No Weddings (24 page)

The whirring died down. “Do you want something to drink?”

I was parched. “Yes. Whatever you’re having.”

Silence. “Are you sure? I have coffee. Pellegrino.”

My mind raced through what else she could be making for herself. Tea? The last time I checked, tea didn’t involve whirring. “I’m sure. Make it two.”

A moment later, Hannah emerged with two giant coffee mugs. One she clutched through a handle, the other she balanced on her palm as she walked over to me. I grabbed the second one as she held it out. Then she backed up and took a seat on the couch across the room, curling her flannelled legs beneath her.

At a whiff of the contents, I looked down, furrowing my brow. I lifted the cup, taking a deeper inhale, examining the dark green mass with tiny bubbles sitting on top. “What is this?”

“A smoothie.”

Every smoothie I’d ever seen was pink. Or orange. Not this putrid green color. I wrinkled my nose. “Looks like pond scum.”

“How do you know it isn’t pond scum?”

I glanced up. Her face was dead serious. She held a mug the size of mine, but I hadn’t looked inside hers. “You wouldn’t poison me to get rid of me, would you?”

She slowly shook her head.

“You’ve got the same thing in your mug?”

Her eyes gleamed. Challenge was there. “Yep.”

“Do I want to know what’s in this?”

The corners of her lips twitched. “Nope.”

I nodded, taking a deep breath. When she made no move to lift her mug, I raised mine, waiting. In slow motion, she raised hers, watching me with a wary gaze, eyes narrowed.

On a steadying breath, I toasted the only thing that came to mind. Us. Now. “To friends.”

She raised her mug in toast, then took a sip.

I lifted my mug to my lips, taking a hit of the hideous smelling smoothie like a strapping Russian would take a shot of vodka. Walk in the park.

Lumpy fluid dissolved into a gritty mess as it filled my mouth. I felt like I’d swallowed a compost heap. I forced down the first swallow. I hoped to God it was like hard liquor, which got easier the more you drank, because I wasn’t moving from this chair in her living room.

“Okay, tell me what’s in it.” Maybe knowing would make it easier to swallow.

She’d been downing the thing and came up for air at my question. “Beets, cucumber, parsley, kale, tricolored carrots, and two apples.”

“Well, thank
fuck
for the apples.” I took another sip, fighting the urge to shudder.

Instead, I focused on the returning healthy color of her face. She looked better. No more tears, but puffiness still persisted around her eyes. Hair, normally shiny, was dulled and tangled. And still, she looked amazing.

Her eyes drifted over me. “You look like shit.”

I fought a laugh. “Thanks. It’s what happens when you party with the Irish and then get no sleep for two days.”

Her mug paused halfway to her mouth, and she cocked her head. “You didn’t sleep either?”

“No, Hannah. I worried about you. I would’ve been here with you if I could’ve been. But I didn’t want to push you before you were ready.”

Shifting her legs fully beneath her and crossing them, she lowered the mug back to her lap. “What makes you think I’m ready now?”

I took another sip of the putrid liquid, hoping something in it would fortify my nerves. I was a guy. We didn’t do feelings. But Hannah did something to me on a visceral level. Around her, I felt myself change from the inside out, transforming into the person I’d always imagined I could be.

“Because I’m ready.” Bold, I know. But I needed to warm up to the touchy-feely stuff.

Her brows arched high. “Ready for what?”

I took a deep breath, then slowly exhaled.
Suck it up, Cade. She needs the whole truth.

Finding my balls somewhere in the green smoothie, I looked up, steeling my spine, meeting her gaze. “Hannah, you have to know by now that there is more than a physical attraction between us. You do know I care about you, right?”

Unafraid, she kept hold of my gaze and nodded once.

Good. At least we were on the same page about my…feelings.

Gaining momentum, I continued. “When you left the bar that night, I was devastated for two reasons. One, you needed someone to be there for you. I needed to be that someone. Seeing you shredded apart like that wrecked me, and I wanted to be the one to help take away that pain. Maybe I didn’t know how to right then, but I sure as hell wanted to be the person to try.

