Those Nights in Montreal Read online

  “Okay fine, I don’t want it to mean anything.”

  Chuckling softly, she gives me an approving nod. “So what are you going to do?”

  “He wants to talk.”

  “Can I offer you some advice?”

  What the hell, since it’s not as if I’m doing such a bang-up job handling things. I shrug. “Sure hit me.” I’m pretty sure I know what she’s going to say. It’s along the lines of me agreeing to give him another chance and then listing all the reasons why. Olivia is all for second chances, especially since she got together with Zach.

  “Talk to him.”

  I’m waiting for more but apparently that’s it. I eye her quizzically.

  A smile tugs at the corner of her mouth. “Nope, that’s it. Talk to him.”

  Talk to him. Easier said than done.

  SCOTT

  Getting Becca to meet me at the coffee shop to talk a week later hadn’t been easy. Getting her to actually listen to me is going to be even tougher. If there’s one thing I can say about my ex, she’s a stubborn one. So stubborn she sometimes makes me want to pull my fuckin’ hair out.

  I watch her as she weaves her way between the tables and toward me. She’s wearing dark blue pants that could pass for jeans and one of the university sweatshirts. She looks good. My eyes never leave her.

  She eyes me warily as she hooks her purse over the chair across from me and sits down. I get why she’s wary of me. We want the same thing—each other—only she’s too scared to admit it. But I need to put her at ease. I’m tired of dealing with her, her guard always twenty feet high.

  “Thanks for agreeing to talk.”

  She gives a brief nod.

  So much for putting her at ease. This is going to be a lot harder than I thought.

  “You know you’re driving me nuts, right?” Honesty is the best policy so I start with that. Not that I have any intentions of lying to her but I have been known to fudge the truth when the situation called for it.

  Her blue eyes widen and her brows shoot up toward her hairline. “Me?” she sputters, her voice a mixture of amusement and bewilderment. “How am I driving you nuts?” She asks as if the idea is preposterous. Like she doesn’t know what little it takes for her to drive me around the bend.

  “Oh I don’t know. Try going out of your way to avoid me after we have sex,” I say casually, making sure to keep my voice low.

  Our eyes lock as her face turns red with embarrassment. She hastily drops her gaze to her clasped hands resting on the table, her thumbs chasing each other in circles. Classic signs of a nervous Becca.

  “It was a mistake,” she mumbles at her hands.

  “Mistake? You don’t make mistakes, remember?”

  Her spine goes stiff and her head snaps up. I knew that would get her attention.

  “I never said that.” She goes all squinty-eyed on me, pushing her chin out.

  “You never had to say it.”

  “What exactly does that mean?” Her jaw is getting tighter by the second.

  I scoot forward in my chair and lean across the table toward her. She doesn’t pull back, which is a good sign.

  “It means you’re pretty well perfect and I’m a screw up. Look I admit it, Becca, I screwed up. I shouldn’t have— Well I should have— Crap. When you thought you were—you know—I shouldn’t have disappeared or whatever. I’ve had a chance to really think back to that time and you’re right. I should have been there for you. I made a mistake because I was scared. More scared than I’ve ever been about anything. But you’ve got to believe that I would never have let you deal with a baby on your own. I swear on my grandmother’s grave when I tell you I would have been there for you.”

  I’m sure she didn’t expect me to cop to all of it. Essentially admit that during that time I had been hard to pin down. To her that had been me avoiding her. I’d been crazy busy then and I hadn’t had a lot of time of my own but I could have returned some of her calls. But I’d been scared and I’d needed time inside my head to think. Talking to Becca had only made everything more real and terrifying.

  On top of that, I’d been worried she’d find out what I was really doing at home and I’d never wanted her to find out that way—by accident. I’d wanted to tell her and I’d intended to when I got back. Of course before I could, she’d dumped me.

  But I think I’m finally getting through to her because she’s just staring at me, her lips parted, her eyes wide like she’s in shock. I can’t read her mind—although sometimes I wish I could—so I don’t have a clue about what’s going on inside her head right now.

