Sonya arched one perfectly-shaped brow. “Well, I’m starved. How about we load up our plates, and you tell me what they are so I can help you figure out how to fix this? I got all your favorites.”
She’d come all this way to see him. The least he could do was humor her. Chad dragged his ass off the sofa and filled his plate with sweet and sour pork, crab rangoon, and egg rolls. He carried it all back into the living room, along with the pint of fried rice, and began to shovel in food as he sketched out the particulars of what he knew about Mary Alice’s relationship with Judd.
“I know the guy a little. I’ve treated his wife. The two of them are so obviously exactly right for each other. Like long-history, finish each other’s sentences, two halves of one whole kind of perfect. I cannot imagine what the hell Judd was doing with Mary Alice in the first place. And I don’t know how she managed to delude herself about it for so long.”
“You managed to delude yourself about me. If I hadn’t gotten up the courage to confess, and we’d gone through with the wedding, who knows where we’d be right now.”
Chad thought about that last year and about the hard truth Sonya had forced him to face. “Love is blind.”
“Yeah. Do you think she’s still in love with him?”
“No. I don’t think she’d have been with me if she were. She knows she’s better off without him, that she deserves so much more than he gave her. But I don’t think her heart has a hundred percent caught up with her head on the subject of Judd. She ran into the pair of them at the hospital yesterday and found out Autumn’s pregnant, right before she saw us.”
Sonya cringed. “Ouch. In love with him or not, that’s gotta hurt. I think it always feels weird when you see your ex moving on with someone else and doing the things you thought you’d be doing with them.”
Chad gave her a wry smile. “Yeah, I’m aware.”
Sonya patted his knee. “But you got over me. I concede that, under the circumstances, what she saw looked bad. But you and I both know that our situation isn’t what she thinks. Even if I were free, we are never going to reconcile.”
“I love these visits. You really know how to make a guy feel wanted.
“You know I love you. But you’re not equipped to handle me, and we both know it.”
Chad groaned.
“If she’s half the woman you say she is, she’s bound to get past that first wave of hurt to listen to you.”
Looking over at the Christmas tree he wouldn’t even have without Mary Alice, he remembered her tears and the look of absolute betrayal in her eyes. It made his gut clench that he’d hurt her, even inadvertently. “That may be a while.”
“You’re a patient guy. If she’s worth it, you’ll wait. And if she’s not, you’ll find someone else.”
“I don’t want someone else. I want her. It’s fast and maybe kind of unreasonable, but I’m crazy about her. She just slipped right into the life I’ve built here, and everything came into focus. I can see my life with her—next week, next year, in twenty years. Marriage. Kids. The whole shebang.”
“That certainly seems serious. You haven’t had that kind of long-term view about a woman since—”
“You,” he finished.
“You’re in love with her.”
He scrubbed both hands over his face. “Shit. Yeah, I am.”
Sonya sighed and tipped back her own beer. “Chad, you know I love you. I want you to find what I’ve found. And if that’s really what you’ve got with Mary Alice, then I want to do anything I can to help you save it.”
&nb
sp; “I appreciate the thought. But I don’t know that there’s anything you can do. You trying to talk to her would probably only make everything worse. She’s just got to work her way around to it on her own.” Who knew how long that would take?
“Well, at least it’s just about Christmas. You’ll be headed home in a few days, right?”
“Not until day after. I’m on-call at the hospital Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. I wanted to give the rest of my staff a chance to be with their families. A bunch of them have kids.”
Sonya shot him an affectionate smile. “There’s that generous guy I love. Will you be seeing her again before then because of this charity of hers? What was it?”
“Fountain of Hope. I don’t know. Delivery day is Saturday. I’m signed up to help with that, but I figure she’ll arrange everything so she doesn’t actually have to see me.” He hated that. Mary Alice had told him how much she loved the delivery part of the process. “Maybe I should back out.”
“Absolutely not,” Sonya insisted. “You show up and you be the same great guy you’ve been since day one. Remind her what she’s missing and that you’re still here.”
“I don’t want to put pressure on her.”