Avoiding Commitment (Avoiding #1)(21)

He ran his hands back through his hair several times thinking the question over. He adjusted his position so that he was lying with his head back against the armrest before addressing her. "I didn't want her to know about you. I..." he paused collecting his thoughts once again. "I met Bekah shortly after you and I…well…you know. I had no interest in dating anyone. But when I told you she was about as persistent as I am, I wasn't lying. After a few unremarkable dates with her, I called the whole thing off."

Lexi looked over at him surprised. She had assumed their relationship was picture perfect. IT was refreshing to hear that it wasn't. "Why? What happened?" she asked curiously.

"She wasn't you."

Lexi gulped. She wanted to just scream at him for not calling her afterwards, for not calling a month later, a year later. Everything could have been fixed, if he'd just called. But instead he'd been with another woman. Now the distance between them was unbearable.

"Bekah doesn't take no for an answer," he continued. "When I was practically catatonic after I left New York, and she slowly brought me out of all of that. I stopped trying to see you in her, I found that the next few dates went much better. I found I could like her. Soon we were together all the time. The relationship progressed rather quickly from there."

Lexi sighed heavily. The way his eyes lit up at the mention of their relationship pained Lexi. She could tell Bekah made him happy...happier than she had ever been capable of making him. Their relationship was everything she had hoped for with Jack, but had never been afforded.

"I don't know how much more you want to know, but Bekah wanted to move in with me when her lease ran out. Her parents are pretty well-off and were helping her financially. They told her they would cut her off if she moved in with her boyfriend before got get engaged. That's pretty much where we are now."

"So, it's not because she wants to get married so desperately? It's about money and moving in with you?" Lexi asked trying to process this new information. Jack had made Bekah situation seem much more...desperate on the phone.

"No. No. No. It's really about her wanting to get married," he remanded hastily. "She is playing it off like those are the real reasons. Honestly, she doesn't really need her parents' money or approval," he finished. Well that was interesting. Even though Lexi wasn't really looking forward to meeting Bekah, she had obviously captured something with Jack. Lexi was kind of curious about her.

"Can I ask you something?" Lexi asked sitting up to get a better look at him.

"You just did."

"Ha. Ha," she said dryly. A smile appeared on his face as he sat up to meet her gaze.

"Sure go ahead."

"Where are all your picture frames?" Whatever he had been anticipating, that hadn't been it. "You used to have a ton of them, but I didn't see any."

"When you were snooping?" he asked playfully. She nodded. His smile waned slightly when he responded. "The glass broke in a bunch of them when I moved here, and the rest are in my closet."

"Why didn't you put those up? I mean at least the woods shot," she said remembering a particular black and white photograph of a rickety bridge overtop of a small creek surrounded by age old pine trees at sunrise. It had always been her favorite.

"I don't have it anymore," he said sheepishly, his eyes fixed on the floor.

"Where did it go?" she asked honestly intrigued. He had always loved that picture too. For the longest time, it had hung in a thick black poster sized frame above his bed.

"I destroyed the frame."

She gasped imagining his prized portrait torn to shreds. It saddened her beyond belief. "Why would you do that? It was your favorite picture."

He shook his head. "It was your favorite."

Realization dawned on her. He had gotten rid of it because of her. He couldn't look at it anymore because of her. Her sadness deepened at the thought of him resorting to such extremes over her.

"Two days after I threw it away, I felt terrible and fished it out of the garbage. The picture was still in tact except for a few small tears from where the glass broke. I gave it to my mom."

Lexi forced the conversation to lighter subject from there not wanting to continue their suffering from long lost memories. She told him about school and her internship. He bored her with accounting information, and how his immediate supervisor was an older woman who kept trying to get him to sleep with her. They watched highlight reels from last year's mediocre football performance from their Alma Mater. Luckily, the team was still ranked in the top twenty-five due to good recruiting. She listened when he told her about his Fantasy Football strategy for the upcoming season, and gave him pointers on who she thought was going to play well. He regaled her with stories from Seth's bachelor party in Las Vegas earlier that summer. She told him about Chyna's congratulatory weekend in Atlantic City when Lexi had been accepted into her internship and found out she was top ten percent in her class.

"This feels so familiar," she breathed leaning her head back against the arm of the loveseat.

"Yeah, I suppose it does," he agreed amicably.

"You have a girlfriend."

"You don't have a boyfriend," he added.

"I could have a boyfriend," Lexi said popping her head up to look at him eyebrows raised. She hadn't told him one way or another so he couldn't really know that for certain.