Dating Dr. Dreamy - Lili Valente Page 0,35
side of my empty plate.
“What’s wrong?” she asks after a moment.
“Nothing.” I fiddle with my fork.
“Doesn’t look like nothing. You’ve got your curtains face on.”
When I need to, I’m good at keeping my emotions concealed, another skill learned when I was young and had to be careful not to make any of the volatile grown-ups in my house angry. But most people don’t realize that I’ve gone underground. Only Lark has ever noticed when the curtains are drawn.
I shrug. “It’s not a big deal, I just…” I put the fork down and look her straight in the eye. There are people I don’t mind hiding from, but Lark isn’t one of them. “You’re not an idiot, and I don’t want you to feel like one.”
“I don’t.” Her brows furrow in confusion for a moment before she realizes what I’m talking about and her forehead smoothes. “Oh, you mean what I said before. It doesn’t matter, Mason. Really. Let the gossips and Aria’s friends and my friends think whatever they want. I don’t care. I know I’m making the decision that’s right for me.”
“You do?”
“I do. You’re right for me,” she says in a soft voice. “And I would rather live through a hundred embarrassing moments than live without you in my life.”
“I love you,” I say, not caring if this isn’t the perfect, romantic moment. It’s the truth, my most important truth, and I want her to know it.
“I…I love you, too,” she says, with a nervous rush of breath.
“Scary?”
She nods. “Yeah, but good. And true. No sense pretending that it’s not.”
“I don’t want you to pretend.” I find a path between the waffle plate and grits bowl and take her hand again. “And as soon as I can afford it, I’m getting you a blinding engagement ring.”
Lark’s eyes go wide.
“Too soon?” I ask, arching a brow. “Too scary?”
“Maybe. A little,” she says, pulling her hand gently away. “Let’s take things slow for a while, okay? Just being with you, being happy together…it’s enough to process right now. You know?”
I bite my lip. “Sorry.”
“You don’t have to be sorry,”
“No, I do. I don’t want to mess this up, and—”
“Relax, Mason,” she says with a laugh. “There’s only one way you can mess this up, and we both know you’re not going to do anything like that again. Now hurry up and grab some eggs before they get cold.”
“Nothing worse than cold eggs.”
“Unless it’s cold grits. Better grab some of them, too, before they turn to concrete.”
And just like that, our perfect morning is perfect once more.
Because we’re Lark and Mason again, and Lark and Mason don’t let the little things get us down.
Never have, and never will.
We tuck into our breakfast with our usual abandon, then take a long walk around downtown, window-shopping and discussing how we want to spend the day. We decide to take the boat out again and head over to the state park with the island in the middle of the lake. It has hiking trails and picnic tables, and we can spend the entire afternoon outside enjoying the perfect weather.
We stop inside the bookstore to pick out something for Lark to read, and then the sub shop to grab sandwiches, before heading over to my friend, Nash’s, house to fetch the boat.
On the way to Nash’s, a plan begins to take shape in my conflict-avoidant brain…
What better way to keep Aria off my case, than to give her someone more interesting than me to engage with?
“Do you think it would be okay to invite Nash over for dinner tonight?” I ask Lark. “He seemed lonely the other day when I dropped off the boat. His girlfriend moved out not too long ago.”
“Nash…” She chews on her lip for a minute. “Why is that name familiar? He isn’t one of your old basketball friends, is he?”
“No, Nash and I worked construction together in the summers. I might have mentioned him.”
“Maybe,” she says in a noncommittal tone.
“He left Bliss River to go to the police academy in Atlanta and worked in a precinct there for a while, but he’s been back for a few years.” I turn onto Nash’s street, adding casually, “I think he’s around Aria’s age. Maybe a year or two older?”
She hums beneath her breath. “Ahhh. I see.”
“See what?”
“Don’t play innocent,” she says, with a laugh. “I think it’s a great idea. Something to distract her from trying to prove our second chance is made of fail.”
“She thinks our second chance is made of