light than the truth.
When I came up blank, I turned toward Beau ready to call upon my media training and dodge the question since I couldn’t spin it. But as soon as I looked into his eyes and opened my mouth, the truth, once again, came out.
“I mean, he liked me. He wanted to be with me. So…” I shrugged.
His eyes narrowed slightly as his head tilted to the side. “A lot of guys want to be with you.”
I shook my head. “I’m not talking about wanting to hook up with me. Yes, a lot of guys want to sleep with me. But I’m talking about a relationship. That’s what Drake wanted. From our first conversation, he was all in. He said he wanted to build a life with someone and didn’t want to play games. It was refreshing. In the back of my head, I’ve always wondered if he’d done it to secure his job.” As soon as I voiced the confession out loud, I wanted to take it back.
The heaviness of my patheticness hung between us in the silence. Being around Beau was dangerous. I couldn’t hide from him. All of my media training went out the window. It felt like the time Alexis was dosed with truth serum and had been unable to lie. Around Beau I was honest, real, and just…me. It was terrifying.
“Any man would be crazy lucky to be with you. And if your ex didn’t see that or appreciate it or if he was with you for any other fucking reason, he’s not just an asshole, he’s a dumb asshole.”
“Well, you won’t get an argument from me on that one.” Hearing the protectiveness in Beau’s tone, made me want things I had no business wanting so I changed the subject. “What about you? What did you see in Rachel? I mean besides her looking like a Barbie come to life.”
Beau lowered his head and looked down at the water below us. “Rachel and I got together when we were young.”
“How young?” I asked trying not to sound as eager as I felt for him to open up to me like I had with him.
“Seventh grade and then we were together all through high school and college. I dropped out our senior year to pursue music. We were already engaged. I thought we’d been together so long that we had enough of a foundation to handle me touring. I was wrong.”
“I’m sorry.” I wasn’t sure what compelled me to apologize. From what Gam had said, his heartbreak was a decade old and Rachel “wasn’t a blue-ribbon pig”. But the look in his eyes made me feel like whether or not she would have placed at the State Fair or how long ago they’d been together didn’t matter. There was still hurt there. He wasn’t over his ex, which was just one more reason not to be thinking the things I was around him.
As upset as I was about Drake cheating on me, none of it had to do with him. The person that he was. It was more about the betrayal and the drama that it was going to cause in my life.
“When we met, she was the prettiest, smartest, funniest, sweetest, coolest girl I’d ever known. She played basketball, baseball, and video games. She liked horror movies more than romantic comedies. She read comic books and loved Mystery Science Theater. She was like having a hot best friend. I knew she was the one just like my dad had when he met my mom. I knew we’d get married, have kids. Live happily ever after. And maybe if we would’ve stayed those twelve-year-old kids, we would have.
“In college, everything changed. She was distant and started partying a lot. Instead of spending time together hanging out, she wanted to be with her sorority sisters. I could feel her slipping away, so the summer before junior year I proposed. It seemed like it worked, we felt like us again for a while. But then when I started touring, I felt the same thing I had freshman and sophomore year. We were fighting a lot. She was jealous about the attention I got. So, we set a wedding date. I thought if we just got married everything would be fine. And the rest is history. I think I fell in love with the girl, but I never really knew the woman.” He shook his head and wiped moisture that had gathered in his lower lids.
Seeing his