Dara sighed and faced the boxes again. She was way too scatterbrained for this right now, but she was the princess of procrastinators, and if she didn’t get all this stuff unpacked soon, it wouldn’t get done at all. Besides, if she wasn’t unpacking, she needed to be working, and setting up her house was a lot less taxing on the brain than working. Tomorrow, she’d be back in her home office and catching up on her various clients, but today, this needed to get done, damn it.
She rubbed her tired eyes. It was her own damned fault she was like this. She couldn’t even blame staying up too late or the hormone-related fatigue, though those two things weren’t helping.
It was that damned conversation in the barn’s gravel parking lot with Matt.
Had she really offered to have sex with him? It had seemed like a good idea at the time—relieving him of that pesky virginity, helping him learn a few things—but now, she wasn’t so sure.
If that kiss was any indication, they wouldn’t be cold fish together like she and Jon had been. Hell, one kiss had made her hotter than those scorching nights with her first husband.
These hormones are fucking insane.
It had to be the hormones. There was no other explanation for her suddenly being this distracted by Matt.
Even if he could scratch that hormonal itch while she helped him figure out this whole physical intimacy thing, there was still the possibility this could complicate things. And if sex with Matt did complicate things, then she could easily find herself in the same place she would be in now if Jon hadn’t relinquished his rights—sharing custody with someone she didn’t want to be around. That wasn’t something she wanted with her baby’s father or with the best friend she’d been missing all this time.
Maybe this wasn’t such a good idea. On the other hand, and maybe it was the hormones talking, she was intrigued by the idea. If it did complicate things, they could talk it through this time and be adults about it, right? She wanted to believe they’d never go their separate ways again. They’d both matured in the years since that stupid argument, which had turned into a much longer silence than it should have because it had happened at the worst possible time.
On the eve of her move to Los Angeles with her first husband, Matt had let it slip that he, to put it mildly, didn’t think highly of the man she’d married. What he didn’t know at the time was that the marriage was already on the rocks. Dara wasn’t about to admit it, though. Pride and immaturity turned the conversation into one of those rare but heated arguments between her and Matt.
That was the beauty of their friendship—they could fight, yell, scream, not speak for a few days and then get together, laugh about how stupid it was, talk through whatever they’d fought about in the first place and move on like nothing had ever happened.
But this time, it hadn’t worked out that way.
The next morning, Dara and Charlie had left Aspen Mill for California. The road trip had been a clusterfuck of fights in the car and angry sex in cheap motels. Then came finding a place in LA. Finding a job. Finding the money to make ends meet while Southern California’s cost of living made mincemeat of their meager savings.
By the time the smoke had cleared and she could stop and think, six months had passed. She hadn’t called Matt. Matt hadn’t called her. They finally got back in touch in October—she’d finally broken down and called him on his birthday—and they’d promised to meet up to talk when they both came to town for Christmas.
But the first Thanksgiving away from their families turned out to be the last straw for Dara and Charlie. Suddenly she wasn’t coming home for Christmas. Her time, money and energy were suddenly funneled into finding a lawyer. Finding her own place. Finding a second and third job.
Matt e-mailed her in May for her birthday, apologizing that he hadn’t called, but work had been so busy, he hadn’t had much downtime. The e-mail had been sent at two in the morning on a weeknight, so apparently he wasn’t kidding. October rolled around again. She e-mailed him. They started sending short, tentative messages back and forth, but it didn’t last. He was busy with his company. She was barely keeping her head above water with three jobs. By Thanksgiving, the communication had fizzled to almost nothing, and by Christmas, it had stopped. Her birthday came and went. His came and went. Another holiday season. On New Year’s Eve, she’d hemmed and hawed for a long time about breaking the silence, which sparked the first fight with her new—and not terribly secure—boyfriend.
A few months later, at a swanky restaurant in Hollywood, the boyfriend asked and she said yes. While Jon was out of the room later that night, she’d grabbed her phone and caught herself just before she’d excitedly texted Matt. He wouldn’t care. He didn’t even know she was seeing anyone. For that matter, she didn’t know if he was seeing anyone, or if he was still in Chicago, or, well, anything. They’d done exactly what she’d never imagined they could—they’d drifted apart.