“I thought you didn’t want me to love you forever.”
Lauren angry-hissed and spun in a circle. He hadn’t seen her this genuinely angry in a while. Playfully angry, yes, but she was upset here. He felt a little bad about pissing her off, but this was also well-trod ground. Did she not understand him?
“I know you have some baggage,” she said, frustration in her voice. “I know your divorce made you wary of trusting people. But if you don’t want to be in a relationship, don’t be in one.”
Caleb opened his mouth to say he wasn’t, but he recognized that was a lie. He and Lauren had definitely crossed a line into being in some kind of relationship. He couldn’t deny that anymore. So the question now was whether it was a relationship he wanted to be in or one he should walk away from.
He didn’t know.
“It’s a risk,” he said, trying to sound calm. “If we decide this is a real relationship, thatisa commitment. It’s a commitment to being with each other and seeing where it goes. And I don’t trust commitment. I once stood in front of my friends and family and committed to love Kara forever, and she still left me.”
“You can’t let that rule the rest of your life.”
“It’s not that I want to! It’s been less than a year, though, and I need more time. I can’t do a big commitment right now. I hear what you’re saying, but I can’t.”
He watched the emotion play out on her face. She looked disappointed and angry and maybe a little relieved. Then she said, “Then what are we even doing?”
“What are you saying?”
“The limbo? It doesn’t work for me. We’re either going to be together in public, or we aren’t going to be together at all. Otherwise, it’s too strange. I don’t want to be your dirty secret, and I don’t want you to be mine. If I’m going to be in a relationship, I want it to be one I can talk about with my friends. I want it to be with someone who I can greet without worrying about giving something away. I want it to be with someone I can exchange PDAs with, someone who wants to get drinks at Pop and dinner at Elizabeth’s and be affectionate with me in those places. I don’t want to just eat takeout at each other’s apartments and have sex. That was fun for a bit, but it’s not fulfilling to me now.”
Caleb understood where she was going with this. He didn’t want things to end, though. He just wanted more time to make up his mind. To see if there was the kind of potential between him and Lauren to make this into something that might be worth risking his heart on. Right now, he still didn’t know if the risk would be worth it.
“I can’t give you what you want,” he said softly.
“Well, then here’s where we are. Either you’re with me all the way, or you’re not with me at all.”
That hung in the air for a moment. Being with Lauren might make him happy…until she met someone else. Until she grew frustrated with him. Until she dumped him. Given that they worked in close enough proximity to each other for things to get awkward, it would probably be better to end things cordially, so they could get along when they had to.
Although they didn’t do a great job of getting along as it was.
“I’ve enjoyed spending time with you,” he said. “We’re great in bed together, and we’ve had some fun. But we hardly get along out of bed at all. We still have dumb fights all the time. How can we possibly have a strong relationship if we’re barely friends outside of a bedroom?”
“So that’s it then. You want to end things.”
He sighed. “I don’twantto end things. I want things to stay as they are. But if that’s not enough for you, then maybe I should just go.”
“You should just go then.”
But he didn’t want to. His feet felt glued to the floor. “Why now?”
“You really think we can just go on doing whatever it was what we were doing indefinitely? Having sex because we’re attracted to each other even though we clearly can’t stand each other?”
“Is that still true, though? Seems to me we get along more often than we don’t.”
“Except here we are, fighting again. A relationship shouldn’t be this…acrimonious.”
“A relationship can be whatever we make it.”
“Except a private affair.” Lauren sighed. “That’s not working for me. Was it working for you?”
“It worked fine.”
Lauren sat on the sofa finally. She rubbed her forehead. “You told me you didn’t used to be such a jerk. That you were jaded because of your divorce. And the last couple of weeks, I thought I saw some of the old you. We had fun together. You even seemed happy sometimes. But maybe I was wrong. Maybe you really are this cold, stoic jerk. You wanted to get your rocks off and nothing more.”
“Come on, Lauren. It was more than that.”
“But you’re not willing to give me much more than that. So just…whatever it was we had? You didn’t want it to be a relationship, so it isn’t. We’re done here. Please leave.”
