Searching for Sunshine Page 9

  Breanna and Jake’s lunch date—the second one—had been Friday. Today was Saturday. She hadn’t heard from him, and she was trying hard not to be pathetic about it.

  She refused to wait around for him to call her regarding some imaginary plans that hadn’t yet been made. Instead, Breanna called Gen, who called Liam’s fiancée, Aria, and the three of them made plans to do a girls’ night out.

  They went to Ted’s, a bar about a block off Main Street, and settled in at a scarred wooden table with mugs of beer for Breanna and Aria and sparkling water for Gen, who was eternally health-conscious.

  A collection of ‘80s rock was playing on the sound system over the usual array of bar noises: people playing pool or darts, people loudly bantering with each other from across the room, people hollering to the bartender for another round.

  Ted’s was a dive by most standards, with its sticky floors and its aroma of spilled beer and old sweat, but the fact that this was Cambria—along with the fact that Breanna had known almost everyone here for so long that she couldn’t remember a time when she hadn’t—gave the place a harmless, friendly feel.

  “I thought you might be out with Jake tonight,” Gen remarked, giving Breanna a significant look.

  Breanna didn’t mention the fact that she had thought the same thing. Instead, she feigned surprise. “Really? Why? We went out yesterday.”

  “Yes, but when the chemistry’s there, things can move fast. Once Ryan and I started seeing each other, we barely did anything else.”

  Breanna fidgeted with her beer mug. “Jake and I have had two dates.”

  “I knew Liam was the one after two dates,” Aria put in. “I didn’t want to admit it to myself, but I knew.”

  “Could we talk about something else?” Breanna asked irritably.

  “Why?” Aria asked.

  “Because it’s Saturday night and he didn’t call,” Gen said, divining the source of Breanna’s mood as surely as if she’d had a GPS map pointing to the spot.

  “He doesn’t have to call,” Breanna insisted. “We saw each other yesterday, for God’s sake.”

  “And how did that go?” Aria asked. Her thick, dark hair was pulled back into a ponytail, and her clingy T-shirt and skinny jeans showed off a figure that was lush and curvy. A number of the guys in the bar kept shooting looks at her, but Aria took no notice. There was no need for her to, since everyone knew she was with Liam, and nobody wanted to get their teeth extracted with Liam’s fist if he found out they’d made a move.

  “It was fine,” Breanna said. Then she told herself to drop the pretense. She was among friends, and if she couldn’t tell her sister-in-law and her future sister-in-law what was really going on in her love life, then who could she tell? Her shoulders dropped and she slumped a little in her chair. “It was great, actually. I mean, really great. He’s warm and smart and easy to talk to.”

  “And hot,” Gen added.

  “Yes. And he’s hot,” Breanna agreed. “And he kissed me—more than once—which made me realize how long it’s been since I’ve had sex. It’s been a really long time.”

  “You could call him,” Aria suggested.

  “No, I couldn’t.”

  “Why not?” she said. “Why should antiquated gender roles prevent you from—”

  “It’s not that,” Breanna said, a hint of misery in her voice. She took a long drink from her beer to drown it.

  “Then …” Aria began.

  “She’s trying to play it cool,” Gen said. “She’s trying not to be needy.”

  “I’m not needy,” Breanna said. “I’ve been living without a man in my life for a long time now, and I’ve been doing all right.”

  “You have,” Gen said soothingly. “But … maybe it’s time for you to do better than all right.”

  Breanna had been thinking just that for a while now. She’d been all right, but she was starting to want more. Jake hadn’t awakened those feelings in her—they’d been stirring for some time. But his arrival in her life had made the longing seem so much more real, so much more urgent.

  “Call him,” Aria said. “Go to his place. Strip naked and climb all over him. Simple.” She shrugged, as though the whole thing were as easy as that.

  “I can’t do that. I have kids.”

  “Well, I assume they wouldn’t be there,” Aria said dryly.

