There it was.
She had the slight urge to throw up. Surely she wasn’t being…dumped.
Brynn had a near-perfect record. Other than the time in tenth grade when Patrick Mulligan had reneged on his homecoming date offer in order to take the better-endowed Carrie Lowry, Brynn had always been a dumper, never a dumpee.
But looking at the resigned, detached expression on James’s face, she had a feeling that was about to change.
“Sure, what do you want to talk about?” she asked, hating the false bright note in her tone. One octave higher and she’d be squeaking.
He set his hand on her knee. Squeezed. “I think we need to take a break.”
Brynn didn’t let her smile slip. Couldn’t even if she wanted to. It was frozen on her face.
“A break, James? I’m not sure anyone beyond junior high really knows what that means.”
He let out a small exasperated sigh. As though she were being the difficult one. “It means I’m not sure I want to do this anymore.”
“You’re not sure,” she repeated in a flat voice.
He rubbed a hand through his hair. Hair that suddenly seemed unbearably boring. “I care about you, Brynn. I really do. And we’re perfect together, it’s ju
st…”
Brynn set her wineglass on the coffee table with a clink. “We are perfect together, James. We want all the same things, we like all the same people…”
“I know,” he said, giving her a sad smile.
“Then why?” Her voice was a whisper now.
His lips tightened and something like guilt flashed across his face, and Brynn felt it like a knife to the gut.
Still, she made herself ask it. “Is there someone else?”
His fingers flexed on her knee again, but she could no longer stand his touch, and pulled her leg back so that she was sitting upright. It was better posture anyway.
“I didn’t cheat, Brynn. I would never do that.”
She relaxed slightly. And she believed him. James was one of those guys with an iron-rod moral code. He wouldn’t run around on her. And yet…
“But you have feelings for someone,” she prompted. She kept her eyes locked on the tulip arrangement on her coffee table, but she felt him shift beside her.
“More like the potential for feelings,” he said awkwardly.
Oh, please. Now she did turn to face him. “Come on. At least give it to me straight. Who is she? Someone you work with?”
Please don’t let it be that cliché.
He cleared his throat. Took another sip of wine. For a second, Brynn almost felt sorry for him. She knew firsthand how hard it was to break up with someone.
But her sympathy began to fade as she realized she’d never dumped someone because she had feelings for someone else.
She intentionally pushed aside her recent attraction to Will. That was a result of too much wine and too few shirts on his part.
James cleared his throat. “Well, you know Maggie?”
Brynn’s mind went blank for a moment before her eyes bugged out. Oh, surely not. “Maggie, as in your neighbor?”
He colored slightly. Bingo.