I jump down from the pull-up bar and put my hands on my knees as I try to catch my breath. I’ve been trying to work off this anxious energy for the last hour and a half. Trying to remind myself that if I give Ellie space, she’ll come to me. Trying to remind myself I had no right to touch her to begin with.
She’s having Colton’s baby.
“Levi?”
I straighten at the sound of her voice. She’s all I’ve been thinking about, and now she’s in front of me. She’s still in work clothes—today in a black wrap dress that clings to her curves and finishes mid-thigh, showing off her long, toned legs, and a pair of red fuck-me heels I’m dying to obey.
“Hey,” I say, trying to smile, trying not to immediately ask why she’s been ignoring my calls for the last four days. “Here to work out?”
She shakes her head. “I was hoping we could talk for a minute?”
I arch a brow. “Here? You wanna go get dinner or something instead?”
Another head shake. “No. I think it’s better if we . . .” She looks around the gym, and her message is clear. Better if we stay here. Better if we aren’t seen together in any context that might be considered romantic.
I grab my towel and wipe the sweat from the back of my neck, ignoring the dread tying knots in my stomach. “Okay. What’s up?”
She clears her throat and cuts her eyes away from me. “Colton didn’t sleep with Molly. They’re friends, nothing more. They really were just talking.”
I actually laugh. That sounds like a lie—the kind of ridiculous lie the asshole in the movie would feed his girlfriend. The kind Ellie would get pissed at the character for buying. “Really? That’s convenient.”
She shrugs. “I believe him.” She holds out a hand, and I see her ring. A diamond solitaire glitters in the overhead light and mocks me. My heart plummets right through my stomach and into the floor. Then I’m falling too. My heart. My soul. My fucking everything just sinks into nothing. “He and I are going to get married. I’m going to help him clean up, and we’re going to make this work.”
I swallow hard. “It’s not your job to help him get clean.”
“Isn’t it? Isn’t it our job to help the people we love? To lift them up when they can’t lift themselves?”
“This is what you want? To marry him? Despite everything he’s put you through the last couple of months? Despite the way he makes you feel? You’re going to tie yourself to a man who’s let drugs ruin your life?”
“He’s your best friend. How can you talk about him like that?”
“Because I’m sick of his bullshit. I’m sick of his lies and his omissions.” Because I care about you more than I’ll ever care about him. “Just think this through, Ellie. Please.”
She wraps her arms around herself. “I have. This is what I need to do.”
I want to say, What about us? I want to ask her if she felt nothing when we were together. Instead, I swallow back my questions, grab my water bottle, and take a long drink.
“It’s for the best,” she says. “You’ll understand that eventually. And you and I? We were just . . .”
I pull the bottle from my lips, meet her eyes, and wait for her to finish that sentence. “Just what?”
“Lonely,” she whispers. “We were just lonely.”
I grip the bottle so tightly that the plastic crackles under my fingers. I make myself exhale slowly, releasing some of my aggravation. “I wasn’t just lonely. With you, I was anything but lonely. I’m sorry it wasn’t the same for you.”
She looks at the floor. “Don’t make this harder than it needs to be, and please don’t tell Colton about our . . . our mistake.”
“But don’t you get it? This shouldn’t be hard at all. When you marry someone, there shouldn’t be anything hard about your decision.”
“Maybe for some people.” She shrugs. “But that’s not the hand I was dealt. I have to try to make this work. For the baby, for me, and for Colton.”
“I love you.” The words are whispered but feel like they’re being ripped from my chest.
She gives me a sad smile. “I consider myself luckier than you can imagine to have felt that love.” She swallows hard. “But right now, I have to put more important things first.”
“What’s more important than love?”
“Life,” she says. Turning, she walks away.
“Ellie!”
She shakes her head but doesn’t look back. Doesn’t say another word.
I watch her push through the glass door and onto the sidewalk. She walks away from me. Away from us. Away from everything I believed we could be.
I hurl my water at the mirrored wall, and the bottle cracks, water spilling all over the floor and streaking down the glass.
Ellie
When I get home, Colton’s truck is in the driveway. That old spark of joy I used to feel at his proximity flickers and is immediately snuffed out by the ache I feel every time I think about Levi’s face.
“I love you.”
As if it should be that simple. As if love is something we feel for one person at a time, and not a complex collection of emotion we experience in infinite different ways for countless people at once.
When I walk in the front door, Colton’s waiting for me with a big grin on his face, and a rich, savory aroma drifts out from the kitchen.
“It smells amazing,” I say. “What is that?”
He flashes a glance over his shoulder toward the kitchen before looking back at me. “It’s a roast. You haven’t eaten yet, have you?”
“Not since breakfast.” And that was just a dry piece of toast. I don’t remember the last time Colton cooked for me. Maybe he did so early on when he was still trying to win me over. He’s not a bad cook. He just tends to prefer to use his time for other things.
“Close your eyes,” he says.
“Why?”
He takes my face in his hands and presses a kiss to my mouth. “Because I have a surprise. Because you’re my fiancée, and I love you.”
I close my eyes and let him lead me down the hall toward our bedroom, but when we turn, it’s not to the right into the bedroom. It’s to the left into the small room that’s been acting as my closet.
“Okay, you can look now.”
When I open my eyes, I almost don’t recognize the space. My clothes have all been cleared out, and the rack I had in the middle of the room is gone. The walls are covered in stick-on decals of elephants, and giraffes, and a smiling yellow sun.
A crib sits in the corner, already made up with bedding that matches the decals on the walls. The dresser matches the crib and has a changing pad on top, and the room’s tiny closet that was once filled with my shoes is open and now has a dozen little outfits hanging in it.
“Oh, Colton.” I press my hand to my chest. Until this moment, I don’t know if I believed he really wanted to do this. I don’t know if I believed he wouldn’t run away at the first opportunity. Marriage scared him. Two months ago, he didn’t even want to plan a wedding with me, and now here he is, decorating our baby’s nursery while I’m at work.
“You like it?” He looks so nervous, and I know my answer means everything to him.
“It’s beautiful.”
“Ava helped me. She said people will get you tons of newborn outfits at the shower, so she had me get outfits for when she’s bigger—just a few so we’d have them on hand so when life gets busy, we don’t have to choose between a naked kid and a midnight run to the store.”
“I can’t believe you did this.” My eyes burn, then laughter bubbles out of me. “Where on Earth did you put all my clothes?”
He grimaces. “About that . . .”
Turning, I look into our bedroom across the hall. The rack from this room has been rolled into it, nearly blocking the door and making it so I can only barely see the boxes of shoes piled on the bed.
“We’ll figure it out,” he says. “Maybe we can do an addition or convert the garage or something.” He slides his arm around my waist and presses a kiss to the top of my head. “Sorry I stole your closet.”