  “Just because you’re a mother doesn’t mean you stop being a woman,” Gen said.

  “I know that,” Breanna shot back. “Don’t you think I know that? But I can’t just jump in with both feet. I have the boys to think about. I want to give this thing with Jake a chance, but I have to be careful. Whatever moves I make, I have to think about them. I have to know I’m doing the right thing. Because it’s not just my life I’m dealing with.”

  And that, she thought, neatly summed up the last nine years of her life. Since Brian had been gone, all of Breanna’s decisions had been not just about herself, but about the boys as well. It wasn’t that she denied herself pleasure for their sakes. She wasn’t a martyr, wasn’t Saint Breanna. But the pleasures she did choose to indulge in had to be carefully chosen. She was no longer a kid who could blithely follow her heart. She was an adult woman with adult responsibilities.

  “Kids do change everything,” Gen reflected. She’d been a mother for just over a year, but Breanna knew that was enough for her to know. One day was enough.

  “So. Taking it slow, then,” Aria said. “If you’re not going to call him, then you should probably try to stop thinking about him—for tonight, anyway. Who wants to play pool?”

  * * *

  The thing about Breanna, Jake thought over frozen pizza at his house on Saturday night, wasn’t that she was beautiful—though she was—or that she was smart and thoughtful—though she was those things, too. The thing, when you got down to it, was that she seemed utterly familiar, as though he’d known her his whole life, had been separated from her so long he’d almost forgotten she existed, and now was finally reuniting with her after a long period of hard and painful deprivation.

  He wasn’t ready to feel those things after just two dates. He wanted to feel mild and intriguing interest, some attraction, while still being able to focus on other things.

  He wanted thoughts of Breanna to be there at the outskirts of his life, ready to be brought forward at appropriate times but easily put back in their place when he needed to apply himself elsewhere.

  Was that so much to ask for?

  As it was, he’d had to actively force himself not to call her. He’d gone out with her yesterday, and when you went out with someone two days in a row, that was making a statement—a declaration that you were moving full steam ahead with whatever it was the two of you were doing.

  Jake wasn’t ready to make that kind of statement—not yet.

  The fact that he was thinking of making that statement at all, and was having to actively restrain himself from doing it, was alarming.

  Jake wasn’t a guy who had trouble committing—he wasn’t one of those clichéd males who used women for sex and then kept them otherwise at a safe distance. He could do emotional intimacy just fine.

  The problem was that he was less than a year out from his divorce. Anybody with half a brain knew you didn’t get into something serious with someone new that soon after having your ass handed to you.

  There was a reason rebound relationships rarely worked. You were lonely and desperate for validation; you needed to prove that you could still be attractive to someone after your life had been thrown into a wood chipper. You made bad decisions in the interests of not feeling like shit for a change.

  He normally trusted his instincts, but he couldn’t trust them now, not when he hadn’t fully regained his equilibrium.

  He thought he recognized something in Breanna, yes. But maybe what he was really seeing was his own desperate longing to heal.

  Still, frozen pizza sucked.

  Feeling sorry for himself for being stuck at home eating DiGiorno on
a Saturday night, he thought screw self-pity and called Mark Winslow. Mark had been bitching about his lack of a girlfriend for some time, so Jake figured it was a good bet that he’d be free.

  He was.

  A beer and some hot wings—or whatever kind of bar food they had at that dive just off Main Street—seemed like a better bet than a night of Law and Order reruns.

  14

  Jake had thought that an evening at a bar would take his mind off Breanna. So he froze in surprise when he walked into Ted’s, scanned the crowd, and saw her at the pool tables talking to a curvy brunette.

  “Shit,” he muttered under his breath.

  “What?” Mark squinted as he looked around, trying to divine the source of the problem.

  “Breanna Delaney,” Jake said, pointing to where she was bent over the table about to take a shot.

