Page 8 of Sweet Valentine
Jonah doesn’t miss it. He smirks, glancing pointedly at the new distance between them. “It looks like your partner’s not too happy.” He taunts her. It had been so long ago, when she had craved just that. “Trouble in paradise?” he mocks.
Patty glares viciously. “Leave me alone. Go away. Come back if they have those phrases on candy and I’ll be happy to put them into your lying, cheating mouth,” she spits out, turning her back on him.
Jonah stands there for a moment longer, his smirk widening. He doesn’t walk away just yet, clearly relishing the discomfort. He glances pointedly at the space between Patty and Colton. “It looks like your partner’s not too happy,” he mocks, his voice dripping with condescension.
Only then does Jonah finally step back, his lazy smile lingering before he turns and strides away, leaving an unsettling tension in his wake.
COLTON
Whatever threshold he’d had for the drama he’d left behind in the city, was quickly spent in the span of minutes watching a man hit on Patty with him on her arm. Frustration scuffs the dirt as he strides away from the park. Colton’s chest is tight. He can’t help interrogating himself: What did you expect from this ridiculous Love Quest?
He hadn’t expected anything. Definitely not some man smiling at Patty as this Jonah character had. She wasn’t about to walk away though. Nor did she have any obligation to. An awkward exchange of stamped candies and a trade of earnest confessions didn’t mean she was his. She isn’t. Patty isn’t anyone’s.
Still, it’s her he catches bounding towards him with big, thumping footsteps. “Colton,wait—” she demands. She doesn’t wait for him, though. With a harsh handful, she grabs a fistful of his uniform with which she wrenches him around. For such a slight woman, she truly had impressive musculature. “Will you justwait,please?” He freezes. Her earnest demand is impossible to deny. Sheer determination boosts her spirit enough to ask him, “What’s going on with you?”
“Nothing.” It comes out sharper than Colton wants it to. He winces, his head shaking as her brows furrow, not buying what he’s selling. Her eyes narrow quizzically. “Nothing doesn’t look like this,” Patty asserts, tender but unyielding. “I don’t get what just happened. I was confronted by an ex I was sure had left town—and you just stormed out, leaving me in that, like I did something wrong.” The words come out sounding raw from her lips. Wounded.
Colton’s stomach churns. “You didn’t do anything wrong.”
Yet someone may as well have tossed a lit match into his sliced open chest, setting his insides on fire. Jonah’s words, hiseasy grin, the way he’d reached over and just touched Patty, like he’d done it hundreds of times before, and likely because he had—it sticks in his mind like gum under a cafeteria table, refusing to get scraped away. How can he tell her that? How does he explain it without coming off as a whackjob? Ajealouswhackjob.
There’s no opportunity to contemplate it any further. Patty punctures his bubble of personal space, stepping closer. Her eyes map his face. “What is it then?” she asks, tender and urgent. “Why did you just shut me out like that? This has been going swell, I thought.”
Never before has he seen this wild, wonderful woman look so forlorn. He exhales a sharp, miserable breath. The day keeps dwindling to a nightmare. Between the conversation pulling his teeth out, and this exposure to how ill-prepared he is to be close to another human being beyond the one dynamic he’s managed to hack, he’s about ready to give up on this entire endeavor. Except Patty isn’t letting him off the hook. She doesn’t look away, no matter how hard the intensity of her imploring gaze made it for him to breathe.
“I don’t know,” Colton mutters, looking anywhere but right at her. He’s seldom felt this exposed in years. “I don’t like that guy.”
“Jonah?” Patty frowns. “Colton, I just told you?—”
“I heard. I—” His teeth grind together, his jaw clenching until it begins to ache.
“I didn’t know he was even in town. He doesn’t mean anything to me.”
“Someone who doesn’t mean anything to you wouldn’t affect you like that,” Colton retorts coarsely.
Patty’s fists plant at her hips as she stares him down, face-to-face with him. “Fine. Then he means a lesson it hurt to learn. Not something I am interested in repeating. Something I am still healing from. Ididn’tknow he was going to be here.”
A part of him itches to argue with it. His instincts are made for it, playing Good Cop, Bad Cop till he’s blue in the face. It wasn’t much of a thrill when he was playing both sides, though. He doesn’t want to play with Patty anyway, not that way. But his head is a mess. How does he even begin to explain it to her?
He says the first thing that comes to mind: “It’s Valentine’s Day.”
She stumbles back a step, taken aback. “Uhhh, yes. Yeah. Hence the hoopla. So?”
His mistake, Colton thinks with a grim smile, to think she’d make this easy on him. He could add it to the list of things he liked about her. “I don’t like Valentine’s Day,” he grinds out, the confession sour in his mouth. Metallic dust. “Never have.” His hands clench to fists in his pockets, fighting every instinct not to turn around and walk away in the opposite direction as fast as he can.
It helps, seeing her features soften for the truth. The confusion in her gaze doesn’t dissipate though, and Colton knows this conversation isn’t through. “Why? What happened on Valentine’s Day?” Patty prompts without self-consciousness.
There may as well be a literal can of worms in his hand. This, right here, is nothing he’s wanted to deal with again. This part—peeling back layers of himself until he felt flayed, and doing so in a leap of faith, letting someone see beneath the surface, not knowing if they’d leave him to turn septic before he’d stitched it all closed again. Could it still be his biggest fear if it had already been realized? “It’s complicated,” he says. “I— Back when I lived in the city, I was married.”
Patty’s eyes widen to saucers. Colton sees it, her mouth opening, before she snaps it back shut, thinking better of it and deciding to nod instead, encouraging little bobs of her head telling him to keep going.
He nods back. Colton’s throat tightened before the words finally escaped him. The memory clung to him like a stubborn wound that refused to heal. “We were married... young, naïve. I thought love was something you could hold onto if you just fought hard enough. But one day, she was gone. She didn’t even leave a note, just vanished into someone else’s life the day before Valentine’s Day.” Colton’s voice faltered, the raw edge of betrayal still fresh, even after all these years. “I still can’t figure out how someone you trust that much could leave you like that.”
If her step backward had been involuntary, her step back forward is the opposite. When Patty steps towards him, her arms uncrossing and falling to her sides, it’s like a barrier comes back down. It’s like she considers it hard, before she reaches for him. She murmurs, “Colton…”
He can’t stand the pity all over her gorgeous face. It stings to look at. With a shake of his head, he cuts her off. “No, don’t. I’m over it. My point wasn’t throwing a pity party, Patty. I just keep my distance from all of it, and I’m answering why. Valentine’s Day. Romance. All the talk, it’s cheap—it’s ajoke.” He is over it. As over it, he knows, as he will ever be. When his voice cracks at the end, he hates himself for it at least half as much as he hates the woman who had broken his heart. “I’ve made peace with it.”
Patty only looks at him. She doesn’t try to reach for him again—and for that, Colton finds himself immensely grateful. He stays put, despite her gaze lingering on him. There is no judgment there. Instead, he finds the same look she had given him the week before, from the other side of a window papered with postcards: knowing. Understanding. A kind that needed no words. That left him reeling; exposed, but inexplicably close to relieved.
