One Week with the Marine (Love on Location)

She teetered back and forth, and the only sound came from her soft, shallow breathing and the clicking of her heels as they rocked on the cement. “How does this work? This life I’d be signing on for? You and I are together, and then you leave over and over again. And I wait. I don’t know if you’ll come back, but I still wait, hoping you’ll come home. And once you’re home—” Her voice splintered. “Once you’re home, you’ll see that I can’t take care of you or the kids you give me. Is that the life we’d be living? You’d have a perfectly outlined plan just like your parents have, and you’d try to cram me into it? That’s what you want?”

“That’s not—”

“It’s true, and you can’t fix it. I can’t fix it.”

“Listen to me.”

“No. I’m done listening to you and lying to myself. This can’t work. I’m not built for this. No matter how I”—she took a deep breath, and his heart was caught in an icy grip, waiting on the rest of her words—“no matter how I feel about you. I’m not strong enough to keep waiting for you to figure that out. I can’t take it. I’m going out so you can pack up your stuff without worrying about seeing me again.”

“Don’t do this. It’s stupid.”

“This whole relationship or agreement or whatever it was, was stupid. We should never have tried.” She rushed back inside before he could say another word.

Not that he had anything to say.

Chapter Eighteen

Avery’s apartment was now, officially, the headquarters of Breakups Anonymous.

Not that she had technically broken up with Holden. Or that they’d had much of a relationship to break up in the first place.

Still, between her and Myla, they’d stockpiled enough ice cream to build an igloo and had watched enough bad daytime talk shows to spot whether or not the guy was the baby daddy from a mile away.

It had been three days since Holden left, and in the interim, Myla had been staying on her couch, too sick of her swanky Upper-East-Side home to dare go back and pack up her things yet. Oliver had called her every day, but she hadn’t bothered to respond. She already knew the truth of what the media had to say—she didn’t need to hear it from him, too.

As for Avery, she’d stuck to curling up with Rodrigo and petting his fur while desperately trying not to remember the day Holden had given him to her.

Finally, she couldn’t take it anymore. She sat up on the couch, Rodrigo still firmly curled into a ball on her lap, and asked, “Who gets someone a cat?”

Myla looked up from her position on the floor and then grabbed the remote and paused the TV show in progress, mid lie-detector results. “What?”

“Holden. He got me this cat.” She looked down at Rodrigo, and her heart flipped over in her chest.

“Okay. I’m following you so far.”

“So, I’m just saying…why? Who gets somebody a cat?”

“Ummm, I don’t know.” Myla scratched her wild mane of hair, her eyebrows knitting together. “Don’t you like cats?”

“I love cats. Now, at least. But I was never like, you know, I wish I had a cat.”

“Do you…not want the cat now?”

“No. I want the cat. You’re just…” She huffed out a breath. “I love my cat. What I’m trying to figure out is why he’d give me a

cat in the first place? Now, you know, I’m stuck with this cat that I love and that reminds me of him.”

“Oh.” Myla nodded. “I see.”

“What? What do you see?” Rodrigo jumped from her lap and followed Myla as she made her way into the kitchen and grabbed two pints of ice cream from the freezer. For herself, she got mint chocolate chip. Then, as she made her way toward Avery, she held out a pint of cookie dough and a spoon.

“What?” Avery asked, taking the ice cream all the same.

“Are we finally going to talk about this?” Myla offered her a gentle smile.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean you leave my house denying that Holden loves you, and then you come back and say you guys decided it couldn’t work and called it quits. You’ve been basically catatonic for three days. Are you going to finally tell me what happened?”