Chapter 6 #2
As soon as the question leaves my mouth, I want to take it back.
It sounds like I’m asking if he’s single, like I’m interested and digging for information.
I won’t pretend like I’m not curious; in fact, my curiosity about him has been gnawing at me like hunger since I saw him at the pool two days ago, but I meant to ask about how he just picked up his life and moved here, not make it seem like I want to know his relationship status.
“No girlfriend,” he says with a smirk. His stupidly handsome face is so punchable sometimes. “Why? Are you int—”
“Please.” I hold up my hand to stop him from saying more.
“I’m just saying, Abby, if you wanted to know if I was single, you could have just asked.”
“I don’t care if you’re single.”
But if that’s true, why did my stomach unclench as he said “no girlfriend”? Surely Miles has dated other women since we broke up, especially as an NHL player. He probably had options for days. I was engaged, for god’s sake; it’s not a big deal. It’s not even a deal. It’s just information.
The first two people in line are called in for their massages, but that still leaves two people in front of me. I’m stuck with Miles for a little longer.
My phone buzzes with another text from Hazel.
H: How’s it going? What are you up to today?
A: In line to get a chair massage. Definitely going to call you later, you’ll never guess who else is at this resort.
H: omg tea, spill
A: Miles
I shift to face Miles so he can’t just look over my shoulder and read my texts. I don’t need him to see that I’m talking about him. Knowing him, he would like it.
My phone buzzes in succession three, four, five times, and as I’m trying to read Hazel’s texts, Miles clears his throat.
“Hey, listen, Abby. I want to apologize about last night.”
My fingers hover over the keyboard, tears pressing against the backs of my eyes. I spent last night rewriting the story I’d been telling myself for years.
After our breakup, a part of me hoped he would call and say he wanted to get back together.
That he could figure out how to balance an athletic career and a girlfriend, and would I give him a second chance?
I held onto this hope for longer than I’d like to admit.
I know I would have said yes. That hopeful part of me got smaller every year, but I would be lying if I said it was dead.
One night shortly after I’d gotten engaged, I confessed something to Hazel while watching The Runaway Bride.
In the movie, Julie Roberts’s character is engaged for a fourth time and getting ready to be married when a reporter shows up to cover a story about her.
She ends up falling for him and marrying him instead of her fiancé.
Haze and I had drunk too many homemade margaritas, and I admitted that if Miles showed up before my wedding, I wasn’t sure I could walk down the aisle confidently to Todd.
When she asked me about it after we’d sobered up, I pretended like I didn’t remember what I’d said and that it was the alcohol talking, but the truth is that if Miles had reappeared in my life at any point, wedding day included, it would have made things a lot more complicated for me.
I held on to a tiny seed of hope for way too long that he was out there feeling terrible for leaving me, agonizing over his mistake, stuck on the injustice of our breakup and the hope that one day I wouldn’t just get the apology that I deserved, but that he would be able to admit how wrong he had been for breaking up with me.
I wasn’t daydreaming that we’d get back together or anything, but I didn’t want to be the only one clinging to the love we once held.
And it turns out that I am.
Was.
It’s not that I feel hurt about what he said, so much as I feel humiliated by my own imagination. And that’s not Miles’s problem.
“You don’t have to apologize, Miles. You were honest with me, and I—I hurt my own feelings.”
“But I didn’t mean it like it came out.”
“It doesn’t matter. It happened eleven years ago. It was a dumb question. I shouldn’t—”
Miles takes a step into my space. “Abby.”
I direct my gaze to his. Our eyes meet, and everything around me disappears except for Miles.
I clench all the muscles in my arms to keep from reaching out to touch him.
It feels wrong to be this close to him and keep my hands to myself, but we aren’t those people.
Even if in this moment it feels like we are.
“I do regret breaking up with you, Abby. I—”
“Next!” a voice from the spa shouts. Four people appear at the doors.
Suddenly, it’s our turn, and the two people in front of us are guided into the spa with Miles and me.
The four of us are escorted into one large room with a row of massage chairs set up.
Miles ends up on the other end of the room, but I’m hyperaware of his proximity to me.