  Her mouth closes and she swallows hard. Seconds tick by while I wait for the verdict because that’s what it will be. If she shoots me down, there’s nothing else I can do. I’ve played my final card. And to tell you the truth, I’m tired of trying this hard and being shot down every time. Last year, I think I’d left at least two dozen messages and texts begging her to call me, to talk to me. She hadn’t returned a single one and had refused to see me when I’d gone to her dorm. “Scott.”

  The heavy weight on my chest doesn’t go away but it becomes lighter when she whispers my name on a long, drawn-out sigh. I can practically feel her softening toward me.

  Encouraged, I push forward. “The point is I make mistakes. I do. Yeah, we all do but some of us make more than others. And I fully admit I fucked up. The other mistake I made was letting you dump me like that. I should’ve known there had to be more to it than what you said. I honestly thought I was doing the right thing by giving you space. But when you wouldn’t take my calls or answer my texts and refused to speak to me, I got pissed. I figured if you really didn’t want to be with me, I’d find someone who did.” Angela had been the “lucky” rebound girl.

  She squeezes her eyes closed as if recalling the memory of seeing me with Angela, and it still hurts. I grab her hands in mine. I’m half expecting her to pull away and for a second I think she considers it. But then she opens her eyes and stares directly into mine, allowing her hands to remain clasped in mine.

  “I never had sex with her,” I confess in an urgent whisper. Thank God the place isn’t crowded and no one’s paying attention to us. This isn’t exactly the ideal place to have this kind of conversation but it was the only place Becca would agree to meet me. I haven’t had sex with anyone while we’ve been apart but I’m not ready to tell her that. Talk about looking whipped.

  “You didn’t?”

  I shake my head and rub my thumb over the fleshy part of her palm.

  “I haven’t had sex with anyone since you,” she says quietly, watching for my reaction.

  Thank God.

  A wave of relief along with a profound feeling of possessiveness washes over me. The thought of Becca having sex with other guys had kept me up more than a few nights.

  Her admission makes it easier for me to put my ego aside. “Me either.” Okay, that wasn’t that bad.

  “But why?” she asks, her voice incredulous.

  I let out a humorless laugh. “It’s not that I didn’t want to. Sometimes I did. But I wasn’t going to do it with just anyone and I wasn’t looking for a one-night stand. I needed to care about her.” I’d had enough of those before I met Becca and I’d been determined not to start that crap again. I hadn’t been looking to raise any girl’s hopes if I could help it.

  Overwhelmed is the word I’d choose to describe the way she’s looking at me right now. She slowly extricates her right hand from my grasp to cover her mouth, her eyes round with wonder.

  After several seconds of silence, she drops her hand from her mouth. The light in her eyes and the smile on her face are worth every single day of my voluntary celibacy.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  REBECCA

  Despite the fact that Scott has reduced me to an emotional mess, I refuse to cry. I glance around the rapidly emptying coffee shop. At least not in public.

  It takes me awhile to fully digest what he just admitted to me. Jealousy is not a pretty
emotion and I’d always been good at hiding it—even from myself—but the thought of Scott with someone else used to drive me nuts. Seeing him with that girl last year had sent me to bed in tears five nights in a row. I’m not sure how I made it through my classes during that time given the fog of misery I’d been living in.

  “So last week was the first time since…?”

  Smiling faintly, he nods.

  Just checking.

  “So will you give me another chance?”

  He looks so earnest, so damn sincere I want to kiss him. But as much as I want to throw caution to the wind, this time I’m going to tread carefully. Don’t get me wrong, I believe him. I get that he was scared. Who wouldn’t be? I think he would have stepped up if I’d been pregnant. Hopefully that would have been before the baby was born and he wouldn’t have waited sixteen years like John had done. Sometimes that kind of help comes an entire childhood too late.

