How To Bring Your Love Life Back From The Dead (5 page)

Instead Daniel was thinking about
how much he missed his dead wife.

Why was this happening? What had she
ever done to deserve this?

Her hands closed around her keys,
and she nearly wept with relief. She had to get out of here. Now.
No, two seconds ago. She was going to hurl. She was going to cry.
She was going to really regret being bold and putting her heart out
there.

“I have to go. I can’t be here—in
this moment. I can’t be here right now.” In two seconds, she’d
start crying from disappointment, and she didn’t want him to see
that. He hadn’t done anything wrong. Not really. He’d tried to get
back into dating…and she’d failed—somehow she’d failed. She didn’t
meet expectations. She wasn’t worth it.

“Lauren…look…I thought you should
know. I didn’t mean to… I just…thought you should know.” He was
sweet and sensitive, and he belonged to a dead woman, and he was
letting her down nicely. She’d never lost out to the deceased
before…Jerry, sure, but not someone dead.

Nodding in huge bobs of her head,
she turned and nearly ran for her car, calling over her shoulder,
“Thanks. Goodnight.”

“Lauren,” he called after
her.

“I have to go. I can’t… I can’t…,”
she said, getting into her car. This second. This moment. This
ugly, ugly moment should die in a fire, and karma was horrifically
cruel for letting her hope.

She walked into her house a few
minutes later. The urge to cry had passed. Now, she felt frozen.
The shock of going from the best date of her life to her most
doomed one had left her as weak as a marathon run. She wanted to
drop to the floor and stare at her ceiling. Instead, she collapsed
onto her couch, right beside her list. That stupid, stupid list.
What did twenty-one year old Lauren know about the real world?
There was a reason Daniel was single and as amazing as he was. He
hadn’t been single that long.

Ugh. More than anything, she wished
she’d borrowed that stupid magazine from the library so she could
throw it against the wall—hard. Or set it on fire and pay the fine.
Whatever the fine was for setting library materials on fire, it was
a damn bargain. She might go to the library on Monday to ask about
the fine and then borrow it. Though it was unlikely they’d let her
borrow anything if she mentioned her bonfire idea.

Still, what ass wrote that
article?

Don’t be afraid of
rejection?

Rejection hurt.

Rejection sucked.

She was never going to put herself
out there so she could be rejected again—that was the plan for the
night—no for forever. Even if, at some future date, she talked
herself out of this plan, for right now, it was a brilliant plan.
It was all about self-preservation. This sort of hurt could kill a
girl. That cut from this morning hadn’t hurt one-tenth this bad.
Having a stake hammered into her heart would sting less than this.
She assumed.

Hell. When Lauren closed her eyes,
she could almost feel his arms around her again, and she could
smell his cologne. Her coat smelled like she’d been rubbing up
against him—which she had been.

She was never going to be bold
again. No way.

Her phone lit up with a
text.

I’m sorry. I should have told you
from the beginning. I’m sorry.

There wasn’t any talk of seeing each
other again or wanting to work it out. She wanted to try. Maybe
they needed more time. Maybe if he got to know her, he’d see she
was worth the risk.

So, she waited.

A minute passed.

Another.

No, that was it. He’d said what he’d
wanted to.

Over. Done. That was it. She fought
the urge to throw her phone and forced herself to set it gently to
the side of the couch.

She’d never felt like that with
anyone—so it figured with her luck that she wasn’t the first one to
feel it with him. He might have been thinking of his first wife the
entire time. Maybe he’d even felt guilty for being with her. And,
all that time, she’d been giddy with how perfect and lovely it all
was. The first tear streaked down her right cheek before she leaned
back and let them dribble down her face.

In her head, she swore she could
hear a grave digger shoveling dirt onto a coffin. Thud. Thud. Here
lies Lauren’s tragic love life. May it rest in peace.

The next day was Sunday, and she’d
promised to eat dinner with her sister’s family. They were going to
carve the pumpkins she’d gotten with her nieces the previous day.
Her sister enjoyed prying into other’s personal lives like most
people enjoyed eating, so it was no surprise when Megan said, “So,
the girls said you hung out at the pumpkin patch with a guy and his
nephews. They said they saw you holding hands.” They’d been setting
the table for dinner, but Megan would have ambushed her at some
point, so avoiding her was pointless.

Lauren winced. “Not a good topic.”
In fact, any topic would have been less painful. Getting
decapitated would be less painful. One good whack, and you were
done, and you never had to think about how you’d grabbed some guy
after an accidental brush of the lips and plastered yourself
against him. If she could volunteer for a decapitation right this
moment, she would.

“Why? Lauren, I know you like to go
slow, but the girls said they really liked him. They said you
seemed to like him too.”

“I did. I mean, I do. It’s just
complicated.”

“Like…what kind of
complicated?”

Lauren sighed. “Like his wife died
two years ago, and he’s not sure he wants to be with anyone or even
date yet kind of complicated.”