“Two, I stood there on that sidewalk abandoned. The crushing wave that sucked you under dragged me down too. All the jarring memories of my nightmare flooded back in on me.”

Her hands tightened around her mug. “So it’s my fault that you relived your hurt too?”

Treading on thin ice, I shook my head, rerouting the explanation in my mind to get her to understand. “No. Nothing was your fault. I get it. I get you. We’ve both been there, even though your situation was a thousand times worse than mine. But we’ve both run before. We’ve both buried our feelings, lied to ourselves that we were actually living.”

She took another sip from her mug, gaze holding mine, listening. Her expression was cool. I understood. She’d been burned deeply and wouldn’t yield her position easily.

Nothing worthwhile in life comes without a fight
.

“I’m only explaining all of this so you understand where I’ve been since you left. I’ve relived my agonizing destruction. Then I replayed yours in my head, putting myself in your shoes, feeling your pain. I let the two situations, yours and mine, intertwine in my head because I
wanted
to feel your pain to be able to help you.”

Her face began to soften, tense muscles in her jaw relaxing.

“This morning, I knew you were ready, because I was ready. I could no longer stand to be apart from the one person who gets what I’ve been through. You get me. My patience snapped, Hannah. I needed to be here for you, and I needed you to be here for me too. It seemed asinine to continue to deal with it separately.”

She snorted, her lips twitching at the corners. “And really, are we dealing? If this is dealing, we suck at it.” An almost-smile appeared. At least I was on the right track.

I gave her a gentle smile. “Then it occurred to me that we didn’t have to suffer anymore—separate or alone. By letting their selfish actions hurt us, we give them power. I refuse to let my ex have an ounce of power over me. And I definitely don’t like Dumbfuck having any power over you.”

Amusement lit her eyes. “Don’t think I mentioned it earlier, but I like calling him Dumbfuck.”

I grinned. “Feels good, doesn’t it?”

She nodded and then regarded me for a few seconds. “We need to have a name for your ex.”

A sudden weight crushed my chest as my ex’s name burned through my mind. Fuck, I knew this wouldn’t be easy, but therapy sucked ass harder than I thought. In order to get better, I supposed we had to rip our scars wide open, let them heal. I didn’t know how we’d ever be able to move on until they were gone.

Hannah’s steady gaze disarmed me. Under her watchfulness, a protection wrapped around me that I hadn’t ever felt before with another human being.

I barely found my voice in my closed throat. “You name her.”

She tilted her head. “Why?”

A smirk tugged at my lips. “Because I christened your asshole Dumbfuck.”

The smile she’d been fighting finally lit up her face, and it was brilliant and contagious. I grinned as the two days’ worth of suffocating tension eased off my chest.

Her fingertips tapped her lips as her expression turned thoughtful. “Are you sure you’re ready for this?”

I straightened. At this point, Hannah could tell me to jump onto a sinking ship and I’d do it. I nodded.

“Well, I need to know, was she cruel?”

My eyes never left Hannah’s, but memories of the night flooded in. “After I proposed, she said ‘no.’ Then she laughed at me.”

Hannah’s brow furrowed, her eyes sparking with anger. For me. “What reason did she give you?”

“She’d said she’d only ever been with me during our time together. But that night, she told me there were others—while we were together. She didn’t want to settle down. She wanted to see the world and be with other men.”

She exhaled hard, compassion washing over her face. “She cheated on you?”

I sighed, dropping my gaze, staring at the wood grain in the flooring for a few heartbeats before looking back up at her. “Yeah.”

“So she obviously wasn’t serious about you at all. She was just having her fun with you.” Hannah scowled. “That’s such bullshit, Cade. What a selfish bitch!”

For a few seconds, we sat there in silence—her digesting the latest details of my train wreck, me feeling a little better because she was outraged by them. Wounds two years’ deep had begun to cauterize right there in Hannah’s living room.

