Silence stretched out between the two of them, filled with only crickets and frogs and the lowing of a distant cow. True to her ground rules, Starla didn’t say anything, but he felt her looking at him.
“From her hospital bed, Macy told me to get out of her life. I didn’t want to, but I listened. Shelly…she was a rebound. Simple as that. We were careless, and she got pregnant. I thought marrying her was the right thing to do, the right thing for the daughters we knew we were having. Hell, maybe it was—I don’t even know. Maybe we should’ve tried harder to make it work for them if not for us. For a while, we did. But when everything you have is built on a lie, the truth comes out eventually, whether you want it to or not.”
“The truth that you’re still in love with Macy?”
He wanted to move, to fidget, to shift his weight, to turn the blunt question aside—but Starla was watching him like…like Shelly used to whenever Macy’s name came up. “She decided I was.”
“Were you? Are you?”
“Hey, I thought you weren’t going to ask questions.”
“All right,” she said innocently, relieving him from the weight of her assessing eyes and looking up at the sky again with a little smile curving her full lips.
“Now. It’s my turn.”
“Ugh. You don’t even have to ask. You know everything you need to know about Max—”
“Brian.”
The bottle actually slipped from her fingers, and for a second, she fought to reclaim her grip on it. He drank from his own, respectfully letting her recover without staring her down the way she’d done him.
“Um, I don’t know why you’d—”
“If I didn’t know from the way you can barely say his name, your reaction right then clued me in.”
“I—just—no. I can’t go there.”
“Starla,” he said gently, “it’s okay. We’re only talking here.”
“He’s married and he has a newborn baby. Please don’t think that I would ever do anything to mess that up for him.” The horror on her face made him feel like a colossal asshole. He shouldn’t have done this to her, but now that the subject had been broached, he realized why he’d been so uneasy about it, why he’d needed to know.
“I didn’t think you would.” It was the truth, but it was more that he hadn’t wanted to think she would.
“Because I swear on every star above us, I would never do that.”
“Tell me.”
She drew a deep breath, and even here in the golden glow of his deck lighting, he could see the pink tint of her skin. He could discern the tiny tremble in her hands and imagine her heart was about to tear its way right out of her chest. Had she never been called on this before? Never shared it with anyone, keeping it all bottled up? It must eat her alive. He knew. He’d been there.
“It started as soon as I met him. But we’ve never been anything more than friends. He met Candace. He fell in love with her, and he married her, and he had a baby with her, and I have to see how happy they are almost every single day of my life. The end.”
“Ouch,” he said after a moment. It was bad enough that he’d lost Macy. If he had to see her with Ghost, day in and day out, he didn’t know how he would handle it.
“And it’s okay, you know? I mean, it’s not, it hurts like hell, but I’m not such a sleazeball that I’m not happy for him. He’s found everything he wants, and that’s, like, miraculous. He deserves it.”
“Still trying to convince yourself?”
She chuckled sadly. “Yeah, maybe.”
“All right, enough of that. I’m sorry it’s a situation that causes you pain.”
“Thanks.” Her relief obvious, she took a long pull on her beer.
“And this other guy, the one I rescued your purse from?”
“He’s nothing. Nothing. Just another terrible mistake on my part.”
“Glad to hear it.” Jared still felt the slow burn of anger creep through his veins. “How long had you been seeing him? Surely that wasn’t a first date or anything.”
“No, a few weeks. It was pretty casual, the occasional hookup. But it’s done.”
If the dude was that bad on a casual hookup, Jared would hate to see how he treated someone he was in a relationship with.
“I’m pretty much swearing off men for a while,” she announced.
Something akin to disappointment flashed through him. That didn’t make any sense, though, did it? Regardless, it was a shame that someone like her, who obviously had so much to offer, kept having such horrible experiences that she was ready to give up altogether. Even if he had done something similar himself, though for different reasons. “Is that necessary? I’m sorry that you’ve had a rough time of it, but surely you know there are good guys out there. Hell, I like to think I’m not that bad myself, but I guess my record might say otherwise too.”
“Have you dated much since your divorce?”
“I went out with someone a few times. It didn’t go anywhere.”
“What are you waiting for, then?”
Someone who makes me feel like Macy always did. He shrugged. “The right person, I guess. I don’t know.”