Well Matched (Well Met #3)(78)

He made a negative sound as his fingers made lazy circles on my arm. “No, tomorrow’s Sunday. It’s a Faire day. I don’t work out on the weekends during the summer. Those chess matches are enough of a workout, believe me.”

“Is that what they’re calling it these days? A workout?” I tried to sound light, unconcerned. The words were supposed to be a joke but they were coated with bile as they came out of my mouth. I couldn’t help it. I pictured my name going into his phone on today’s date. Did he enter names retroactively?

When I chanced a look up at him he was blinking at me in confusion. “What else would I call it?”

Oh, the hell with this. Sleepiness gone, I scrubbed a hand over my face and sat up. He frowned at the loss, but I held up a hand. “Look, I saw your phone. When we went to Virginia.”

He looked nonplussed. “Okay . . . ? I think I remember that. Getting the address of the hotel, right?”

“Yeah. But I saw the names.”

“The names,” he repeated blankly.

“The names.” Now I was getting mad. Was he being deliberately obtuse? “In your phone.” I reached for it on the coffee table and waved it at him. “All the women you’re with. Early in the morning.”

His brow was a knot of confusion as he took the phone out of my hand, and I kept talking, my voice getting higher and my words becoming suspiciously close to a babble. “It’s none of my business, I know it’s not, but I don’t want you to think you have to stay here with me if you have . . . you know . . . another engagement.” Engagement? I sounded like a Jane Austen heroine. What the fuck.

He scrolled through his phone with a perplexed expression while I was talking, then stopped. “Wait.” Some more taps, some more scrolling. “You mean like Fran, Cindy, Annie?”

“Maybe?” Definitely. I shouldn’t have remembered them, but they were burned into my brain and onto my heart. Reminding me that the guy paying attention to me paid attention to a lot of other women too. I was nothing special.

“Angie, Diane . . . ?”

I put my hands over my ears. “I don’t need to hear all their names.”

He tugged my hands down. “Come here. Please.” I wanted to resist, but I sighed and let him pull me back down against him. His arms went around me, and he held his phone in front of us both. “Look. They’re workouts.”

“Yeah.” I didn’t look at his phone. “You said that already. And it frankly sounds a little misogynistic if you ask me. To refer to banging someone as . . .”

“CrossFit workouts.” He spoke over me. “Look . . .” He pulled up the web browser on his phone, then navigated to a page for an industrial-looking gym that seemed to be a glorified garage. The kind of place that blasted hardcore metal music twenty-four hours a day. “Here’s where I work out, see?” He tapped again, bringing up the schedule. “Six in the morning, so I can get it done and get to work during the school year. I remember now, right around when we went to my grandparents’, we were doing a bunch of the girls.”

I shook my head. “Not sounding any better.”

He sighed in frustration, tapping a little more. “Okay. Here. Here’s a list. See how they’re all girls’ names? They’re benchmark workouts, so you can track your progress as you repeat them. Here’s Cindy.” He scrolled to the name, in big red letters on the site, and read off the list below it. “That’s five pull-ups, ten pushups, and fifteen squats.”

“That . . . that doesn’t seem too bad.” I leaned forward, intent on the phone.

“As many times as you can for twenty minutes.”

“Oh.” I sat back. “Never mind. That sucks.”

He snorted. “Especially at six in the morning. Fran’s different: that one’s timed, so the point is to beat your time from last time. If you’d actually clicked on the calendar entries, I was keeping track of numbers of reps, time, stuff like that for the different workouts.”

“Huh.” I was quiet for a moment as I reordered my thinking. I imagined clicking on Fran, picturing him timing himself while he . . . nope. I wasn’t going there.

“Wait.” He leaned forward, leaned us both forward, to drop his phone back on the coffee table. “You really thought . . .” He grasped my shoulders, turning me to face him. “April.” The intensity in his voice and the seriousness in his expression were jarring. This was not a guy who looked like this. Not often. “There’s been no one. Not since Virginia. God, before that even. Since that night at Jackson’s, when I chased that guy off. There’s just been you. You know that, right?”

“I . . .” This was too much, and I couldn’t respond. All I could do was shake my head, eyes wide. I couldn’t even blink when he was looking at me like this.

“Look. I know this shit is hard for you.” He tucked my hair behind my ears while he talked. “I know you’ve done everything on your own all this time. You don’t like letting people in. But . . . I’m here, okay? Whatever you need. Whenever you need.”

“I need . . .” But I couldn’t say it. I couldn’t tell him about my secret heart, the one that had just begun to beat for the first time in so long. The one that wanted to let him in. I didn’t have the words. Not yet. I needed time. I needed him to understand.