standing behind me, keys in hand like he’s just got home. He’d either had as good a month as me or just a really shitty day. Neither of which made me feel good about how things had gone down.
“Hi,” I said.
He nodded. “Hi.”
“You okay?”
“I’m not the one pacing and talking to themselves outside my house.”
I nodded. “True. Uh…can we talk? Please?”
He sighed and headed for his front door. “I don’t think there’s anything to talk about, Leah.”
“There is, though. I have to explain the whole Edward thing–”
“Not your type after all?” he shot back at me.
I had to remind myself he thought I’d gone on a date with someone else just after we’d decided not to end it. I could see why he was hurting – at least I hoped it was hurt, as it were – and I tried to force myself to be patient until I got everything out. It was like dealing with the class idiot who constantly played up even though you knew they were capable of so much more.
“He was never my type, Patrick.”
“Yeah,” he huffed humourlessly. “I often go to dinner with people not my type.”
“It was a favour to my mother!” I burst out.
He turned. “What?”
I took a breath. “I told her that, whatever we were doing, it wasn’t ending any time soon. I wanted her approval. I wanted her to accept you were staying in my life. But she had other plans.”
His eyes narrowed. “What other plans?”
“She told me that she would accept you fully, making no mention of any other suitor ever again, if I went to one dinner with Edward and proved to her all bridges were burned.”
Patrick was nodding. “And then she told me all about it.”
“Yes! Yes.” I laughed in relief. “She set the whole thing up. This whole time I thought she’d kind of resigned herself to watching the whole thing play out and crash and burn, but she was just biding her time to get us into the perfect position.”
He unlocked the door and pushed it open. There was still suspicion on his face, but I was hopeful he was willing to talk it through. He took a deep breath and looked at me.
“Come in and we’ll talk?”
I nodded and surged forward embarrassingly quickly.
He led me in and I closed and locked the door out of habit. He walked straight to the kitchen as he undid his tie and pulled a beer out of the fridge.
“Okay,” he said as passed me one. “Talk.”
He looked closed and guarded, but not entirely shut off.
I nodded. “I should have told you her plan. I should have told you about meeting Edward for dinner. I guess I honestly thought it was so insignificant that I’d just go, get it over with, then we’d live happily ever after.”
A small quirk of his lips broke through. “Happily ever after?”
Now was not the time to slam walls into place and freak out that I wasn’t ready for this. “Yeah. I kinda hoped you were my forever, Patrick. I mean, at least that you had the potential, and I wanted to see where that went. I wanted to see it through without the burden of a lie, even something as simple as a hurried engagement that we could probably have feasibly drawn out for as long as we wanted. But it still would have hung over us, and I didn’t want it casting a shadow.”
He took a slow sip of his beer as he threw his tie onto the bench. He then leant both hands on it and levelled an even look at me. “If I understand you right, you’ve come here to let me know I was a fucking pigheaded wanker who jumped to conclusions, didn’t let you finish a sentence, said some awful shit I didn’t mean, and subsequently wasted a whole month we could have had together?”
I tried not to smile, but his words gave me a hope I hadn’t felt in what felt like a very long time. I nodded. “Something like that…”
He gave a single nod as his tongue ran over his teeth. “Right. Well, that certainly sounds like me.”
“So…” I started and he brought his eyes back to me. “I wasn’t a job, then?”
He huffed roughly. “No, Leah. Never. You started out as a bit of fun and became the person I could see myself spending my life with. I freaked out when I heard about Edward and let my ego get in the way, and I’m sorry.”
“Me,