice a week that makes you sore. Maybe you need to wear flats instead of four-inch heels. Maybe you need to chill out at your job a little bit and not constantly push yourself to be the number-one seller every single fucking month.”

Isabelle didn’t answer or look at him. Her jaw was so tight, he wondered if she was going to crack a tooth.

Finally, she said, “We’ve known each other for eight months, Shane. Eight
months
. It’s not like you promised ‘in sickness and in health’ and ‘’til death do us part’, you know? I’m trying to let you out before it gets hard.”

“Maybe I wouldn’t mind it being hard.” He gripped one hand into a fist, then rolled his neck again.

Maybe he wouldn’t.

But maybe he would.

Shit, how the hell did he know? Things hadn’t been hard for him for a very, very long time. He avoided hard. He purposefully went for fun and frivolous.

He’d had hard when he was a kid. He’d seen hard in the other kids in their home. But about the time his biological grandmother had come looking for him, he’d decided that someone else could do hard. He was going to do fun.

He’d chosen to stay in the foster home. He’d made the place as fun and happy as he could for the other kids and made sure that his adoptive parents were glad every single day they’d taken him in. His mom had made things hard for him and he was over it.

At age seven, he chose his path and hadn’t deviated from it since. He was going to be the guy that everyone wanted around, that no one wanted to leave, the life of the party, the one that people noticed and couldn’t get enough of.

Sure, the job was sometimes what people might call hard, but he didn’t see it that way. He was on the good side, the side that mattered, the side that made a difference. He did what he could to make things better for the people counting on him. He was the cop who always had teddy bears in his car for the kids he came across on domestic abuse calls. He was the guy who played Elvis in his car even when he was taking a drug dealer downtown. He was the one that could make even the lady he’d busted for texting while driving smile at a stupid joke. And he went to sleep every night content that he’d done his best.

He slept like a baby.

“You make me seem like an ass,” he told her. “Like it has to all be about me. Like I couldn’t be expected to give up a couple of late nights if it was better for you. You haven’t ever told me to chill out. You haven’t ever pointed out that I act like a college frat boy who has just discovered life with beer bongs and no curfews.”

She cracked a tiny smile at that, then shook her head. “You’re you, Shane. You’re happy. You make other people happy being who you are. Why would I want you to change that?”

“Because you should want to be with me, dammit.”

She pressed her lips together. Finally she blew out a long breath. “I’m sorry. I don’t mean to make you feel bad. I’m screwing this all up.”

He sighed. “No you’re not. Maybe giving up caffeine is harder than giving me up.”

His stomach and heart and brain all rejected that idea, but maybe that was it. Maybe he was the most expendable thing in her life. Like she’d said, it had only been eight months.

“That’s not it,” she said.

Of course she said that. Because what was she going say?
Yes, Shane, if I have to choose, I will
always
choose gummy bears over you.

“I’m trying to figure this out for
me
. I’m trying to get used to giving stuff up. I don’t want to figure it out for you, too,” she said, with clear frustration.

“I’ll figure it out
with
you.”

“I guess…it’s too much. The figuring out what exercise I can and can’t do. What helps my sleep and what screws it up. How to drink less coffee and not want to kill someone. That’s all
enough
. Moving in together, being in each other’s lives twenty-four-seven would have been a big adjustment even without all of this. But I can’t deal with balancing out how to meld our lives together when I don’t have control of my own life. And I can’t keep feeling guilty about you too.”

“So you’re taking the easy way out. Just cutting this part out instead of trying to work it through?”

She blew out a breath. “Yes. Okay? I can’t stop eating or sleeping or working so…yeah. You’re one thing I can stop doing.”

Her voice wobbled as she said it, but she still said it. And Shane’s heart stopped for a moment, before restarting with a painful thud.

“And being without me is easy?”

“Being without you
now
is easier than it will be in six more months when I know how it feels to come home to you, when I know how much I love seeing your dirty socks mixed in with mine, when I know that if I forget to buy orange juice, you’ll remember. When you decide to leave after all of that, it will be the worst thing I’ve ever been through.”

Shane had no fucking idea what to say to that.

She had a point.

She definitely had a point.

Cutting their losses now would hurt, but it would be less painful than if they realized it wasn’t going to work down the road.

“You don’t know that it won’t work,” he said.

