Searching For His Omega - Harper B. Cole Page 0,35

didn’t know.” I dished up the pasta onto the plates he handed me and brought them around to the table as I told him the story, leaving out the part about my contract. I didn’t want to give him false promises if nothing could be worked out.

“This is delicious.”

“Thanks.”

That was pretty much our entire conversation as we ate our lunch slash dinner. There was nothing to say. I was leaving.

It hurt so much and it was only a week. What was it going to feel like later when it was a month or more. How did people leave the people they loved?

Loved.

I loved Stan.

Holy shit.

I was in love with him, and not because of the baby or the dancing or his perfect ass. I loved him for his strength, his compassion, his intelligence, his ability to ask for help when he needed it, the way he put me in my place, the way he loved our child, the way he...they way he...everything.

“I love you,” I said almost to myself, knowing he wouldn’t hear me as we said goodbye.

I loved Stan.

Full. Stop.

Now what was I going to do about it?

Twenty-Three

Stan

I leaned against the doorway, one hand on my growing bump, and stared at the empty drawer in my bedroom. It was the one I’d given Chet while he stayed in my place. It hadn’t been shoved back, and the emptiness echoed the gaping hole inside me. It may as well have had a blinking, red neon sign announcing, ‘He left.’

My eyes swam with tears. I’d gotten so used to falling over him in the kitchen as I made tea in the morning, and his dirty socks were thrown not in but near the hamper. But right now, I’d bury my face in those filthy socks. I missed him so much. Okay, backup a minute. Nope. There’d be no sniffing. But I’d admire them from a distance and shout at Chet to pick them up.

Thinking back to the previous evening when he’d been flinging things in his bag, I shivered as I recalled the air sizzling and crackling with tension. If he hadn’t had a plane to catch, I would have ripped his clothes off and climbed on top of him. I’d needed a connection, but there was a car out front and the driver was bugging Chet with messages.

But neither of us had said a word while he packed. Each item he put in the bag hurt as if it were a piece of my heart snapped off, piece by piece. I’d been overcome with anxiety, wondering if I’d ever see him again. Being pregnant, my hormones were all jumbly. No, wrong word. As a coffee man I knew the perfect description. They were percolating!

But Chet, being the alpha that he was, threw me a curveball as he said goodbye. I closed my eyes and rewound the three little words he’d spoken though my mind. “I love you.” And then he was gone except for a quick text that read, You danced your way into my heart.

He was such a sap. And I loved it. I replied with, I danced as if I’ve never danced before.

But as I lay in my empty bed, hugging a pillow and staring at the ceiling, my thoughts were question after unanswered question. Does he want us to be together? But as I spoke the words in my head, my therapist’s image popped into my thoughts. “I know. I know,” I said out loud. “I’m being passive.”

Okay. Let’s start again. Do I want us to be together? “Is that better?” I yelled. But the therapist in my head didn’t answer. Sneaky! I had to figure it out for myself.

How can we be equal partners in a relationship and parent our child when we’re not in the same place? I wasn’t about to ask Chet to give up his job, and I wasn’t resigning from my position. I’d seen friends do the long-distance thing. It worked for some, and for others, the time apart shredded the fabric of their relationship until there was nothing left except bitterness.

Chet and I hadn’t discussed a future. There was that pesky being apart thing getting in the way again. The ‘I love you’ suggested a future, and I was ready to embrace it.

The next morning as I sat drinking my flat white before the café opened, a hand waved in front of my face. I glanced up to see Charlie hovering over me. “Not a disaster, is it? I haven’t even