Myriad thoughts raged through his head as he’d sat next to her, thoughts he couldn’t quite grasp or put into words. All the things he’d wished he’d said the night he’d ended it, all the things he’d wanted to say over the last five years, how incredible it was to see her now. He tried to make conversation, tried to at least say hello without sounding like an idiot, but frankly, when Leah had half-trotted, half-limped away, Michael had felt relieved.
He wasn’t ready for this at all. He needed time to get his thoughts together, to figure out how to proceed, but it was proving impossible with her in the same room. Hell, the same state. He couldn’t keep his eyes off of her, and he watched her at the other end of the gym talking to some women, her hands flying. He wondered where she’d been, what she’d done . . . who she was with now.
His torch for her had never died. The very moment he’d seen her and knew it was Leah, he’d felt a rush of all the loose and fuzzy things that he used to feel for her bubbling up inside him again. It was weird and intense—a feeling he’d only experienced a couple of times in his life. At thirteen, he’d felt it for Candace Flores, who was two years older than him and never noticed Michael at all—except to call him a major geek one day in front of several other kids and then laugh.
After that spectacular put-down, Michael hadn’t felt this way again until he’d met Leah at a happy hour one night in New York. There was something about her that felt familiar from the very start, something that had caused the first ribbon of desire to curl around his heart with no more than a hello from her.
And here he was five years later, having been the one to have ruined everything, feeling it all over again.
She looked so good. The image Michael had carried around all these years hadn’t done her justice. She’d let her hair grow out—it was below shoulder-length now, but still the color of corn silk. Her eyes were large and crystalline blue, and her mouth still made the man in him squirm. She’d always had that effect on him—when he saw her, the guy instinct in him wanted to be with her, in every way possible.
She was wearing shorts and a tight T-shirt that outlined her near-perfect shape. Her legs were long and athletic, and she looked healthy, not anorexic like so many others in the gym. She looked absolutely fantastic.
Get it together, man, he chastised himself. He couldn’t stand at one end of the gym ogling her all day. They had a lot of work to do, and this wasn’t exactly the time or place to pick up a relationship he’d broken in half with a single blow to the gut five years ago.
He made himself turn away, made himself work, and somehow he managed to get through the morning session. He took girls aside and tried to teach them how to play team dodgeball by complimenting them and getting them to lighten up a little, to laugh. His efforts, as usual, made him more than one friend among his group.
He even chatted with one of the women he’d once dated, Jill, and had her laughing and looking a little too hopeful at the end of their chat.
He did not, however, look at Leah if he could help it. He just couldn’t. If he did, he would want to talk to her, and if he talked to her, he’d want to explain everything, and then maybe even beg her forgiveness, or do something equally wimpish. Besides, he had an instinct that the time for explaining himself had reached its statute of limitations.
But when they broke for lunch, he saw her walking away from him in the company of the three women he’d seen her with all morning.
As he watched them disappear outside, he noticed Jack near the door wearing a rather grand shit-eating grin as Michael came striding forward. “I told you I had a surprise,” Jack said with a wink.
“Yeah, that was a surprise, all right,” Michael said with a sigh of resignation. “So how’d you do it?”
Jack grinned. “Remember New York?”
Dear God, how could he have forgotten it? It had been his first glimpse of Leah in five years. “What I remember is that your brother couldn’t hit the broad side of a barn.”
“And I remember you were awfully interested in a certain laxative commercial. Imagine how surprised and delighted I was when you won the Costa Rica gig and left me to sit through three days of casting, only to find a gem of a laxative girl among so many? It was the cherry on top of my sundae.”
What were the odds? Seriously, what were the odds?
Jack laughed and gave him a good ol’ boy clap on the back. “So . . . I was right. She does mean something to you.”
“No, no, it’s not that,” Michael said, and instantly hated himself for trivializing her.
But Jack had known him for a long time and was on to him. “I know, I know, it’s never that,” he joked. “Not for the Extreme Bachelor. Not for our man about town. But Mikey, whoever she is, she’s hot.”
Michael smiled halfheartedly. “I know.”
“That’s why I added a couple of your other old flames to the list. You know, to make things interesting. I just want you to have fun,” he said with a laugh.
“Why, thanks, Jack. I believe I owe you. And don’t forget that—I owe you, man.”
“My pleasure,” Jack said.