New Year Second Chance

Afterwards, Dax puts his phone away. Then he plants a kiss on the top of my head.

“I have to go.”

I wave him off. “Go.”

“I’ll call you, though, and we’ll discuss how the rest of this goes,” he says.

Like some business arrangement? Great. I can already see how this is going to go. We’ll talk on the phone two to three times a week. I’ll spend weekends at his place. We’ll get away to some remote location every few months.

Can’t we just go back to college?

“Okay,” I simply say.

“Bye.” Dax walks out the door.

“Bye.”

And just like that, my boyfriend is gone. Off to add seven figures to his bank account.

I lie back down on the bed and let out a sigh.

Are we really going to survive this time?

~

“You got back together with Dax?” Emily’s eyes grow wide with disbelief.

I told her she didn’t have to come over to my house tonight since I’m taking care of Shanna, yet she’s still here, and of course her first question was whether or not Dax and I are back together. I told her the truth.

“Why do you look so surprised?” I ask her as I wash a feeding bottle on the kitchen sink. “Didn’t you say I should give him another chance?”

“Yes,” Emily answers. “But I didn’t think you’d have the guts.”

I frown.

“What made you change your mind?”

I scrub the inside of the bottle with a brush. “I decided to not let fear get in the way of my happiness.”

Emily gives me a wide grin and raises her hand. “You go, girl.”

I raise my own hand, the one without any soap on it, to receive her high five. I do feel like a winner. Unfortunately, I also am not satisfied with my prize.

Emily notices my frown. “What’s wrong?”

I let out a sigh. “My new boyfriend is a busy man who lives miles away.”

Emily frowns, too. “Yeah. That sucks.”

It does.

“What does he do again?”

“CEO.”

Emily lets out a whistle. “That rich, huh?”

“That busy,” I answer.

“So you’re going to do this thing long-distance?”

I shrug. “We haven’t really talked about it.”

And he hasn’t called. Bummer.

Maybe we should have had less sex and more conversations.

“Well, unless you want a long-distance relationship, which I’m not sure is a good idea since the two of you just got back together, you’ll have to quit your job at the library and move in to his apartment,” Emily says.

I put my hands down on the sink. “Quit my job?”

And what? Be a house girlfriend?

“You have told Dax that you’re not working at NASA, right?”

I purse my lips.

Emily gasps. “Jenna!”

“I wasn’t holding it back on purpose,” I tell her. “I just… I wanted to tell him, okay? But the right opportunity just didn’t come up.”

Emily puts a hand on her hip and gives me a look of dismay. “Jenna Holt, stop making excuses. For important things like this, you make the opportunity.”

I know.

“What did you do at that lodge? Ski all day?”

“I only tried it once,” I answer. “And I’m never doing it again.”

“What did you guys do, then? Stay in the bedroom and have sex for hours on end?”

I blush.

Emily gasps, then slaps me on the shoulder. “Jenna!”

“Ouch.” I rub my shoulder.

Did she really have to hit me so hard?

She puts her arm around me. “I am so happy for you.”

I raise an eyebrow at her. “Did you hear anything I just said before that?”

Emily’s arm falls off me. “Right.”

She touches her chin.

“You know what? I think you really have to tell him.”

“Like I said, I was going to.”

“Now.”

My eyebrows arch. “Now?”

Emily puts her hands on my shoulders. “Jenna, the more you postpone this, the harder it will be for you to tell him the truth. And then you’ll start fooling yourself into thinking maybe you shouldn’t tell him, and then it will turn into some deep, dark secret, and then when it comes out, which it will, it will ruin you both.”

I look at her. A deep, dark secret? That sounds ominous and far-fetched. Even so, I can’t bring myself to laugh at her. She has a point. The more I delay, the more I have to lose.

“Besides, you’ve just taken him back,” Emily goes on. “He knows he’s on probation. He won’t pick a fight. And like I’ve said before, for him to want you back, that means he loves you. He’ll accept you no matter what you are.”

I shrug. “He hasn’t really said he loves me.”

She pats my shoulders. “Well, you know men. A lot of them have a hard time saying it, but they show it, especially when it counts.”

Come to think of it, I never heard my dad say the words to my mom when she was still around.

“Well, I guess you don’t know men since… well, I’ve never known you to have a boyfriend before.”

“Dax was the first,” I confess.