  “Okay,” I say drawing out the word. “But I want us to take it slower this time. The last time—well you know—we…didn’t.” In other words, we talked on the phone for three weeks after we’d gotten back to our respective homes in our respective states. We’d had sex the first time Scott had driven up to visit me in Nevada, which had been five weeks after we’d met.

  At the time, I’d felt I’d really gotten to know him in our five weeks’ worth of conversations. I mean really know him. So having sex with him hadn’t been something I’d had to think too hard about. It had felt right and I never once regretted it. Well that is until I’d thought I was pregnant and he’d gone AWOL on me.

  Scott reflexively nods but not in agreement because a second later his eyes narrow and his head tilts slightly to the side. “What do you mean by slower,” he asks, watching me intently.

  “Sex. No sex.”

  His expression shutters and suddenly I can’t read him. He goes still and his thumb stops stroking my hand. “No sex?” he asks hoarsely before clearing his throat.

  “I think that was our problem.”

  His head rears back as his eyes widen in disbelief. He looks affronted. I hurry to appease the blow my statement must have dealt his male ego. Understandably so, I guess.

  “No, nothing like that. I mean because it’s always been the one place we never had any problems. And because of that, I think sometimes stuff gets blurred or missed. It fixed everything.” I don’t know if I’m making sense or not, or maybe the tautness of his jaw means he doesn’t agree with me. “I guess what I’m saying is that I don’t want that to be all we have.”

  I didn’t expect my condition to be met with his wholehearted support and agreement. I knew Scott wouldn’t be happy about it but I hoped he’d understand where I’m coming from.

  His jaw begins to tick. He clears his throat again before finally responding. “So how long do you see us not—I mean going slow?”

  I stifle a laugh. How typical of him to want to be given a timeframe—not that I completely blame him. Hey, this whole no sex thing isn’t going to be easy on me either. “Well I hadn’t really thought about an exact timeframe.”

  He sighs. “Becca, we’ve had sex before. I love having sex with you and I’m pretty sure the feeling is mutual. I don’t know, it’s like trying to go back and forget that, you know, how good it is, how good it’s always been.”

  My hesitancy must have showed on my face because he quickly adds, “I’m not saying I won’t do it. You know I will. I’m just saying it’s going to be hard. You know I’m not a saint.”

  Not a saint is code for horny as hell.

  “I just want us to work this time.”

  At that, Scott briefly closes his eyes. Opening them, he stares directly into mine. “And that’s what I want too.” Giving all indication that he’s resigned himself to his fate, he lets out a weightier sigh. “Okay, we’ll do it your way. No sex.”

  “For now,” he adds, after a telling pause.

  And that’s when I pretty well resign myself to my fate. Scott doesn’t want to go without sex and I have a feeling that my resolve is only going to be as strong as his willingness to keep his word. Which means this no sex thing is going to be the furthest thing from easy.

  * * *

  Later that night, clad in our pajamas, my roomies and I are comfortably ensconced in the couches; me and April on one and Olivia stretched out on the other, her head propped up by her hand and a throw draped over her legs.

  I finally tell them the news they’ve been dying to hear since I walked in the apartment twenty minutes ago, that Scott and I are giving it another go. I have to give them credit for not looking too smug about it. They do grin like a couple of idiots though, as if they’d had a hand in it. Alright, they sort of did but that’s not the point.

  “So are you going to finally tell us why you broke up with him?” Olivia asks.

  My gaze goes from Olivia and then to April. They’re both wearing identical expressions of curiosity. No, it’s more than that. They want me to trust them the same way they’ve trusted me with all their stuff.

  I open my mouth and it all comes out, going from spitting rain to a torrential downpour. I tell them about the pregnancy scare and Scott’s reaction to it; the paralyzing fear that had consumed me for five days. I tell them everything. And it is good, almost cathartic to finally get it all out because this is something I hadn’t shared with anyone, not even Stephanie, my best friend from high school.

  They take it in in shocked silence, their jaws slack and eyes round.

