25
“W hy don’t you just call him?” Xola asked as she sat down on the couch.
“I already have, and he didn’t answer,” Olani responded.
It’d been a week since she’d last spoken to Elion, since she’d confessed and told him she not only owned the site but was the only woman on it.
Admittedly, it’d gone better than she expected.
She’d expected outright anger and maybe raised voices.
Neither of those she’d received, but she shouldn’t have been surprised.
He’d never struck her as the type to raise his voice, and he’d claimed he wasn’t mad but hurt.
She probably would have preferred him to be mad.
She’d texted him a few times and called him three. He hadn’t answered her calls or responded to her texts. She wasn’t even sure he’d read them.
“You will not like this, but he has a point. You should have told him sooner. I even told you that before you went on your weekend away.”
Olani knew he had a point, a reason to be hurt.
Everything he’d said was true. If the roles were reversed and he’d done what she had, she wouldn’t have taken it nearly as gracefully as he did.
She wasn’t even sure she would have sat there as long as he had or if she would have even allowed him to explain.
When creating the site, she’d only been looking to fix herself up with someone who was looking for the same things she was.
She hadn’t considered those she had nothing in common with, but Elion had been correct.
While several likely signed up for some sort of hookup, some had genuinely been looking for what she was, and because she didn’t think they had anything in common, she’d left them floating in the wind.
She hadn’t even thought about replying to let them know she could not find them a compatible person.
She knew that often people got left high and dry on dating sites, but even then, that didn’t make it right. Olani knew it was unrealistic to think that she could have responded to all the surveys that came in. Not unless she sent out some sort of email blast.
There was another part of her that didn’t feel guilty.
So what? She’d gathered a pool of men she could choose from.
Was that not the premise of every dating site?
To leaf through all the options and choose the one you liked the best. But then, she supposed it went both ways on other sites.
The women and the men had their pick of the lot. That wasn’t the case with hers.
She hadn’t thought her site to be misleading, but she’d gone back and read the initial ad that she’d run and saw how it was obtuse in its meaning.
It asked for men to fill out their applications but stated that it was for singles looking to settle down with the same goals.
Yes, that sounded like there would be hundreds of men and women.
“You know where he lives, right? Why not just pop up and talk to him?” Xola asked, taking a sip of her tea.
“I will not do that. He’s made it very clear by his avoidance of my texts and calls that he doesn’t want to talk to me, and I’m going to respect that.”
Olani had done her part; she’d reached out and was ignored. She would not continue to do so, and she damn sure was not about to show up unannounced at his front door.
“Then are you going to look through more of the surveys and see if there’s someone else you’re compatible with?”
She looked at her cousin, who was eyeing her over the rim of her teacup. “No. That site was clearly a bad idea.”
“I disagree. You met someone you hit it off with and enjoyed being with. The site wasn’t a bad idea.
The way you went about telling him, or well, not telling him in the beginning, was.
I’m sure there are hundreds of women who would be interested in joining if you opened it up to them.
I was thinking about it myself a few weeks ago. ”
“You were?” she questioned, surprised.
“I was. Your relationship with Elion inspired me to want to try it.”
Olani scoffed. “Yeah, well, we see how that ended.”
“We also know why it ended that way, but I’m serious. You should think about opening it up for the masses. You can charge a signup fee like the other sites, and I’m sure you’d be able to find someone to, I don’t know, write a program to auto-match for compatibility.”
She leaned against the arm of the couch as she took in Xola’s words. She was sure she could do all of that, but the question was, did she want to? She felt bitter when it came to the site, when in reality, she should have felt bitter toward herself.
Although her cousin had a point, there were other people out there who were looking for what she had been. Hell, if there weren’t, then shows like Married at First Sight wouldn’t exist. But it seemed like a lot of work, and she wasn’t sure she had the energy to take it on.
“Doesn’t he have an art show coming up soon?”
“He does,” Olani responded, and she knew her cousin whiplashing between topics was on purpose. Something Xola did to make it seem like they weren’t staying on one unpleasant subject for too long when they really were.
“Do you know where it is? We…could go. The two of you could talk.”
She shook her head. “I do know where it’s being held, but we aren’t going. I will not crash his exhibit just to get him to talk to me. He doesn’t want to. I’m not going to force him.”
“He invited you before all of this went down, so it wouldn’t be crashing.”
“No, Xo.”
Her cousin sighed. “Fine, but sometimes Lani, you have to fight for what you want.”
“Not when what you want doesn’t want you,” she mumbled, leaning her head against the back of the couch and closing her eyes.
Xola didn’t respond, and for that, Olani was grateful. She just wanted to let the situation go, didn’t want to think about it anymore. The relationship had fallen apart. It wasn’t as if none of her others hadn’t done the same. This one hit her differently; felt worse.