“I can’t make any promises of any kind,” she said quietly. “
I
don’t even know how to live with me right now, so how can I promise you anything about what it will be like?”

He tried to take a deep breath, but his chest wouldn’t loosen enough to let his lungs expand.

“And,” she said, her words almost inaudible. “You think you’ll still want to be with me when I’m different, when I’m not going out as much, or having as much fun. But you might not. And…” She stopped and blew out a breath. “Maybe I won’t still want to be with you.”

He couldn’t stay cooped up in this car for another minute. “We need to stop.”

He could tell she was holding back tears as she nodded. “Okay.”

She took the exit for the tiny town of Wall, South Dakota, the home of Wall Drug Store, which had been advertised on billboards along the entire stretch of I-90 as they’d been traveling. Shane knew it was a lot more than a drug store. It was a huge tourist trap. But it was huge. It would give him some space and time from Isabelle, and give him a chance to figure out how in the hell he was going to finish this trip. And how he wanted it to turn out.

They parked and got out. Isabelle started for the main building in the sprawling shopping-mall-esque arrangement of shops and restaurants.

“I’m going to make a call,” he told her. “I’ll meet you inside.”

She looked back at him and clearly started to say something before pressing her lips together and nodding.

Shane watched her enter the store, then paced to the end of the sidewalk, pivoted and paced back. Fuck. He needed to run. Or hit the gym. Or hit
something.

She was completely right.

He knew she loved him. She loved how he made her feel. But she’d fallen for the life-of-the-party guy. She didn’t want him to change. Because there was a chance—probably a decent one—that if he changed, so would
her
feelings. It wasn’t just that she’d feel guilty if he changed his lifestyle for her and then didn’t like it. It was also the risk of him changing his lifestyle, not minding it, and then
her
being the dissatisfied one.

Fuck
.

He pulled his phone out and punched in Ryan’s number.

“Hey, Shane,” his friend greeted.

“Are all the Dixon girls a lot of work, or just Isabelle?”

“Oh, I think it’s all of them,” Ryan said sincerely. “But Iz might be more work than Amanda.”

Shane rubbed the back of his neck. “Yeah. Well, I hope so. For your sake.”

Ryan chuckled. “Thanks. So what’s going on? You guys to the cabin and bored already?”

Shane snorted. “No. And no. We’re still driving.”

“But you left this morning early, didn’t you?”

“Yeah, we’ve had some pit stops.”

“So things are…”

He’d love to fill in that blank. He had no idea how things were. “A mess,” he finally said.

“Sorry, man.”

“I don’t know if I can fix this.”

“What’s going on?”

“Do you ever worry about what will happen with you and Amanda if you…change?”

“If I change?”

“Yeah, you know. If you stop doing something you’ve always done.”

“Like what?”

Shane scowled at the tourists passing him. God, this place was packed. “Like…stuff that makes you who you are. Like…”

“Being a paramedic?” Ryan offered.

Shane felt like banging his head against the wall. That wasn’t exactly it, no. But he couldn’t come up with another example. “Like playing football.”

Ryan laughed. “You’re asking if I worry that things won’t work between Amanda and me if I stop playing football?”

Shane frowned. “Yeah.”

“No. I don’t worry about that at all,” Ryan said. Shane could hear the grin in his voice. “In fact, I figure someday I
will
stop playing football. And I expect that things with Amanda and me to be fine when that happens.”

Okay, it wasn’t a perfect analogy. Football didn’t make up a huge part of Ryan’s personality. It was something he did.

“Well, what if you start doing something you didn’t do when you met her?” he asked instead. “Like what if you suddenly decided to…” he needed something that was similar to changing his social habits and personality entirely, “…go into politics.”

There was a long pause on the other end of the phone.

Yeah, that sounded stupid.

“What the hell are you talking about?” Ryan asked.

“Isabelle’s trying to dump me.”

“I thought she already had.”

“Ha-ha,” Shane said. “She means it. She thinks I’m bad for her. Or she’s bad for me. Or something. Both I guess.”

“Why?”

“She wants me to…change. She wants me to…” It all sounded so stupid. It
was
so stupid. The woman he loved wanted to stay home more. So he needed to stay home more.

Except that she didn’t want
him
to change.

What bothered him the most was that she wasn’t even going to let him try.

“What would you do if Amanda was trying to break up with you?”

“Fight her tooth and nail.”

“And what if she was…right?”