Playing With Her Heart (Caught Up In Love #4)(31)
Author: Lauren Blakely

I was a crazed animal, beseeched with need.

And it makes no sense how I could have wanted him so badly, but be so terribly in love with the man I’m meeting for coffee in an hour. The perfect man for me. Patrick with his music, and his songs, and the duets we sing together so well. Patrick who wants to be my friend first. Patrick who I’ve loved for so long.

All Davis wants is to f**k me.

I have to focus on today, on the here and now. Not on the other night.

I turn back to the mirror, appraising my appearance. I’m wearing jeans, red cowboy boots and a scoop neck top. My hair is down and I tuck it behind my ears, because it’s the only way I can wear it that doesn’t remind me of Davis. Of how he can’t keep his hands out of my hair. How he likes my hair up, how he likes my hair down, how he can’t stop touching me. Here with my hair tucked primly, I don’t feel like the woman who’s playing two men.

“Um, no. What are you? A schoolgirl? Let it free!” Kat threads her fingers in my hair and makes it wild again. “Never tuck your hair behind your ears on a date.”

“It’s not even a date. We’re just friends,” I say, as if that makes what I’m doing okay.

She rolls her eyes. “Yeah. Go have fun with your friend. I’m going to go call my friend Bryan,” she says, sketching air quotes, “to see if he wants to come over and be friends.”

“I mean it, Kat. How much more platonic could it be? We’re going out on a Sunday afternoon. It’s not that way with Patrick.”

She fixes me a serious look. “Make it that way then, Jill. Make it the way you want it. Now’s your time.”

I grab my coat, my purse and my phone and catch the subway, those last few words still echoing. Now’s my time. Because I’ve done my time, right? I’ve beaten myself up over Aaron. I’ve read his letters thousands of times. They’re branded in my brain. They’re tattooed on my heart. They’re alive in my head, eating away at me.

I close my eyes as the train rattles under the city, and Aaron’s written words ring in my ears.

I f**king love you so much.

Do you have any idea what it feels like to love a person this much?

It’s killing me to be without you.

I press my fingers against my temple, as if I can squeeze out the reminders of him. The memories I’m dying to bury for good. I still don’t understand it. He was so good to me the whole time we were together. Captain of the swim team, president of student council, the model upstanding guy. He was unimpeachable, and he was crazy about me. If I’d loved him as much as he loved me, would things have been different? Would I be different? But it’s so hard to know anymore. All I know is that love should be free from the kind of weight and hold that Aaron had on me. Love should be perfect and pure.

The train pulls into Seventy-Second Street and soon I’m walking to a coffee shop where I’m greeted by the blazingly beautiful smile of Patrick, the very reason I’m no longer in that dark, awful place I lived in after things ended with Aaron. He’s the reason, he got me through and he’s here now, wearing jeans and a navy blue pullover, his honey-gold eyes twinkling when he sees me.

He wraps me in a hug and his arms feel warm and safe around me, as I always imagined they’d be. Yes, this is the opposite of all my lonely days and nights. This is the beginning of the end of feeling like the worst person in the world.

For the next hour, we drink lattes and chat about our favorite shows, then our favorite movies, then our favorite songs, and it’s all such standard getting-to-know you stuff, and it’s fun. Really, it’s fun. When we finish and leave the cafe, he tips his forehead to the end of the block. “There’s a great indie bookstore on Seventy-Third. Want to pop in?”

“Of course.”

Once inside, he stops at the first table and taps a celebrity tell-all tale from the latest reality star du jour. “God, I love these books,” he says and grabs it, and opens it to a random page. He adopts a high-pitched voice to match that of the starlet. “But spending the summers in Lake Como with my movie star boyfriend isn’t as glamorous as everyone thinks it would be. My iPhone has spotty reception there, so it’s hard for me to keep up with Twitter.”

He chuckles deeply. “I have to get this.” He lowers his voice to a conspiratorial whisper. “Don’t tell anyone though. It’s my addiction. A total vice. I eat these books up like they’re candy. It’s junk reading, but I don’t care. They make me happy.”

I bring a finger to my lips. “I won’t breathe a word.”

“What about you? What do you like to read?”

I bite my lip and look away. Do I tell him the truth? That I read red-hot racy romance novels? That I love stories with sexy alpha males who border on bossy? That I crave tales of men who work hard and f**k hard and say dirty sexy things to their women? There was a time when I went for the sweeter stuff. But lately, I need the heat way up to get off.

Yeah, maybe I won’t tell him all this. Especially considering all I needed the other night was a man who doesn’t even want me. A man who won’t even take me out to dinner, much less for a coffee. Not that I’d even want to go out with him. Not when I have a chance with Patrick.

“Oh, you know, this and that,” I say evasively.

“C’mon, now,” he says in a teasing voice. “You can tell me.”

This is what I wanted, right? To get to know him. To let him get to know me. I hesitate, though, because I don’t know how it would feel to speak the truth. To open up. Even about a little thing like what I read. But it’s not really a little thing. It’s a big thing, because it has everything to do with who I am now. With why I am this person. I read these books because it’s all I’ve allowed myself. Because I’m terrified of getting close to another person again. Because I’m petrified of a twisted kind of love.

Because make-believe is more than a job. It’s a way of life for me.

“Elmore Leonard. Get Shorty is not only an awesome movie, but a fantastic book too,” I say, because he’s my brother’s favorite author. I’m using his lines too, telling Patrick exactly what Chris has said to me about Elmore Leonard. A wave of self-loathing pounds me because I’m lying to Patrick over something so minor. Would it be so hard for me to tell him the truth about something as innocuous as what I read? But even as I try to get the honest words past my lips I’m layering on another little white lie. “And Carl Hiassen, too. He just tells the craziest stories and they suck me into his world.”