Sleeping With Her Enemy(5)

He set the ring on the bar in front of them and she stared at it, trying to get her shit together. It was beautiful in its way. She had picked it out, after all. But lying there in the dim light of the bar, the emerald-cut stone and shiny platinum band looked so…common. Like something you’d see on every third Pinterest board of women her age. She took a deep breath. “Well, a man removing a ring from my finger was not how I’d imagined this day going.” She’d been going for levity, thinking a bit of self-deprecation would pierce the weird, thick awareness that crackled between them. But instead of wry, it came out sounding sad. Pathetic.

Dax cleared his throat. “My point earlier, which I stand by, is that Mason is a tool. What kind of idiot proposes over cereal? Even I, who will go to my grave never having proposed to anyone, know better than that. And you know what? Mason is not just a tool. He’s a boring tool. You might be a lot of things, Ms. Morrison, but boring isn’t one of them. So Mason left you—so what? You didn’t really lose anything.”

He might as well have punched her. Because although he was, as usual, mistaken, he’d managed to get right to the heart of the matter with that last comment. “I have, though,” she squeaked, appalled at how her voice came out sounding like she’d just inhaled the helium from one of the Canada Day balloons hanging above the bar. “I’ve lost everything.”

“Okay, that’s just patently not true. You’ve lost this guy, Dr. Vajayjay, whom I believe we’ve already established you’re better off without.” Dax’s voice dripped with disdain, and Amy wanted to point out that it was he who’d established that she was better off without Mason. She had murmured nary a word of agreement on the topic. But on the other hand, she hadn’t exactly jumped to Mason’s defense, so perhaps that was telling. “So I fail to see how you can say you’ve ‘lost everything.’” He made air quotes with his fingers before wrapping them around his beer bottle and taking a long pull.

The truth wasn’t very flattering. But hey, if ever there was a time to engage in some ruthless introspection, it was just after being jilted. And if you were already talking to a dickhead who disliked you, what was a little more ammo?

“I had this idea of our future, see?” Her voice had lost that squeaky quality, but it was still a lot shakier than she would have liked. She cleared her throat. “I started dating Mason when I was twenty-two. Last year of college. It felt like the last big decision I would make. Once I made it—once I chose him—it was like I was settled on a certain path.” She sighed. There was no need to fill in the details: the boy and girl—Irish twins, because you might as well get it over with all at once. The house in ritzy, old-money Forest Hill. The weekend cottage on Lake Muskoka. But she wasn’t as shallow as that sounded. It wasn’t about the stuff. It was about the life the stuff signified. There were also birthday parties for the kids, bake sales, neighborhood book clubs. It was hard to think of a way to sum it all up. “I have the career thing covered,” she finally said, aware that he was waiting for her to continue. “And until a couple hours ago, I thought I had the family part nailed down, too.”

“Yeah,” Dax said. “But Mason. He was so…dull.”

Some switch inside her chest flipped, and she started to sob. It was that same feeling that had railroaded her in the elevator, the sense that everything had been yanked away from her with no warning. The night before, she and Mason had parted ways all lovey-dovey. She had gone to her parents’ for the night. She hadn’t been able to sleep imagining their life together. She’d fancied herself an astronaut, wakeful the night before liftoff.

And then it was over. And not even because there was someone else, apparently. Because Mason didn’t love her anymore. Because she wasn’t enough. Because her vision of their shared future had been insufficient.

This was worse than in the elevator, though. It was one thing to lose your shit, quite another to lose your shit in front of Dax Harris. She couldn’t look at him as a pit of embarrassment opened in her stomach. So now she was sobbing and mortified—lovely. She might as well just quit her job because there was no way she could face him in the office after this.

“Sweetheart.” He slung an arm around her shoulders, and it had the effect of halting her tears immediately. That, and it scared the hell out of her. She could deal with Dax’s disdain—she’d been doing it for years—but she couldn’t handle his pity.

So she shrugged his arm off, shivering at the loss of what had actually been a not-unpleasant sensation, and said, “Don’t call me sweetheart.” Then she took a long drink of her beer. “This is good.” She held up the bottle to examine it. She hadn’t paid any attention when he’d ordered.