“Selfish Bitch.”

I glanced up. Calmness descended over Hannah, like she’d gotten control over herself, over my situation. “What?”

“That’s her new name: Selfish Bitch.”

I grinned, feeling vindicated by a girl who hadn’t been there, but seemed pissed off enough to bloody her hands and do battle for me. Then I arched my brows and nodded. “Nice.”

Hannah laughed with me, and the whole room lit up. And I no longer cared about names or our exes. All that mattered was we’d each taken a step toward one another.

Her eyes drifted to the abandoned bag on the floor. “What’s that?”

I glanced over at the white plastic bag. “That is an epiphany I had, and a way we can both move on.”

Hannah stood from the couch and waited, watching me. “I’m ready.”

“See?” I winked at her, confidence building in where this was headed. “I knew you were.”

H
annah had a skeptical expression, but she came over to me anyway and removed the mug of sludge from my hand. She deposited both mugs on a small side table. Then, with a finger and thumb, she picked up the plastic bag I’d brought.

I stood there like an idiot, watching her. In the span of thirty minutes, over two crap-tasting vegetable smoothies, we’d become a team in something again. The baby step made me feel like Neil Armstrong on the moon.

“Well?” With the bag dangling at the end of her arm, she looked at me, her brows lifted.

I stepped closer and took the bag, then remained in place, inches from her. “It’s important to note we’re already properly dressed for the momentous occasion.”

She looked down. “The pajamas I put on Saturday night?”

I grinned. “And the jeans and shirt I had on Saturday night. The dress code to exorcise Dumbfuck and Selfish Bitch from our lives forever is funky grunge.”

She laughed. And the world tilted a few degrees toward right again.

Her expression grew serious. “But we get to shower after this, right?”

I arched a brow, exhaling slowly. “Is that an invitation?”

She shoved my chest, laughing harder. “No. Separate showers. Separate places.”

“Damn.” I took her hand in mine and led her toward the kitchen. “Come on, let’s do this.”

When we reached her center island, I ripped open the bag and dumped it upside down, spilling out its contents onto the marble surface.

The double-sided yellow sticky note stuck out from beneath a pile of fabric. Hannah plucked it free. “Your list?”

I nodded. “That list and all the shallow emptiness it represents, that was the old me. That piece of paper is the only physical evidence of how badly she fucked me up. You got a pan we can burn this in?”

After a slow nod with a dubious expression on her face, she bent down and pulled out a large pan with both hands. It had a metal lid with a glass insert in the center.

I tilted my head, reconsidering the idea. “It won’t ruin the pan?” The last thing I wanted to do was destroy something of value as we obliterated items that had become worthless.

“Nope. It’s a SCANPAN, fired in thirty-six-thousand-degree heat. We’re good.” She put it on the stove and lifted the lid.

I dropped the list into the center of the dark surface. “Excellent.”

She dropped the lid down, her attention shifting to what remained on the counter. “Pants?”

I nodded. “New pants I’d bought for the infamous date and wore that night, which had the pocket that held her ring in a velvet box. Don’t know why I kept them. Everything else was tossed in the trash in a fit of rage. Every letter, card, movie stub, T-shirt, her favorite pillow, our favorite movie, her favorite CD—all of it was thrown into a giant heap on February fifteenth. Weeks later, I realized I’d forgotten the pants.”

She lifted the lid off the pan again and tipped her head toward it.

I grabbed the pile of wool and dumped it on the list. The material spilled far over the edge of the large pan, making it seem woefully inadequate. “You sure we won’t set fire to the place?”

Hannah set the lid on the counter, then bent over, opening a slim cabinet door beside the stove. She pulled out a fire extinguisher and placed it beside the lid.

I snorted. “Use that often?”

“Precautions of the trade.” She crossed her arms. “What now?”

“Your turn. Do you have something from Dumbfuck to burn?”