Avoiding Temptation (Avoiding #3)(73)

“Um…thanks.”

“You and your obsession with your hair…”

“It has a calming effect!”

Jack laughed. “I’m just messing with you. I like it. It tells me what you’re thinking without having to ask.”

“You know what I’m thinking anyway.” At least, it always felt like that.

“I’m pretty sure if I knew what you were thinking without asking, I wouldn’t have been such a f**k-up,” he said.

Silence lingered between them as Lexi stared back at him. He was not making this easy. Part of being around Jack was so easy. He just got her. They had been around each other so long that she didn’t have to explain herself. In the past, he had known exactly when and where to touch her. He had known her. But then, there were things about Jack that were so difficult, such as his need to always pick someone else, the heavy weight of their history, the hint of desire that always sprang up between them, unbidden, at the most inopportune moments. So much was there between them, swirling around, that at times, it felt suffocating. And Lexi just wished she could see past those emotions.

The waiter interrupted them by dropping off drinks and taking their orders. Lexi wasn’t that hungry to begin with, and the turn of the conversation didn’t seem to help.

When the waiter disappeared, Jack started talking again. “We got off track. What I was saying before is that when Bekah and I were dating, she was a really different person, to me at least. She was sweet and sincere and acted like she loved me. We were together all the time. I was hesitant about marrying her. I was worried that she was into me a bit more than I was into her.”

Lexi ground her teeth together. She wanted to shake him. She wanted to reach over the table and slap some sense into him. Didn’t he know what he had done by being so stupid? Argh! It just made her blood boil.

“Then, we got married, and things were all right for a while. We both had to adjust to living together and our new life. I guess you could call it the honeymoon effect, but then something happened. It changed. She stopped caring about me, about anything. I don’t know what happened. Maybe she just decided that she had made a mistake. In any case, she wasn’t the same person that I’d met. And she’s even worse than that now.”

“Then, I guess this divorce is for the better,” Lexi said softly.

Lexi knew that it was. She had known that he shouldn’t have ever married Bekah, but Lexi couldn’t change the past any more than he could.

“Lexi, the worst part about it all is that I really tried to make it work.”

“I know, Jack,” she whispered.

“How do you know?”

“I was there through it,” she reminded him.

“But there’s something more to that statement.” He pointed at her, like he was trying to figure out what she was hiding behind her big brown eyes. “Isn’t there?”

“It’s just…Jack, you would try to make a marriage work even if it was all wrong.”

“Why would you say that?” he asked, his eyes icing over.

He didn’t want to hear what she was dishing out.

“Because you did it with all of your other girlfriends.”

Jack’s eyes hardened. “There’s nothing wrong with trying to make things work with someone.”

“There is when they’re all wrong for you,” Lexi couldn’t help but shoot back.

“It’s better than running away from every relationship as soon as things get rocky.”

“I’m pretty sure the only thing that kept getting in the way of my relationships was your dick,” she said, not able to hold her anger down.

“Oh, come on, Lex, give me some credit. Sometimes my tongue, too.”

Lexi stood abruptly. “Why? Why didn’t you try with me? Why every other person but not me? Why am I still the only one here, Jack?”

“I did try with you,” he said, not breaking eye contact. “We tried it out in New York.”

“Bullshit! You slept with someone else in New York. Tell me the truth.”

“Lex, I did try—”

“You know I talked to Stella?”

“What?” Jack asked. He looked seriously confused in that moment.

“I saw her at the D-Bags show,” Lexi said, taking a seat when the couple across the room started staring at her.

“That was more than two years ago.” He didn’t look pleased that this was coming up. “What did she say?”

“She said that she was sorry for what she had done to me. What did she do to me, Jack?”

“Why is this just now coming up?”

“Because she told me that you said no like five thousand times. She said that you didn’t want to sleep with her that night and that she seduced your drunk ass. She said you had an excuse for being a total moron that night, but you didn’t even tell me that! You said there was no excuse for what you did, and then you pulled out a f**king diamond ring, and poof! You vanished into thin air.”

“I told you I had no excuse for what I did with Stella because there was no excuse for what I did. I couldn’t come crawling back to you, begging you to see me as the total moron,” he said, spitting her own words back at her, “who had slept with someone else, groveling for you to take me back.”