Love Bug (The Prescotts Book 3) by Tara Wyatt (electric book reader .TXT) 📗

out with some friends from work for dinner and bowling, Willa had eaten some soup and then opened the bottle of wine she’d put in the fridge to chill. Glass in hand, she settled herself on the couch and sent Lauren a text message, hoping she’d be free to talk.

Willa: Hey, are you around and able to talk for a bit? Something’s happened and I could use a friend.

Lauren responded almost immediately.

Lauren: Calling you right now.

Willa’s phone started vibrating and she swiped her finger across the screen to answer Lauren’s call.

“Hey,” she said, her voice coming out like sandpaper.

“Hey. What’s going on?”

“Oh. I thought maybe you knew, if maybe Max had told Theo…” Her breath hitched in her chest and she paused, giving herself a moment to get her rampaging emotions under control.

“No, I don’t think he’s talked to Max in a few days, at least. What happened?” Lauren’s voice was warm and full of concern, soothing Willa from the other side of the country.

She spent the next several minutes filling Lauren in on everything—what the article had said, that she’d asked Max about the necklace and he’d lied right to her face, that she’d told him she needed some space to think everything through, and how much she was hurting.

“I love him, Lauren, and I want a future with him, but what if he never lets me in? What if I stay with him, because I love him, and I spend the rest of my life on the outside looking in?”

“What did he say about all of this?”

“He apologized for lying and said that he’d only done it to protect me, meaning he clearly never intended to share this huge event from his past with me. While he was here, I gave him chance after chance to actually open up and talk about it, to let me in, and he didn’t. He just kept apologizing and explaining why he’d done it.” Her fingers went to the pendant around her neck, the one Max had given her. She traced the outline of the stones, hating that the beautiful gift felt tainted now.

“I’m so sorry, babe. I can’t even imagine how it must’ve felt to read that.”

“I was totally blindsided. But the actual article isn’t the worst part. It’s that even after the lie came out, he still didn’t let me in. He just wanted forgiveness and for us to move past this like it hadn’t happened. He doesn’t understand that if this is going to work, I need him to be open with me. I need all of him. He can’t hold me at arm’s length while I give him every single part of me. It makes me feel like the entire relationship is unbalanced and now I’m questioning other things too.”

“Like what?”

“The accuracy of how I see our relationship. Maybe it’s more to me than it is to him, given the different levels of honesty we’ve got going on here. Maybe I just got so far in over my head that I wasn’t able to see things clearly anymore.”

“I don’t think that’s true,” said Lauren gently. “Regardless of what he didn’t tell you, how you saw your relationship, how you feel—or felt—is valid and hasn’t changed.”

“I don’t know what to do. I love him, and I want to be with him, but I’m not sure how to move past this. He lied to me, Lauren. He lied right to my face.”

“He did, and that was shitty of him. But, just thinking about Max’s side here, I don’t think he lied for any nefarious reasons. What happened to his girlfriend had to have been massively traumatic for him. It’d be difficult for anyone to talk about, and Max isn’t exactly the caring and sharing type. And I do think his heart was in the right place, although he shouldn’t have lied.”

“But that’s just my point. If he can’t talk to me about difficult things, maybe we’re at different places in this relationship, and I don’t know what to do with that.”

“I don’t think it’s that Max is deliberately shutting you out, or wanting to keep you at a distance. These guys…they have damage. They have scars. He may not know how to open up to you.”

“What if he never figures that out?”

“I don’t know.” Lauren sighed. “I don’t know. I’m so sorry, babe. This sucks.”

Willa brushed away the fresh tear sliding down her cheek, amazed she still had some in her after all of the crying she’d done today. “I love him. I thought I was going to marry him. I’ve spent the past month being happier than I’ve ever been in my life, and I feel like everything’s just so much more uncertain and nebulous than it was yesterday.”

“Not to make this about me, but I do know where you’re coming from. When I overheard Theo tell his cousin Noah that he was single after we’d been together for weeks—yeah, we hadn’t put a label on it, but come on. We were dating—I felt like I’d been hit with a bus. But in that moment, it also forced me to get really clear about what I wanted and what I needed, both from him and from myself. I knew I was in love with him and I knew I wanted a future with him. But I needed him to commit and not freak out at the idea of a relationship. I needed to know that he was choosing me. Us. I needed him to decide that we were bigger than his baggage. And I needed to forgive him and accept him in order to have a future with him.”

Willa’s stomach burned, simmering with jealousy because everyone could see that Lauren and Theo had been destined to be together. Everyone had believed that Theo would eventually get his head out of his ass, realize he loved her, and fight for her. And he had, and now they were planning their wedding.

“What if he’d never gotten there, though? What if he’d