  Mark, a big guy with a scruffy three-day beard, a receding hairline, and a weight issue, incorrectly interpreted the issue. “I don’t think she’s going to care that you’re here drinking. I mean, you’re not on the clock.”

  Jake let him think what he wanted to think. “Still …” he said.

  Mark was a local, and he’d known Breanna casually for some time. “She’s cool,” he assured Jake. “She doesn’t have a stick up her ass.” He clapped Jake on the back companionably. “Let’s get a table.”

  * * *

  Breanna was about to hit the nine ball into the side pocket when she saw Jake heading toward a table in the center of the room. She noticed him midstroke, and her stick glanced off the edge of the cue ball, sending it skittering in a direction nowhere near where she’d intended.

  “Good thing you’re not playing for money,” Aria remarked. Then her gaze followed Breanna’s and landed on Jake. “Well, well.”

  “Take your turn,” Breanna said.

  “Aren’t you going to—”

  “Just take your turn.”

  Gen came back from the ladies’ room and looked from Aria to Breanna and back again. “What happened? Something happened.”

  “He happened,” Aria said, pointing at Jake.

  “Ooh,” Gen said.

  “Would you please just take your turn?” Breanna asked Aria, desperate for them to change the subject.

  “Aren’t you going to go over and talk to him?” Gen said.

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because she’s playing it cool,” Aria said. “She’s not going over there because she doesn’t want him to know that she really wants to go over there.”

  “Right.” Gen propped a hand on her hip and considered the situation. “He didn’t call her, and she wants him to think that she wasn’t waiting for him to call her because she has better things to do.”

  “I wasn’t waiting,” Breanna said. “I do have better things to do.” She kept her back turned to Jake so they could avoid the dreaded moment of eye contact, when they would both have to decide how to play it.

  “You have to go over there, though,” Aria said, leaning on her pool cue. “If you don’t, it’s going to be weird.”

  “You could always go out the bathroom window,” Gen suggested. “It’s a pretty small window, though.”

  “I’m not going out the window,” Breanna said. Then, to Aria: “Would you just take your turn?”

  “Fine.” Aria bent down, lined up her shot, and sank the three into a corner pocket.

  Breanna knew that as a mature, adult woman, there was no reason she should feel awkward about seeing Jake here at Ted’s. They’d dated a couple of times, and they liked each other, and they were on good terms. There was no reason either of them should not be here. So, what was the problem?

  The problem, she thought in answer to her own question, was that he hadn’t wanted to see her tonight. Otherwise, he would have called. So now she was in the position of having to go up and talk to him knowing that he’d planned—and even wanted—an evening without her in it.

  But the alternative—ignoring him or taking the window option Gen had suggested—didn’t seem viable.

  So, she had to talk to him. What would she say? What should her tone of voice be when she said it?

  She was still planning her approach, studiously looking at the wall rather than at Jake, when he decided the issue for her.

  “Mind if I have the next game?”

  His voice washed over her like warm water, and she became aroused just hearing it. Which wasn’t a good sign when it came to her own sense of self-possession.

  “You go ahead,” Aria said, sounding perky. “We just finished. Here, you can use my cue.” She handed it to him, and she and Gen hustled off to the bar, leaving him and Breanna alone.

  They hadn’t just finished—they were still in the middle of a game—but Breanna guessed that hardly mattered now. Jake gathered balls and began loading them into the rack.

  “I didn’t mean to interrupt your girls’ night,” he said, though he’d done just that.

  Breanna looked over at Gen and Aria, who were huddled at a table whispering together and shooting covert looks this way. “They don’t seem too put out about it,” she said.

  The guy Jake had come in with was busy chatting up a blonde at the bar. The woman was speaking to him animatedly, gesturing with hands adorned with multiple rings and brightly colored acrylic fingernails.

  “Mark seems to be doing okay,” Jake observed.

  Jake took the break, but he didn’t sink anything. Breanna lined up for her shot and put the six ball in the corner pocket.

  “I was going to call you,” Jake said.