“Y ou should stop moping around and just call her,” Clara stated.
Elion cut his eyes at his niece. “I’m not moping.”
“You are, and you have been all week.”
He didn’t respond, because justifying her with an answer would make Clara think she was right, and she wasn’t.
He hadn’t been moping; he’d been thinking, replaying.
Replaying dates and conversations. Replaying the week they’d spent together.
Thinking that while he had every right to be hurt by the situation, he might have overreacted.
“Look, I’m not sure what happened, but is it really something the two of you can’t work through? You like her. That much is obvious, and she’s good for you because she had you focusing on something other than work. You were taking days off and having fun.”
Elion hadn’t told Clara about what happened between him and Olani, but it hadn’t taken her long to figure out they were no longer seeing one another.
She’d asked him a couple of days after their argument when he would see Olani again and if he had decided what to do about the site's end goal. He hadn’t answered her, and it seemed that was answer enough for his niece.
Olani had called and texted him, and it’d taken everything in him to not answer the phone, to not text her back.
Maybe he was holding onto his hurt, or maybe he was trying to distance himself and make the inevitable breakup easier because he was unsure if she’d want to be with him after their last conversation.
He wasn’t sure which one, but what he was sure of was that he didn’t want to sit around and be lectured by his niece.
So, he sent a text to Shaw asking if he was at home and if he could stop by.
When he got the okay, Elion grabbed his keys, told Clara he would be back in a few hours, and headed out of the house. He took the almost hour drive to Shaw’s house, listening to soft jazz. Once he pulled up behind Shaw’s vehicle, he knocked on the front door.
“It’s open. I’m in the basement,” Shaw stated through the speaker at the front door, and he stepped inside. He locked the door behind him and went to the finished basement, which Shaw designed as his man cave.
“Hey,” Shaw greeted, turning in the recliner he sat in to look at him. “You look like you need a drink.”
“Hey,” Elion responded as his friend stood.
He wasn’t sure how Shaw knew he needed a drink.
To his knowledge, he didn’t look any different than he always did.
However, they’d known each other for a decade, and it’d become second nature for them to pick up on things going on with the other.
He sat on the couch while Shaw made them both a drink.
“Thanks,” he stated, taking the offered glass a couple of minutes later.
“You want to talk about it?”
Elion took a drink. “Talk about what?” He was playing dumb; sometimes, it helped in getting Shaw to drop something. This was not one of those times.
“Your breakup, separation. Whatever you want to call it.” Elion raised a brow at him. “You called asking if you could use the vineyard again for a private date and then called and canceled it. You don’t cancel things. You reschedule, but you don’t cancel. So?”
He took another drink to think for a moment. Did he want to tell Shaw? What could it really hurt? Maybe having a second opinion would help, especially since a small part of him thought he might have overreacted. He took a deep breath before telling Shaw what happened.
“I can see why you’d be upset, but you ignored the obvious,” Shaw stated after Elion finished telling him how he met Olani, to begin with, and giving him the details of their conversation.
“Which was?”
“She chose you. There were probably dozens of other men she could have dated, and she chose you. It isn’t unlike a normal dating app. Hell, you could say she swiped right on you.”
Elion supposed he could have taken that into account, but he’d been so focused on the lie that built their relationship, that he hadn’t even thought about it. Now that Shaw brought it up, he realized he should have looked at it that way, but he hadn’t stopped to do so with his judgment clouded.
“She created something that would help in what she was looking for. You can’t be too upset with her about that, and I get that you're hurt, especially if you’d fallen in—”
“Don’t say it,” Elion cut him off, and Shaw raised his hand in surrender.
Silence lapsed between them for a few moments, and Elion drank down the rest of the brown liquid in his glass.
“It’s brilliant if you think about it. Creating a site to find a spouse. If I were looking for one at the moment, that would be something I joined instead of going through a drawn-out dating experience that probably wouldn’t lead anywhere.”
He raised a brow at him. “You’d join a site where marriage was the end goal? You? The perpetual bachelor?”
Shaw rolled his eyes. “I said if I was looking, and I date. It’s just always casual.”
“Sure,” he responded in disbelief. Elion was sure he dated more than Shaw, and that was saying something.
“I would ask you what you’re going to do, but I think we both already know. If I had to bet, I’d say you knew what you were going to do when you came over here.”
Maybe his friend was right. Maybe he had, or maybe he hadn’t decided at all. Maybe it was best to let the situation lay as it was, or maybe he was just lying to himself.
“Shaw, can I—”
“Saturday night at eight. It’s all yours,” Shaw interjected, and Elion made a mental note to do something nice for his friend.