He grinned, which was unnerving. “I brought Hamilton home yesterday and realized I forgot to get his immunization records from Lauren, but I need them before his vet appointment Saturday. Lauren and I are working opposite shifts the rest of the week, so she offered to meet me here tonight to give me the paperwork. She said you’d be here.”
“You’re early. She won’t get here for another hour, probably. I’m waiting for Evan.”
“Uh-huh.”
“You already knew that, didn’t you?”
He shrugged.
“Did you come here to see me?”
“Do you see anyone else here?”
Lindsay was not happy to see him. She wasn’t ready to talk to him yet. If she ever would be. This was ridiculous. Why did he keep popping up in her life? She sipped her martini and looked around, trying to find something to focus her attention on.
“So you don’t want to talk about what happened?” he asked.
“What, the sexy bits?”
“And you freaking out afterward.”
Lindsay sighed. No, she didn’t want to talk about any of this, not at all. She ground out, “We’re not getting back together.”
“No?”
“No. The sex was good and all, but as far as I can tell, you’re still the same charming, flirty mess I broke up with five years ago.”
He had the good grace to look mildly offended, but his eyes sparkled as if he were laughing at her. “Good? The sex wasgreat.”
She rolled her eyes. “Sex was never our problem.”
He nodded. “So you said the other night.” When the waitress slid a basket of chips onto the table, he took one and popped it in his mouth, a gesture that looked casual and relaxed. “So what was our problem? That you are so jaded from your parents’ divorce that you don’t trust yourself to be vulnerable with anyone, and that you used Phoebe making out with me as an excuse to end the good thing you and I had going?” He popped another chip in his mouth.
Lauren stared at him for a long moment and then realized her jaw was hanging open. She closed her mouth hard, her teeth clacking together. She must have looked like a cartoon character.
How dare he? How could he just sit there and casually psychoanalyze her, think he knew her so well and spit out a proclamation like that?
But also, she was shocked at how well he’d nailed her.
She realized, then, that despite his casual demeanor, he was mad. She’d been within her rights to walk out on him the other night; she wasn’t ready for anything more with him than that one dumb night. But he was mad that she’d bailed with him.
He should have understood. She knew that being the child of an acrimonious divorce did not make her unique, but she’d confessed that much to Brad one night when they’d been dating. Her mother had been a mess emotionally for a lot of Lindsay’s childhood, and Lindsay had always been reluctant to put herself in the position to be that vulnerable. Enough of her friends were in good relationships now that obviously love and happiness were achievable, but Lindsay often wondered if they were really in the cards for her.
Lindsay’s father and Brad had a lot in common. Brad was far kinder, but like Lindsay’s dad, he was an incorrigible flirt and women seemed to gravitate to him. Brad knew all this because Lindsay had told him, partly to confess something about herself and partly to explain why she had trust issues. She’d seen firsthand how much her mother had been destroyed by her father’s philandering, and Lindsay didn’t want to repeat that old pattern. Brad had acted sympathetic at the time. He’d even told her he was glad she’d told him because he understood her better.
Lindsay’s father often partook of what was offered. She hadn’t thought Brad had ever done that…until the night she caught him with Phoebe.
“What I was going to say,” Lindsay said, recovering, “was that you flirt with anything in a skirt and don’t know when to rein it in.”
“We’ve had this conversation before. We had a variation on it the other night. We figured out that we don’t trust each other. You don’t trust me because I’m an unrepentant flirt, and I don’t trust you because you don’t trust anyone.”
“That’s not true. I trust my friends.”
“Have you ever been in a romantic relationship in which you trusted the guy you were dating?”
Lindsay crossed her arms because he probably already knew the answer to that question. Clearly it was no. It was why she wasn’t involved with anyone right now. The fact that he kept bringing it up pissed her off.
“In my defense,” said Brad, “I am a functional adult now in a way I was not five years ago. You may have noticed that I have my own place now.”
