Love Story (Love Unexpectedly 3)

I’m not even sure Reece Sullivan knows what it means.

“Has anyone heard from him?” I ask, hating myself for being so desperate to hear something about him. Anything.

“Nope, no way,” Brandi says. “Sorry, but I’m not making this that easy for you. You want to know how he is, you want to know where his head’s at, you go to him.”

“I can’t. I don’t know what I’d say.”

“So figure it out,” my sister says, her voice gentling. “You and Reece belong together. I know you were gone for a while, but I was here more often, and I saw him with the girlfriends he had while you two were apart. He barely even looked at them.”

I wince at the thought of Reece and other girls. “Can we not go there?”

“If you guys are going to make this work, you’ll have to come to grips with what happened when you were together, as well as when you weren’t,” Brandi says, sounding way wiser than she has any right to. “And besides, you had boyfriends in the meantime.”

“I know,” I say, nibbling on a fingernail. “Reece oh so kindly reminded me of that the other night, as though he gets to be jealous after what he pulled with Abby back in the day.”

“Well to be fair, you did make him drive to Miami to meet that Oscar dude.”

“It wasn’t even Oscar that had him all riled,” I say, swirling my wine. “It was Matt Terry, of all people.”

“Who?”

“Exactly!” I say, lifting my glass emphatically, almost swishing some over the side.

“No really, who is Matt Terry?”

“He was this guy who pursued me freshman year at college. I was trying to give Matt a chance, desperate to move on from Reece, but all it took was one horrible kiss and I knew I couldn’t go through with it. I broke up with the poor guy before our first date.”

“Yikes. I’ve never heard this story.”

I shrug. “Nobody has. It was sort of one those blink-and-you-miss-it moments of my life.”

I take another sip of wine, then another, noticing Brandi’s silence is longer than usual. “You still there?”

“Lucy.”

I gesture impatiently with my glass even though she can’t see me. “Yeah?”

“You’ve never told anyone about Matt Terry?”

I scrunch my nose, wondering why we’re still talking about a poor kid I barely remember. “No, I don’t think so. I thought about telling my roommate, but I didn’t want to embarrass the poor guy. He was sweet. Not Matt’s fault I was still hung up on The Asshole. Let’s start calling Reece that now, ’kay?”

My sister refuses to play along with my game, her voice more urgent now. “Lucy, if you never told a soul about what happened with this Matt guy, how did Reece know?”

I open my mouth to respond, and then realize I don’t have an answer.

“This kiss, the bad one with Matt,” Brandi rushes on. “Where did it happen?”

“I don’t know, outside the library?” I think, trying to remember, my heart racing with something that feels important. “How would Reece have known about that?”

“He wouldn’t. Unless he saw it.”

“How would he see it, unless…”

My sister makes a triumphant whooping noise. “He did follow you. He came after you to win you back, saw you making out with another dude. It’s the only explanation. Like, literally the only one. Right?”

I want to tell her she’s wrong. But racking my brain, I realize she has to be right. The only other explanation is that he somehow connected with Matt, who’s the only other person who knows about the kiss. But that’s even more far-fetched.

But either way, it meant that Reece cared.