Dances with Monsters(162)

However, that was not the only thing contributing to her foul mood.

Since Monday, she hadn't seen Heath and she had barely spoken to him. Busy, he'd said, he'd been super busy lately. He hadn't mentioned what any of that busy-ness entailed but Drew assumed it had to do with him needing to pick up the pieces from the fallout at Smackdown. She also assumed that it had to do, at least a little bit, with her little confession in the courthouse a couple days ago.

Where she had initially felt brave and happy at her admission, she now felt down and a little foolish. She might have been out of the dating game for some time now but she at least recalled hearing her girlfriends and sisters tell her that the girl was never supposed to say "I love you" first, even if she really meant it, because guys tended to scare easily, and everyone knew that girls got way too emotionally overwrought too soon.

Drew had meant what she'd said to Heath. In the days following her confession and Heath's subsequent silence, she had forced herself to examine the truth of her statement. Had she just been caught up in the stress of the day? The emotion of the weekend? Did she really know what she was saying?

After a couple of sleepless nights and thinking of little else, Drew realized that yes, what she'd said to him, she'd meant. And she was still proud of herself for putting all of her emotions out on the table, the same as she'd felt when she'd first uttered the words. And at the time, she hadn't necessarily even been looking for or expecting a return statement from him immediately. It would have been nice, but that hadn't been the point of her opening her mouth in the first place. It was something that she'd needed him to know, to understand how she felt. And she regretted nothing.

However, as the hours stretched into a day and a day became days, and days began to stretch into the week, she realized that it would have been nice to hear something back from him. Telling her he loved her, too, would have been the first choice. Since he hadn't said it back, she could only assume he didn't feel that way about her. But even if he hadn't said it back to her, at least it would have been nice to feel like things hadn't changed between them, and they now obviously had. With his sudden "busy-ness" and his unavailability for her, physically and conversationally, she began to believe that she had, in fact, scared him off.

She had to laugh ruefully at herself a little bit. No, it wasn't her traumatic experience or subsequent mental fallout and issues with self-mutilation and anxiety that had scared him off. Nor her squeamishness at close physical contact or the length of time it had taken for her to become comfortable, let alone enjoy, being touched. No, it had been her honest confession that she loved him, that she was in love with him, that had sent him screaming for the hills.

Instant man-repellant, she thought wryly. She was extremely disappointed, though; Heath had stayed by her side throughout everything but this, this, had been the thing to push him away? He had helped to bring her so far, and once she'd decided to go all the way—literally and figuratively—he was just done?

She was hurt, and lonely, and utterly miserable.

To make things worse, the showcase was in just one day. She was ready, her costume was ready, she felt confident about her physical ability to pull off the performance. However, now that her head and her heart were hurting, she knew it now had the ability to become a complete clusterfuck. She had to find a way to channel her negative emotions into the passion of her dance, or else she would simply be distracted and fail despite her hard work and dedication to being successful. She hadn't even bothered rehearsing at all this week yet, so heartsick she was that she couldn't even really bring herself to care much about the performance. The rational part of her brain recognized that she was in a danger-zone that could set her up for failure.

Her first day back at work was awkward at best. She felt like everyone who came into the café was looking at her strangely now that she was, apparently, all over the news. She was no longer Joe Carnevale's youngest kid, workin' the counter at the café. She was a rape victim who had just testified at the trial of her attacker to put him away for life. She hated it, the looks, the whispers. She wanted to throw things and yell and scream at them, tell them to mind their own fucking business. But she couldn't, so she endured it all silently, steam coming out of her ears.

Her mood certainly didn't help the customer interactions. Normally, she was able to keep her feelings and emotions in check when dealing with customers, wanting to present the best front for her parents' business as possible and be friendly and inviting and warm. Today, she was cool, disinterested and at times, almost actually growly. Bunz, normally fearless when it came to demanding that her friend "miss her" with her attitude or instructing her to spill the beans, quietly kept to herself in the back. When she did speak to Drew, she was soft-spoken and kept things short, almost as though she knew the real reason for Drew's moodiness. Drew knew she was going to need to go back and apologize to Bunz later on. But she couldn't find it in herself to talk about what was happening and why she was in such a bad mood. She silently thanked God for a friend like Bunz who seemed to know instinctively not to push her, nor did she seem to take offense to Drew's shortness, as though she understood that it had nothing to do with her.