Just his being in the same room as me is distracting.
Despite the hands kneading my back muscles, I’m still tense. My stomach is in knots. What else was he going to say back there?
I do regret breaking up with you.
His words circle around in my mind, replaying on a loop. I can’t even cut through the noise to figure out how I feel about it. I try to just get around his words.
I feel like I have whiplash from last night’s conversation. He regrets it but thinks it was for the best? He regrets it but doesn’t think that he would have been a good hockey player while he was with me? My head is spinning with the implications and the contradictions. I need more information.
I need to talk to Hazel.
My massage is nice, but it’s over too soon, and I’m the first one in our group to be done. I sneak out of the spa, hoping Miles isn’t trailing me, and head to a bar in the lobby to get a drink, snag a seat, and call Hazel.
I have about an hour before my next resort activity, and although I should eat, my stomach is still all twisted up from this Miles situation, and I need to talk it out with Hazel before I can even think about food.
I dial her number once I’m settled into a wicker egg-shaped chair with deep cushions, a strawberry daiquiri and a bottle of water in hand.
“Oh my god, Abigail Marianne Ashe, how dare you drop a bomb like that and then ignore my texts?!” Hazel answers the phone without so much as a hello.
“I know, but he was like right there and starting talking to me and then I went in for a chair massage, so I couldn’t.”
“Okay, well, spill the tea, sis, because what the hell do you mean your college ex-boyfriend is at the same resort as you?”
I tell her everything: running into him at the pool, at dinner, the conversation we had, and how seeing him again doesn’t just take me back to the heartbreak of my twenties, but also to the one in my thirties.
I tell her I’m doing okay, but it was hard at first. I tell her what he said outside the spa, and she gasps at all the right times, sprinkling in her own commentary as I talk.
I check my surroundings, making sure he isn’t nearby, eavesdropping, but there’s no sight of his six-foot-two frame.
“I mean, you have to hear him out, right? Get the rest of whatever he was saying?” Hazel asks, nearly breathless with anticipation.
“I thought for sure you were going to tell me to stay the hell away from him.”
“You didn’t let me finish. I was going to say you should hear him out and then close the door on that. Because if I recall correctly, he couldn’t even say ‘I love you’ back in college.”
“That was because of the stuff with his parents,” I say.
“That kind of emotional unavailability takes years of therapy and maturing to get on the other side of. Just be careful, Abs. You’re still tender and being around him is obviously poking at your bruises.”
“I know. He keeps…appearing, though. And asking questions and looking at me like he’s happy to see me.”
“He probably is. You were the best thing that ever happened to him.”
Maybe that’s what he was going to say. Words were never something Miles was good at, and I had patience for that in college, but lately I haven’t had patience for much of anything.
“Does he still look as good as he used to?” Hazel asks conspiratorially.
“Better.”
Hazel laughs, a bright cackling noise as familiar to me as my own laugh.
“What? Why is that funny?” I ask.
“Oh, honey, you are in danger.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, like, you and Miles are like magnets. You spent so much time at the hockey rink in college because you couldn’t bear to be away from him for a few hours.
Your ability to find each other in a crowded room was the stuff of romance movies back in college; there’s no way that’s gone.
I can hear it in your voice. You’re telling me he’s as hot, if not hotter than he was back then. Girl, you’re going to jump his bones.”
I groan. Hazel is right—I am drawn to Miles. That I haven’t touched him yet is a testament to my own willpower, but I’m neither a statue nor a saint, and my ability to resist temptation has limits.
“I can’t do that, Haze. Physical stuff is emotional for me. I’m not one of those people who can separate it and it’s already all twisted up together with Miles. Jumping his bones would make things way too messy. And not in the hot way.”
“So you need to talk to him one more time—no problem, you can handle that. But then you need to avoid him for the rest of the week so you don’t crawl into his lap and fall in love with him again?”
“That…feels really dramatic.”
“This is dramatic,” she says.
I groan again. “This is not what I needed on this vacation.”
“Just find yourself another equally handsome man to get your mind off Miles.”
“Well, hopefully there’s someone in my pasta-making class. I’m gonna get going.”