  Breanna straightened, put up a hand, and said, “Don’t.”

  “Don’t what?” Jake looked at her in surprise, his eyebrows raised.

  “There’s absolutely no reason you were obligated to call me. So, don’t make excuses. There’s no point, when we’ve only been out twice, and—”

  “I wasn’t going to make an excuse. I was going to tell you about a thing that happened. Are you going to shoot, or what?”

  Flustered, Breanna looked at the table, then tried to put the five ball in the side pocket. It bounced off the bumper and careened helplessly across green felt.

  “Okay,” she said. “What’s the thing that happened?”

  “I was going to call you,” he started again. “But then I thought, I can’t call her for a date so soon after a date. That’s going to seem desperate and pathetic. I need to play it cool. So I didn’t call, even though I really wanted to. And then, in a futile attempt not to seem desperate and pathetic, I called Mark, a guy I barely know, to come to the bar with me so I wouldn’t be sitting at home eating frozen pizza and watching Wheel of Fortune.”

  Charmed by his speech, she grinned. “Are you going to shoot, or what?”

  “Right.” Jake bent down, positioned his cue, and hit the eleven into the side on a nice rebound shot.

  Deciding it was only fair to meet sincerity with more of the same, she said, “I wanted you to call. Then I decided that was desperate and pathetic, so I called Gen and Aria and made them come out with me so it would seem like I had something better to do than wait to hear from you.”

  Jake glanced at her from where he was bent over the table, a half grin on his face that made Breanna a little bit weak-kneed. “I guess we’re both desperate and pathetic, then.”

  “I guess.”

  “Or,” he said, “we just really like each other, and we don’t have the patience for bullshit like playing it cool.”

  “Maybe that’s it,” she agreed.

  Though she would never admit it outright—mostly because she didn’t want to seem giddy and lovestruck—she was unreasonably pleased by the fact that he’d wanted to call her, and that he’d said he really liked her. She tried not to smile in a way that would give her away, but she couldn’t seem to help it. She could feel the smile on her face, and there didn’t seem to be much she could do about it.

  The pool game was forgotten. They stood there with their cues in their hands
, giving each other the goofy smiles of people who were about to fall hard, and who didn’t much care about how they might land.

  “Will you go out with me, Breanna? Right now? Playing it cool can go screw itself.” The way he was looking at her made her stomach flutter not with butterflies, but with raw desire.

  “Yes,” she said.

  * * *

  Jake guessed it might have been rude to leave Mark at the bar alone after they’d come here together. But Mark was making progress with the blonde, so when Jake approached him with his apology all planned and ready to go, he didn’t even have to use it.

  “Hey, Mark,” Jake began. “I know it’s not cool of me, but—”

  Mark pushed off his barstool, took Jake aside, and said, “You mind if I kind of, you know, do my own thing?” He put a hand on Jake’s shoulder in a just-us-bros kind of way. “I think I can get Krista here to let me take her home.”

  Jake looked over at Krista, who did, indeed, seem amenable to whatever Mark might have in mind. That was a stroke of luck for both of them, it turned out.

  Still, Jake had to give him a little bit of shit just for sport.

  “Well, I don’t know …”

  “Come on, man,” Mark pleaded. “I haven’t been laid in eight months. Eight fuckin’ months.”

  “Aw, I guess,” Jake said, looking profoundly put out.

  “Thanks. I owe you. Here, have a round on me.” Mark reached for his wallet.

  “Save it,” Jake said.

  When Mark and Krista were gone, Jake looked around and saw Breanna talking to the two women she’d come with. She said something to them, and they laughed and looked at Jake. Then Breanna grabbed her purse and her coat and came over to where Jake was standing.

  “All set,” she said.

  “Your friends okay with it?” he asked.

  “They’re my sisters-in-law. And yes, they’re fine.”

  The women were wiggling their fingers at them in the kind of wave that said they knew what Jake and Breanna wanted to do to each other, and they very much approved.