an escalating manner and you caved.” She looks me up and down. “Knowing you as I do, I assume you thought you’d figure out a new plan and try again. This pattern repeated for some indeterminate amount of time until you finally took off in the middle of the night instead of facing it again.” Her crossed leg swings. “How am I doing so far?”
I swallow. I guess it’s not that complicated after all. “I’m not saying it’s pretty, but it’s accurate.”
“Here’s what I want to know.” She takes a deep breath and blows it out. “Am I a habit? Because I’m having a hard time believing you didn’t see the parallels.”
I want more than anything to insist she’s not, but it’s not the truth. Only the truth doesn’t tell the whole story, and I feel trapped by the confines of it. Uncertain. But all I can do is give Cat what she asked for, as unvarnished as I can make it. I pick up my pen and toy with the clicker on the end. “In a way, yes. But how I feel about you is not habit. That’s brand new.”
She swipes a hand through her hair. “I don’t know about that. It’s not like you asked me to marry you or anything.”
The hurt I see in her silver eyes kills me. “I didn’t ask Meredith to marry me. I’m not even sure what happened qualifies as an engagement.”
“Would you care to explain?”
I rub my eye sockets, which are like sandpaper, I’m so tired. “She kept telling me it made sense to get married, that it would be perfect, and I didn’t agree, but I didn’t exactly put the matter to bed either.”
“Funny, you never struck me as a going-along type of guy.”
I glance away, thinking about my long-sorted past. I see now, there’s no escaping it. No running. If I want to be free of it, the only way out is in—to lay myself bare and see what Cat does with it.
I drop the pen I’ve been toying with and look at her, this woman who’s become everything to me. “I told you my dad died when I was eighteen.”
“You did, but I’m not sure what that has to do with your engagement.”
“I’m not engaged.” I grit my teeth and attempt to calm my frustration. “Please let me explain, okay?”
“Fine.” Her foot kicks in a rapid bounce, like she’s contemplating running.
I’d best get on with it, since I don’t know how much time she’ll give me. “His death, it was so…sudden. One second he was there, and the next he was gone. I didn’t know how to process it, so I didn’t. It was four months until I graduated high school, and by the time I got my diploma, I felt like my mom was suffocating me. The day after graduation was the first time I ran from my life. I headed down to Mexico and spent a year being a beach bum. It’s there that I discovered farming—I worked one for money. Eventually I got tired of sun and surf, but by then I’d fallen in love with growing things. I went home and enrolled in college.”
She nods and says nothing, just watches me with unreadable eyes.
“On breaks, I traveled around, worked in any place that would give me a job, and avoided going home. One of those jobs is where I met Gabe.” I scrub a hand over my jaw. “As much as I loved it, and as good as I was, I always managed to screw it up. Either I was too arrogant, or aggressive, or sure I was right and my boss was wrong.”
I shrugged, hating this next part but saying it anyway, because it’s the truth. “Or I’d sleep with the wrong woman and be forced to move on. I’ll spare you the gory details, but you get the point. Then my mom started slipping, mentally. Even though I mostly avoided her, it struck me that when she was gone, I’d be completely alone. By then I was getting older, and I had no roots, no family, and a shit career because I couldn’t get my act together enough to make a go at success.”
It sounds feeble coming from my lips, but it’s the truth. I hate that it shows my weaknesses, but maybe that’s my problem. I’m always trying to outrun them instead of facing them head on. Hindsight being twenty-twenty and all, I wish I’d stopped sooner.