  “Wow. Oh wow,” is all April manages to get out.

  Olivia’s reaction is slightly more eloquent. “Well thank God the test was wrong.”

  I snort lightly. “It would have been better if it hadn’t been wrong to begin with but the doctor said it happens. Not a lot, but it happens. She said that user error is usually the cause of most false positives.” I make a face. “I’m sure she thought I either contaminated the sample or didn’t follow the instructions.”

  April snickers. “Right. How hard is it to pee on a stick?”

  I give a shrug. “Yeah, that’s what I thought.”

  But I’d been such a nervous wreck when I’d taken the test. I’d bought it right after class and had taken it back to the dorm. I’m not sure I waited the whole five minutes it said on the box but I’m sure it’d been pretty close. When the plus sign had appeared, I’d thought I was going to pass out. Instead, I’d sat on my bed and cried. I cried for an hour before I’d called Scott.

  To be fair, that’s not the kind of news a guy wants to get over the phone. It’s not the kind of news most eighteen-year-old guys want to get at all. Scott was no different. After I’d choked it out amidst tears and sobs, he’d come over right away. After he’d calmed me down and assured me everything would be okay and I’d told him I was going to make an appointment at the doctor to confirm it, he’d reminded me that he had to fly home the next day. Inside, I’d been freaking out but on the outside I’d pretended I’d be all right on my own.

  “I don’t understand why you slept with him after he came back,” April says as she shifts, curling her legs up on the other side of her body. “I mean if you were mad at him for not returning your calls and all that, when he came back why did you have sex with him?”

  I shake my head in confusion. “I don’t know. I guess I thought that everything was back to normal now that we knew I wasn’t pregnant. When he came back, he seemed so happy to see me and, of course, I was still in love with him. But I realized after, you know, that I didn’t feel the same. The more I thought about how he’d treated me when he was back home in L.A., the angrier I got. I kept thinking that he wouldn’t have been happy to see me if I’d actually been pregnant. That what he actually had been was relieved not so much as happy.”

  April and Olivia both nod in understanding.

  “All I knew was I didn’t want to be with someone who wasn’t going to stick by me if I ever found myself in that situation. My mom’s a single mother and I’ve seen how hard it’s
been for her to raise me by herself.”

  “Of course,” Olivia says softly, her eyes filled with sympathy.

  “But you believe him now, right? That he wouldn’t have bailed on you?” April asks as if needing the confirmation.

  I nod slowly, my head bobbing up and down repeatedly. “Yes, I do now.” I shove aside any niggling feelings of doubt I may have.

  He’s not like my father.

  Scott wants me back. He fought to get me back like he hadn’t done a year ago. And I’m still in love with him. I want us to get things back to where we were before. To what we had before.

  He’s not a thing like my father.

  “Well if it helps, I believe him too,” April says.

  “Me too,” Olivia chimes in.

  I give a small smile and send up a silent prayer that things work out.

  * * *

  When I return from my shift at the library that Friday at six, my roommates practically accost me the second I enter the apartment. Because Zach has an away game and will be gone until Sunday, Liv and April decided to make tonight a girls’ night in, which usually entails watching Ryan Gosling movies while consuming pounds of salty snacks and gallons of carbonated beverages.

  “So tonight is your first official we’re-back-together-again date, huh?” April asks, already eyeing me up and down, her hand cupping her chin in a loose imitation of The Thinker.

  “Yep.” Given the choice between a movie or dinner, I’d chosen dinner. My thoughts: me and Scott in a darkened theatre wouldn’t be the best idea. But what am I going to do, avoid being alone with him…in the dark? And for how long? Although, it’s not like we’re a bunch of horny teenagers who can’t control ourselves. Okay, so technically I’m still a teenager but I’m going to be twenty in four months.

  “Good. Well come on.” With that command, April turns and starts toward the bedrooms in the back, naturally expecting me to follow. Olivia is already two steps in front of me and one step behind her.