His eyes now conveyed an aura of calm. They still looked beautiful, but I immediately missed feeling like he could pounce on me at any moment.
“I know that’s never easy,” he said, his voice low.
“Not easy at all.”
The conversation lulled for a moment, and suddenly having his gaze on me felt like pressure. This was the reality of divorce that I hated more than anything, and I never could have anticipated. Sure, it was hard for me to process the emotions on my own. But it also changed the way people looked at me.
I was allergic to being pitied. I’d always had everything figured out, all of my “life goal” boxes checked the moment I was in my twenties.
Married to my incredible high-school sweetheart? Check.
Good, well-paying tech job that I usually enjoyed? Check.
Three smart, curious, hilarious kids? Check.
And now that first, pivotal thing—being in a relationship—had been completely obliterated.
Even if the groundskeeper wasn’t pitying me, talking about being divorced still made me feel lost. Like I’d left the house forgetting something extremely important. Like I was incomplete.
“Sagged,” he said, breaking the silence between us.
I blinked. “What?”
“Six letter word for bent over. Try ‘sagged.’”
I furrowed my brow, looking back down at the puzzle. I tested it out in my mind, looking at the intersecting columns and rows.
“That would make 18 down work perfectly.”
He nodded once. “You’ve found your answer.”
I clicked my pen, scrawling in the word. “Thank you.”
“Luke,” he said, holding out his hand.
I held out mine and shook his hand. “I’m Cameron. Or Cam.”
His hand was calloused compared to mine, no doubt because of his job working outdoors.
“It’s a pleasure to meet you, Cam.”
“It’s nice to meet you, too,” I said. “Even though I’m scatterbrained as hell.”
“Don’t worry about it,” he said. “I’ve never been divorced, but I definitely know what it’s like to be distracted. In your head about something.”
I nodded once, taking a sip of my beer.
“And I also know what it’s like to try and distract myself,” he continued. “Although for me, it usually involves getting lost in some project in my backyard, not doing a damn crossword puzzle in the middle of a bar.”
I snorted. “Listen, I like puzzles, okay? You can always figure them out eventually.”
His gaze danced over my face. Fuck, it should have been illegal to have eyes that beautiful in a man so ruggedly handsome.
“You like that sense of control?” he asked in his deep voice. I couldn’t tell if he was still flirting or not.
I shrugged one shoulder. “Nah. Not really control. It’s the sense of discovery I like.”
His eyes were smoldering now. “I wouldn’t mind discovering more about you, Cam.”
Damn.
Definitely flirting. Aggressively, actually. My cock was perking up rapidly under my pants, but my brain was in some sort of stage-5 shutdown.
I nervously clicked the top of my pen with my thumb—once, twice, three times. Luke reached over to pull it gently out of my hand, placing it on top of my newspaper.
“Talk to me,” he said.
I cleared my throat. “You said you understand what it’s like to be distracted? So what distracts you?” I managed to ask.
People had been trying to relate to me since I started the process of my divorce. Sometimes, they compared their own past breakups to the divorce, saying that I would “get over it soon” and that I was about to have the “time of my life.” I’d always found it a little tone-deaf, even though I knew they were just trying to help. My divorce wasn’t just something I could get over. It made me feel like I was starting my life over again, blindly going out to sea without a damn paddle.
So I didn’t really want to ask Luke what he meant, but I needed to talk about something before my brain melted down.
“I spent ten years in the military,” he said simply, his tone changing, like he wanted to dispense the information and then forget about it. “Afghanistan, multiple times. Didn’t have an easy time getting back to normal life afterward.”
“Oh,” I said, trying to hide my surprise. Suddenly his beefy body didn’t just look like the body of a man who worked outdoors. It had a whole mountain of history. Luke had clearly been through the wringer of rigorous physical work and experiences I couldn’t even imagine.
“And that’s why I know how it feels to want distraction. To distract other people, and definitely distract yourself.”
I swallowed, nodding once. “I see. What branch were you in?”
He looked down at the bar, grabbing his beer and taking another big swig. “Marines.”
I could tell he didn’t want to talk any more about the topic. I barely knew how to talk about it, myself. Nobody in my immediate family had ever been in the military, and I had no idea what it implied. Some people in the military had standard jobs, like computer work or nursing or operating machinery. But Luke said he’d been to Afghanistan multiple times. He could have been put through terrible situations.