Searching for Sunshine by Linda Seed

Author:Linda Seed [Seed, Linda]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Linda Seed

19

The thing was, Jake didn’t think the sentence we should talk ever led to anything good.

It led to many significant things: breakups, divorce, cancer diagnoses, firings. Probably more than one criminal investigation. But it rarely led to anything a person could actually look forward to.

We should talk. You’ve won the lottery. Yeah, that wasn’t going to happen.

He wasn’t going to be devastated if he got dumped so early into this thing with Breanna. He wasn’t so naïve as to believe a few dates meant anything. Except they had kind of meant something to him. Otherwise, why had it bothered him so much that she hadn’t told her kids?

In any case, he resolved to man up and act mature and reasonable when Breanna gave him the news that she was done. He wasn’t about to act like a wounded, kicked puppy. If he felt like that once it was all over, well, that was his own business.

They’d agreed to meet upstairs at Cambria Coffee before work the next morning. They got a table upstairs, away from the crowd down on the sidewalk of Main Street. Jake had a black coffee—its stark severity seemed appropriate for a dumping—and Breanna had tea, the tag hanging outside the lid of her cup.

He’d decided to be preemptive, so he launched right into it as soon as they sat down.

“Look. There’s no reason this has to affect our working relationship. I’m going to be completely professional about your renovation, so you don’t have to worry about that. If you still want Michael to come over and help out, I can do that, too, though if you’ve changed your mind about that …”

“What are you talking about?” She was looking at him as though he were speaking some unknowable foreign language.

“I want you to know that just because we’re not seeing each other anymore—”

“We’re not? Oh …. You don’t want to see me anymore?”

The hurt and surprise on her face shot straight into his gut.

“I thought that was what you wanted to talk about,” he told her. “You said, ‘We should talk.’ ”

“I meant we should talk about when to tell the boys about us. But … you want to break up? Not that this is a relationship, exactly. Yet. But—”

“Hell, no.” Jake had to quickly recalibrate his mental state. Relief and confusion flooded him in equal measure. “No, no, no. It’s just that when you said ‘We should talk,’ I thought—”

“You thought it was that talk.”

“Yeah.” He scrubbed at his face with his hands. “Shit. Can we just … you know … start over? Hit the reset button?”

“Please.”

So they did, starting with each of them clarifying their intentions. He wanted to keep seeing her, and she wanted to keep seeing him—thank God. With that out of the way, they were finally able to get to the actual purpose of the talk.

“I wanted to explain why I didn’t tell the boys,” she said, fidgeting with the tag of her tea bag, which was dangling outside the cup. “Jake, it’s not about you.

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