They had clicked from the start—she liked to laugh, liked weird things like off-the-wall indie films, just like him, and Thai food, just like him. She claimed to have morphed from a gangly geek into what she was, just like him. Unfortunately, he’d blown it all in a pretty spectacular way. The night he had walked away from her for what he thought would be forever sat like an ugly scar across his memory. He dreamed of it—in his dream he was always trying to take it back, but he could never catch her to tell her.
At the time, he thought he was doing her a favor. She didn’t really know who he was or what he did—their whole relationship had been predicated on a lie. Hell, what he thought he knew of himself hadn’t even been the truth. But in hindsight, after five more years of trotting the globe and playing with its women, he had come to another conclusion—Leah Kleinschmidt was the one woman who had the power to push him over the finish line.
He just never thought he’d see her again, and it never occurred to him that he would see her in the flesh, in L.A. On one of his sets.
Now, the Extreme Bachelor had absolutely no idea how to proceed.
His uncertainty added to an already difficult day that got only more difficult after lunch, when they took the ladies out on a ropes course, a series of hurdles designed to test their endurance and their teamwork.
He lost sight of Leah completely during the afternoon, as he had one woman or another in his face constantly. One got rope burn when she fell and did not let go of the rope. One caught her hair on a swing and shrieked so loudly you would have thought she’d been impaled. During a break, several of them camped out around a child’s swing set—part of their urban obstacle course—and howled with laughter about something, and when Jack appeared to tell them break was over, they doubled over with more boisterous laughter, leaving Jack red-faced without even knowing why.
And moreover, Jack was right—the women never seemed to stop talking. The longer the day went, the louder it seemed to get. When Michael settled a dispute over a ruined shoe—“These are Pumas!” one blonde shrieked at a brunette who rolled her eyes—he’d had enough. Fortunately, the rest of T.A. felt the same way. Eli, who remained amazingly calm throughout the day—so calm that Michael was beginning to wonder if he might have eaten a couple of elephant tranquilizers over the lunch break to help him along—called the girls together, gave them a little pep talk, and sent them home until the next morning.
The women immediately broke into chatter and showed no signs of going anywhere. It was, apparently, social hour.
“I think we need to talk about that second battle scene,” Cooper was saying, pulling out a sheet of paper from his back pocket. “After what I saw on the ropes course, there is no way in hell we are going to get some of these girls to jump off a rooftop without killing themselves, and we can’t afford to hire enough stunt women to do it for them.”
Michael watched Leah emerge from the little locker room, her backpack over her shoulder. She waved goodbye to her friends, the same wiggly fingers she used to wave at him at the subway, and walked toward the parking lot.
Okay, this was it. He couldn’t help himself, he couldn’t watch her walk away and not say something. He slipped away from the very serious discussion of rooftop jumping and followed her.
Leah was walking fast. He jogged to catch up with her. “Leah!” he called out when it looked like she might actually beat him to her car. “Wait up!”
She paused; he saw a slight but discernible dip in her shoulders. But when she turned around, she was smiling. An odd smile, but a smile nonetheless. “Oh! Hey, Michael . . . ah, listen, I really have to run,” she said, jerking her thumb toward an old Ford Escort. “I’d love to chat, but I’ve gotta be someplace, and you know, the traffic—”
“I just want a minute, Leah. One minute.”
She looked at her car, then at him. Her eyes were so blue—he’d forgotten how blue. “Well . . .” She glanced at her watch.
“Listen . . . that was really weird today,” he said, wasting no time. “I was blown away by it.”
“Oh,” she said, nodding, and then her brows dipped a little. “By what?”
She had to ask? “By seeing you. I was hoping we could talk a minute.”
“Ah. Well. Here’s the thing,” she said, squeezing the bridge of her nose for a minute. “I’ve really got to be someplace, and it’s just . . . our . . . you know . . . stuff . . . I mean, it’s old news, isn’t it?” She dropped her hand and looked at him, and the expression on her face made his gut wrench. “No offense, but it was really a long time ago.”
“Five years,” he said instantly. “Look, I don’t want to make you uncomfortable, Leah. I just want to . . .” Dammit, what did he really want? “I just want to talk,” he said decisively. “Just talk. If not today, maybe tomorrow?”
“Tomorrow?” Honestly, she seemed to be debating if she would even be back at work tomorrow. “Yeah, maybe. Okay. So I’ll see you tomorrow—”
“Leah, listen,” he said, before she could run off. “I’ve thought a lot about you over the years. A lot.”