“You were sleeping, and you’d had a hard day. I decided it would be kinder to leave you there rather than wake you up just to give you a message.”
“I’ll bet you have paper and pen at your house. You could have left me a note.”
“Too impersonal.”
I shook my head in disbelief. “And disappearing without saying anything isn’t?”
A tiny smile snuck out before he could hide it.
I pointed at his face. “What was that?”
“What was what?”
“That smile! I saw you smile, don’t try to hide it. You like this, don’t you?”
“Like what?” He was all innocence.
“Like torturing me, that’s what.” I was grumbling now. I’ve never felt so out of my element and at a disadvantage as I did now. I hated myself for being such a wiener. If we were in the courtroom, I’d have Mack on his knees and the judge shaking his head in pity. But in this truck, wearing his mother’s slippers and my former dorm-wear, I was the one being made a fool of. And the saddest part was, I was doing it to myself.
He said nothing to deny it. His tiny smile slid away to make his expression once more unreadable.
We drove in silence for a while, my stress elevating with every passing mile until I couldn’t take it anymore. “Listen, all joking aside, I have to talk to you. It’s really important.”
“So talk. I’m sitting right here.”
“I really need you to sign those papers.”
“No.”
I huffed out a big breath of frustrated air. I’d been expecting a run-around but not a flat out refusal. Time to change tack … “You don’t love me, Mack.”
“How do you know who I love and who I don’t love?”
“You don’t even know me! How can you possibly love me? That’s just … stupid. Asinine, even.”
He glanced at me, his expression dark. “I know you better than you think I do.” His brows turned down as he focused on the road, and his hands tensed on the wheel.
“Oh, yeah? I doubt it.” No one knew the real me. Not even Bradley. People who said you needed to be yourself when you were with your soulmate didn’t know the real me. If they did, they might change their perspective on that little happy thought. Some things were just better left unsaid, and some pasts are just better left behind.
“Okay, how about this … I know you grew up in the northeast and your father left when you were very young. I know your mother dated a bunch of men who were big partiers, before moving in with one who eventually abused her. I know you feared for your lives for years, and finally convinced your mom to leave him when you were in high school, but that she went back to him right before you started college. I know he almost killed her once and you saw the whole thing happen.” He paused and looked at me for a few seconds. “How am I doing so far?”
My heart-rate went through the roof and my mouth had gone suddenly dry. How could he possibly know all my secrets? Is he a mind reader? Did he do a background check on me?
He continued unraveling my secrets, not waiting for a response from me. “I know you started working on your, uh … lifeplan … I think that’s what you called it, when you were fifteen and have been following it to the letter ever since. Except for that little side-trip you took from it in Las Vegas, everything’s been going according to plan. You’ve only dated guys who fit the mold and want the same things you want, and when they stopped fitting into the plan, you dumped ‘em and found another candidate.”
“More like they dumped me,” I mumbled. My ears burned with shame. I felt like that teenager in the hospital again, signing off on documents I didn’t read, telling the doctors to go ahead and do whatever they could to save her.
“Dumped, got dumped … that’s all just semantics. I’m not done yet. So, then this guy asked you to marry him, and you checked all the boxes to make sure he fit, and when you realized he did, you said yes. And that’s when you decided to finally give me a call and take care of the little problem you started two years ago.”
I lifted my arm and rested it on the windowsill, the opposite hand pressed into the seat next to my left thigh. I felt like I was being attacked, only he was doing it in a normal tone of voice without a hint of malice. If the truck had been stopped, I probably would have jumped out.
My voice was shaky when it finally started to work again. “I didn’t start any problem, you did. And how do you know all that stuff about me? Have you been spying on me?”
He laughed bitterly. “Hardly. I didn’t even know where you were until you showed up in town looking for me. When Boog called and described you and told me what you’d said to Hannah, I knew it was you. It’s the first time I’ve even come close to you in two years.” He didn’t sound happy about that at all.