Her sister went absolutely and
completely still. “Wow,” she said finally.

“Tell me about it,” Lauren said,
dropping down into one of the chairs around the dining table. “I’ve
dated guys with baggage, but nothing like this.” She threw her
hands up in the air. “I mean, how do you compete with someone who
is dead? Besides, he didn’t ask me to.” Not one word. No more
texts. No phone call she could let go to voicemail. Nothing. He was
done. And he’d basically apologized for their date. Even Jerry
hadn’t been that cruel.

“I’m sorry,” her sister
whispered.

“Yeah, me too. I thought I’d finally
found…the one. You know how it was with you and Eric when you first
met? That’s how I felt for a golden shining moment and then he told
me that, and I left. I practically ran. I had no idea how to handle
someone telling me that.” It was just as well she hadn’t stayed.
What else could he have said that would make this sting less?
Nothing. He might have even gone on and told her more about his
wife. And then she would have known how she didn’t measure up. That
would have been really bad. No. Going home and crying her eyes out
before eating a load of pumpkin chocolate chip cookies had been a
good call.

Self-preservation. She was all about
self-preservation.

Her sister was still staring at her.
“Are you sure he was telling you that he didn’t want to see you
anymore?”

“No, I don’t know why he was telling
me. He mentioned he wasn’t sure if he was ready. I waited for him
to ask me to give him time or to slow down—he didn’t ask me either
of those things. I didn’t know what to do—so I ran. I bolted out of
there.”

“That was last night?”

“Yep.”

“Has he called or emailed
today?”

“He texted me last night saying he
was sorry and that he should have told me from the beginning, but
not anything about wanting to see me again. I was totally into him,
Megan. I practically poured myself on him at the haunted house. He
was probably thinking the whole time, “I wish she wasn’t draping
herself across me.””

“He wasn’t thinking that,” Megan
said, rolling her eyes.

“He was.” Lauren dropped her head
into her hands. “I’ve never felt like this much of an idiot. I
grabbed him and kissed him, and he was hoping I’d just stop. I
asked him out—he probably went out with me out of pity because I
was throwing myself at him. All night I was throwing myself at him.
I nearly drowned him in attention. He probably hates
me.”

“He doesn’t hate you.”

“He might.”

“You’re being
ridiculous.”

“No, you’re being ridiculous!” When
her sister didn’t answer right away, Lauren looked up.

Megan was standing there with her
arms folded and an amused look on her face. “You get one ranting
statement for free since clearly you’ve had a rough time, but I
think you’re wrong about this guy. He just needs time to figure out
what he wants.”

“Well, that doesn’t help. There’s a
good chance he doesn’t want me.” Besides, he’d had time. He’d had
plenty of time.

Her phone buzzed with a text, and
she pulled it out. It almost made her smile, but she still felt too
hopeless to smile. Self-preservation. Eyes open. No more giddy
twenty-one year old Lauren calling the shots. She would
remain…hopeless. Her love life was still dead. Very
dead.

“What?”

“He wants to know if he can call me
later—to talk.”

“See! That’s a good
sign.”

“Maybe.” Her hopes had crashed
pretty spectacularly last night. She was not getting them up. At
all. She’d squash them down periodically just to be sure. She
texted back a simple, “Yes.” That was cool and not at all
pathetic.

Lauren bounced a knee and drummed
her fingers on the table. When was “later” anyway? Maybe she should
ask Eric what “later” meant to a guy.

“You’re going to be useless at
carving pumpkins,” her sister observed, bringing food out to the
table.

“Possibly. I’m just here to applaud
efforts anyway, though.”

“You’re here to scoop out the guts.
None of the rest of us will do that.”

Lauren sighed. “Fine. I guess
there’s some joy in knowing you’ll always be needed at
Halloween.”

Megan patted her on the head.
“That’s the spirit.”

She doubted it—she really
did.

He called as she stepped in the door
after getting back from her sister’s.

“Hello?”

“Is this a good time?” He sounded
nervous. That was good. He wouldn’t sound nervous if he was hoping
to stomp on her heart.

“Yes, this is fine. I just got home
from carving pumpkins with my nieces. One of them carved a
Jaws’
shark, and the other carved a face with a knife
sticking out its forehead—she kept some of the guts to leave around
the scene of the crime. I was really proud.”

“You should be.” His voice was more
relaxed. Maybe he’d assumed she was going to fall to pieces, burst
into tears, and hang up the phone.

She still might, depending on what
he said.

In fact, he had to make a quick
recovery. After five minutes, thirty-one year old Lauren was
sealing the coffin on this relationship and writing it off as
dead-on-arrival. Self-preservation.

“So?” she asked finally when the
silence between them dragged on.

“I’m sorry I didn’t tell you from
the beginning. I kept waiting for that perfect moment, but there
didn’t seem to be one.”