“I haven’t woke up this early since high school.”
“Really? What time did your school start?”
“Well, classes didn’t start until like eight-thirty,” she clarified. “But I was on the dance team. We had super early practices.”
“Dance team, huh?” he asked, becoming intrigued. “You must be pretty flexible.”
“Ha! That was not subtle at all, Nick.”
He gave her a mischievous look. “I wasn’t trying to be.”
“Well, as a matter of fact, I am quite flexible. I do Pilates five times a week. But I was far more flexible in high school.”
“Were you pretty popular because of that?”
She gaped at him. “Nick! I was not that kind of girl.”
He feigned innocence. “That’s not what I meant.”
“Yeah right.”
He snickered.
“For your information, mister dirty mind, I only had one boyfriend in high school,” she explained in a snarky tone. “And not until my senior year. And then I had one boyfriend in college. I was a good girl.”
“Was,” he pressed, still teasing.
“You’re relentless,” she chastised.
He shrugged as he continued to snicker.
She sighed. “Yes, was.I guess.”
He eyeballed her for a second before turning back to the road. “What do you mean by that?”
“I was a shameless hussy once.”
“Ohh,” he said as he recalled the Saturday evening conversation. “You mean because of that one guy you told me about.”
She shook her head in disgust. “I was stupid.”
“That’s not stupid, Samantha. You’re an adult. There’s nothing wrong with having a little fun with someone.”
“It wasn’t fun,” she retorted. “It was stupid.”
“What was so stupid about it?”
“Because he led me on!” Her voice was almost a shout and Nick was somewhat startled by her sudden change in demeanor.
“I took a leap of faith because I believed in him, and he was just leading me on from the beginning. He led me to believe there was something to believe in so I took a chance. The first weekend I knew him, he took me out of town to meet his family and he was a perfect gentleman, and talked about how I was everything he’d been looking for. And it was a wonderful couple of days. His family was perfect and he was perfect, and he took me to church with him and the whole nine yards. So when we got back from the trip, I decided to go for it. And then he continued to be perfect for weeks. He told me he wanted a future,and that he wanted to marry me, that he wanted to have a family with me. For ten weeks, he was perfect. And then!”
She paused to inhale deeply and exhale loudly.
“And then, he suddenly stopped talking to me. Like, completely. For like two weeks until I randomly bumped into him one Saturday night at some bar and he was with this woman, whom he introduced to me as hisfiancée.”
Nick winced, feeling a surprising amount of genuine empathy. “Ouch.”
“Yeah,” Samantha huffed. “He’d been seeing her the whole time too. I think he was seeing her first. He was also seeing this other girl too, more casually than me, but they had dated for about six weeks at the same time. She had figured everything out and sent me a message on Facebook about a week after I bumped into him and his fiancée. She said, ‘You realize we’ve been taken for a ride, right?’ Taken for a ride, to say the least. And … and I mean—”
