For a moment, I was silent. I met his gaze, surprised by the gentle patience I could see.
“Why do you want to know?”
“I don’t know,” he said honestly. “I just do.”
Strangely enough, I wanted to tell him.
“I haven’t had a lot of relationships,” I confessed. “In university, I dated a guy who broke up with me because he said I was just too much. Too bossy, too opinionated, too everything. He said I embarrassed him.” I barked out a humorless laugh. “He said a lot of other things, but that hurt the most.”
“Sounds as if he was the one with the confidence problem.”
“Maybe. I didn’t date for a long time after that. Then I met Ryan, and I really liked him. He was smart and funny. A few years older than me and established. He was in control and knew what he wanted from life. He said he liked my brashness—that he admired it.” I paused. “I guess he changed his mind.”
Hunter’s eyes darkened, but he nodded for me to go on.
“Ryan liked the good life. He liked dinners out and the theatre. Parties. He loved big groups.” I paused. “He loved being the star of the show in those groups of people.”
“Hmm,” was all Hunter said.
“At first, it was fun. Different for me. I was busy at work, learning the ropes, and I worked a lot. Ryan understood since he had done the same thing already. We got along well, and we were pretty serious. At least, I thought we were. I even moved in with him.”
“What happened?”
“He changed. Or I changed. He became more demanding, less understanding. Shouting all the time. Suddenly, I couldn’t do anything right. The way I dressed, spoke, acted—everything was wrong. I was too loud, too opinionated, too over the top. He wanted me to be more like his friends’ girlfriends and wives.” I snorted. “I was nothing like them. He hated my ‘unfeminine’ job, the fact that I had work boots in my trunk, and that I dealt with contractors and city officials. He used to tell everyone I was a PA.”
“Elitist asshole.”
“I tried so hard to be what he wanted. I’d rush home early to change. I didn’t talk about my job. I went to parties with him, hating every second. I didn’t see my family as much. I did everything to try to make him happy. It was always about him. What he wanted, his needs.” I scrubbed my face, tired of talking about Ryan. It was still painful to think how stupid I’d been.
“How did your family feel about him?”
I grimaced. “They never fully warmed to him. He liked the men in my family but sort of ignored the women. He continually tried to get the dads to talk business with him. He wanted their money badly, which, as it turned out, was one of the appealing things about me. Maybe the only one. Once he realized me in his life didn’t guarantee BAM dollars in his pocket, I wasn’t as desirable—something I wish I’d seen earlier. But I was in deep and determined to make it work. I didn’t want to fail.”
“But you weren’t failing, Ava. He was.”
“Took me a while to figure that out. Addi and Gracie were always there for me. They saw what was happening. Liam saw it. Ronan did too.” I swallowed. “Everyone did but me. I tried to change myself and who I was to please him, but there was no pleasing him, and I almost lost myself doing that.”
“What happened?”
“The entire cliché of a bad relationship happened. I came home early, planning on surprising him with dinner. He surprised me by screwing one of his associates in our bed. I walked in on them.”
Hunter cursed quietly.
“We argued, and of course, he told me it was my fault. All of it. I had driven him to it. I wasn’t enough. I wasn’t pretty enough, thin enough, anything enough. I was too loud, too bossy, too manly, too everything terrible in his books. My family were assholes and refused to give him a chance to prove what he could do for them.” I shook my head. “I laughed at him and reminded him they didn’t need him to do anything. They made their fortune honestly, with hard work— unlike him. He didn’t like that,” I added. “He was all about parties and networking. As I discovered after, he wasn’t as, ah, solvent as he led me to believe.” I rolled my head on my shoulders, feeling the tension of talking about Ryan. “The money he perceived I had was a huge draw.” I took a sip of beer.
“He said the only thing I was good for was fucking and even that was subpar.”
“Liar,” he hissed.
“He stormed out, and I called my brothers and packed my stuff. Looking around, I realized how much of myself I had already lost. Nothing there was mine. He’d picked everything out and changed things as the whim struck him. I was simply part of the furniture—something to be switched out when he got tired. All I took with me were the clothes I had brought when I moved in. I left everything he had chosen for me—they were for a woman I really didn’t know.”