Total pages in book: 97
Estimated words: 92841 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 464(@200wpm)___ 371(@250wpm)___ 309(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 92841 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 464(@200wpm)___ 371(@250wpm)___ 309(@300wpm)
“And how did it make you feel when he showed up?” she asks with a soft smile.
“For a moment, when he was nervously trying to ask me out, my brain allowed me to pretend everything was simple. Like I was just a woman, standing in front of a man who was interested in her and wanted to take her out on a date.
“But then the question finally slid off his lips, and the memory of Brandon asking me out for the first time hit me like a ton of bricks,” I choke out, tears filling my lids. “I hate this. I hate that I can’t be normal.”
“You know how I feel about that word,” Julia chides playfully. “The expectation to be normal isn’t one that is achievable since one can’t accurately define it. What’s considered normal to one person is different for another.”
“I know,” I mumble, having heard her say this on more than one occasion.
“You mentioned when he asked you out, he reminded you of Brandon,” she says. “Are there similarities between the two?”
I think for a moment about Brandon. He was broody and mysterious, the ultimate tatted-up bad boy with a rough exterior who didn’t give a shit about what anyone thought of him besides me. He always had a soft spot for me. We had flirted for years, the chemistry between us sizzling, and when he asked me out, he was sure I would say yes. At that point, it was just a formality.
But Shane’s nothing like Brandon—at least not from what I’ve seen. He’s got this sweet sexiness to him, like he should be posing for a charity calendar in his uniform while holding a kitten he just saved. It’s clear, based on the way his shirt stretched across his chest, he’s in shape, and for a split second, I fantasized about him wearing that uniform in the bedroom as he reminded me what it felt like to be intimate with a man again.
As he stood in front of me and Scott, he was unsure of what I would say, yet he still took his shot. And when I turned him down and the look of defeat filled his features, I wanted to take back my answer and agree to go out with him just so that boyish grin would once again make an appearance.
But I couldn’t do it.
“No,” I tell her. “They’re actually nothing alike from what I can tell. But it wasn’t really about his looks or personality. It was the thought of getting to know another man—of possibly falling in love, having children, and creating a life with someone who wasn’t Brandon—and the memory of my daughter, who’d never gotten a chance to live, that filled me with guilt and made me turn him down.”
“Wow,” Julia says with a smirk that tells me she’s about to go all therapist on me. “You just created an entire fake future with a man before you even agreed to one date. For all you know, he was just looking to get laid.”
I bark out a laugh and shake my head. “He seems too sweet for that.”
“You don’t know that because you don’t know him. What if he was only looking for something casual? Would you have said yes then?”
God, that’s so hard because the truth is, I miss being intimate with someone, but the thought of being intimate with anyone but Brandon feels wrong.
“I don’t know,” I admit truthfully. “But it doesn’t matter because I said no and he left.”
“It still matters,” Julia says, “because this is part of you moving forward. I want you to think about what you see your future looking like. I know I asked you to do this before, but that was over a year ago. And a year ago, had a man asked you out, you wouldn’t have even considered it.”
“I said no,” I remind her.
“But you still considered it. We as therapists like to call that progress.” She winks, and I groan. “Speaking of which, you should check out the book I’m reading. You might find it … enlightening.”
She holds up the paperback, and my heart clenches at the couple on the cover. I used to love reading romance. It was my mom’s and my thing. We could talk about the books we’d read for hours while checking out all the bookstores in our area. We attended book signings to meet our favorite authors, and my mom has an entire library of signed paperbacks we’ve collected over the years.
The day I lost Brandon and our daughter, I lost my desire to read romance. The first time I picked up a romance book to try to escape, I bawled my eyes out, unable to handle reading about someone else getting their happily ever after, knowing I would never get mine.
“It’s so good,” she says. “They’re roommates but can’t stand each other.”