Page 39 of My Best Friend's Dad

Thismatters. Rowleigh. It’s like there’s an arrow pieced straight through the both of us with a line of rope, and when it’s retracted, we’re drawn together. A gory and gruesome image, but I feel a little speared through the heart.

“Do you ever feel like you’ve lived more than one lifetime?” he asks softly, breaking into my thoughts out of nowhere with his question that he’s pulled out of that same nowhere-ness.

“Like reincarnation?”

“Sorry, no. I meant…more than one life in this life. Like who you were in the past is someone different from who you are now,and you can’t draw a line between that person and your current self.”

“Like you wonder how you got here?”

His shoulders heave, and he looks away toward the open barn door. “I don’t know.”

I squeeze my water bottle hard enough to practically rocket launch the cap into the roof. “Do you miss this?” That question brings his eyes back to me, and they’re soft, dark, and luminous because he’s standing in all those glowy cracks, and my god, does this man ever look good in sunny cedar glowy cracks. “You could still do it. You could do whatever you want. Run hotels, not run hotels. Do antiques, see the world. Be a dad. Nothing’s off limits.”

“You are,” he murmurs.

I gasp. Like a real-life echoing gasp that rattles through the barn. My hand crunches the bottle into oblivion, but the cap doesn’t come all the way off. Water rises up, spilling beneath the seam and running over my fingers.

Ineedto play this off as aha, that’s funny, good jokemoment. I could fake laugh and go back to sorting through haunted trunks or take my terrifying face-eating bear outside into the daylight to give his dark soul a sunbathing. I could remind Rowleigh that this is about him, not about me or us.

Instead, I drop the water bottle at my feet. My mask joins it, the strings falling from my fingers. “Call off your wedding.”Shit. Oh, wow. Yup, that’s great.Is that husky voice even mine? I sound like a haunted seductress.

There’s a span of time that lasts for only a few seconds, but it’s like a void. I tip over and fall into it, waiting. Waiting for him to break this magic sunbeam and dust spell, to shatter the tension that’s been wrapped around us since I walked into that lounge, and we first set eyes on each other, binding each other with hooks and strings that neither of us can just shake off.

He sighs and takes one step forward. My heart crashes into my stomach, the acids churning all around it, eroding the muscle until it barely feels like it’s beating.

There’s a reason hearts don’t belong in the digestive system.

And a thousand valid reasons I never should have just asked him to call off his fake wedding. Not because he loves life. Not because he wants to.

But for me.

Rowleigh’s eyes darken, and his jaw clenches. He puts up both hands, his mask dangling from one. Not to ward me off, but like he’s surrendering. Still, my heart plummets further, right down into the knees and toes category.

“Even if I did call it off, it still wouldn’t be appropriate.” His tone is all regretful, though he’s arranged his face into something that’s hard to read. “You’re my daughter’s age. Your parents would hate that. In the grand scheme of things, it can’t be more than a spicy fling, which will make me look and feel like a monster. I don’t…I don’t fling. I don’t want to fling with you. I mean, I do, but not…I…I’d get attached. You probably would too. Then where would we be? Trying to do life when there’s two decades between us?”

“Some people do,” I choke out, and then I choke on dust for real as I suck in a watery breath. My eye sockets are burning. I think it’s tears, but it could be dirt. I can’t fight for this. I should be agreeing with him.

“I’d die way before you.”

“What?” I yelp. “No!” I can’t imagine Rowleigh being anything less than fully alive, smiling those devilish smiles or those shy, secret smiles. It hurts to think of his huge, powerful body being sick or still. “You’re freaking forty-something! You cannot talk about death!” The first trickles of moisture leak from my eyes and run scalding hot down my cheeks.

“Everyone has to do it sometime.”

“No. Well, yes, but that’s not a good argument.” I stamp my foot down hard, which makes a big puff of dust rise up. There was probably straw at one time in here, but it has gone the way of decomposition and returned to the earth.

I cough and choke on the dust, blinking hard. I rub my eyes as the grit goes straight for my face, attracted by the moisture. It sticks to my cheeks, and after I give it a good rub, I see nothing but a blurry mess when I try to open my eyes. Panic crawls up my throat before it hits me that I just fucked my contacts all to fuckery by rubbing like that. They’re probably at the backs of my eyeballs now.

“I’d be the stereotype of the middle-aged guy who has to date a woman half his age to feel young again. Mid-life crisis and red flags all over the place,” Rowleigh goes on. His voice is coming closer.

My eyes focus just enough to take in his blurry, dark shape. He’s only a few feet away. That accounts for the delicious scents of manliness permeating through the dust cloud clogging up my nostrils.

“The fact that you can say that is more like a green flag.” I blink rapidly, hoping that will simultaneously clear out the dirt in my eyes and reseat my contacts.

“My daughter probably wouldn’t ever speak to me again.”

Oof, there goes whatever air my lungs managed to filter out a few seconds ago. Even if I’m freaking out internally and he’s all,we can’t be a cliché, andeven if we’re both bundles of red flags, we’re still gravitating closer to each other.

I’m moving blindly. Literally. All I can see is a black blob, which is Rowleigh, and a whole lot of haloed light around his face, skewed by all the little dancing dots.