But then he had to go and ruin it. “So which douchebag was on a wedding show?”
“Since when do you keep track of my douchebags?” Alex’s voice was strained, like it always was when she was spoiling for a fight. He would give her one if they weren’t around Lexi. Lexi hated when they fought, so he tried to limit their skirmishes to when she was not present.
The number of times they’d fought over Saturday morning television as teens—Lexi had never risen before noon—had to be approaching infinity.
“Listen, as long as you weren’t somehow fooled into being on a wedding show with him, I wouldn’t worry about it.” Not that Alex would ever be fooled into getting married, much less appearing on reality television. No one could keep up with Lexi, but she sometimes tried to slow her pace to let someone catch up. Alex left most people coughing on her dust and seemingly felt no remorse about it. “I don’t understand why this would even be bothering you. You don’t want to get married.”
Lexi scoffed. Another great thing about her was that she never believed the worst things people believed about themselves. She wasn’t naïve, though. Lexi just knew that the worst thing people believed about themselves wasn’t usually the actual worst thing about them. Usually someone’s worst quality was something that they weren’t even aware of, or even something that was usually a virtue.
As for Alex thinking she wasn’t cut out for marriage, that was just smart in Will’s book. Will might not be as quick as Alex to write the whole thing off, but he didn’t need to try more than once.
“It’s not bothering me.” Alex’s protest sounded weak, and he didn’t like that. He started looking in the cupboards for something he could put together for dessert. “It just feels weird. He said he didn’t want to get married—ever—either. And now he’s marrying someone else.”
“Trust me, you dodged a bullet.” Will shook his head. “You don’t want to get married.”
“I don’t, but it feels weird that he said that he didn’t want to get married—until after we’d broken up. Like, just dating me for fun wasn’t enough. I’m essentially like food that leaves guys hungry an hour later. I’m cotton candy.”
Will really didn’t like to hear that note of vulnerability in Alex’s voice. Even though she hated him, they had always held off on killing each other out of a sick sense of mutual respect. After all, she was biologically related to Lexi. If he made Alex cry—she’d never cried as a teenager when he’d pulled idiot pranks on her—then Lexi wouldn’t like him anymore. She wouldn’t welcome him into her home even though his father was persona non grata.
And he couldn’t lose Lexi.
Something about Alex feeling like this douchebag getting married to some person who couldn’t measure up to Alex threatened to throw off the balance. Will was the only wounded bird allowed in the house at the moment. “Why would this even bother you? Again, you told him flat out that you didn’t want anything serious.” And Alex wasn’t cotton candy. She was Thanksgiving dinner. But she wasn’t for him, and he would never tell her that. She’d never let him forget it.
“Yeah, until three months in, he was part of an extensive roster. He wasn’t even the number one draft pick.” That really set Will’s teeth on edge. It might be really caveman of him, but he had been witness to his father’s bad behavior with women and knew that there weren’t enough decent ones to fill any roster, but especially Alex’s roster. She might be tough, but she deserved to be treated with care. “I just want it to make sense, you know?”
Will shook his head and looked Alex in the eye. He tried not to do that very often because she didn’t miss anything with those piercing light brown, almost green eyes. And he’d always had to be careful not to hold her gaze for too long. The first time he’d done that, he’d thought about kissing her. That might be half his lifetime ago, but he’d known then that it would end in tears.
“It only makes sense if he was a wishy-washy douchebag that can’t handle a woman who won’t just roll over and do what he likes.”
Will didn’t really know what it would be like to be in a relationship with Alex. He didn’t let his mind go there. But he did know that she wasn’t a pushover. She had more spine than the hard-ass chefs who used to throw boiling hot pans of sauce around the kitchen if it wasn’t seasoned to perfection. She had more spine than his wife’s divorce attorney, who had somehow gotten him to give up his golf clubs, which his ex-wife would never use.
Will tried not to think about his ex-wife. Even though they’d worked together for years, they hadn’t realized how ill-suited they were until they’d gotten married and actually had to live together. When they were each doing separate jobs at a busy restaurant—she as a master sommelier, he as the chef de cuisine—it felt like it was a perfect match. But once they’d gotten married, they’d realized that they had nothing to talk about beyond their work.
Add that to the fact that she’d wanted to start a family and he’d come to the realization that he didn’t want kids at all, and it had become clear that they’d needed to call it. Will felt guilty for hurting her, and April felt like he’d lied to her.
Everything had always been easy with April, until it wasn’t.
He felt like an idiot because he’d missed the signs that they weren’t well suited. He’d been so focused on making his career a success that he hadn’t seen the fork in the road that they’d been headed for since the very beginning of their relationship.
Alex wouldn’t have let him go blind like that. She was the kind of woman who demanded attention—she demanded an equal. And unfortunately, he didn’t know many men who were up to the job of being that equal.
He only knew that he wasn’t going to start dating again, because he would never find anyone like Alex. And if he could never find anyone like Alex, then he might as well not even try.
FOUR
Alex looked at the list on her yellow legal pad and hated herself a little for making it. She’d always prided herself on her ability to walk in and out of her dalliances and flirtations with grace and ease. No commitments, no rings, no silver-framed photos on pristine mantels, and absolutely no heartbreak. Just have fun and forget them. She’d even fooled herself into believing that she’d forgotten some of the names on the list—names that had popped into her mind much too easily as soon as she’d put pen to paper.
It didn’t bother her that the list was long—a page and half. After all, she was in her thirties and had a rather voracious appetite for sex and affection. Because she didn’t believe that long-term relationships between human beings were viable now that people lived past the age of thirty-five, of course the list was going to be long.