“What are you talking about? You have a fiancée. She must be in love with you if she said yes when you asked her to marry you. Why are we even talking about this?”
“Our engagement is fake,” I confessed, saying the words and ripping the band-aid right the hell off. “Everyone just assumed we were getting married and I convinced her to roll with it, but she’s not in love with me. I’m really into her, though. She drives me insane, but only when she shuts down on me. I don’t know how to make her see that I could be the man for her if she won’t let me in.”
Colt stared at me for a beat, but thankfully, he spared me a lecture on the pretend fiancée thing. “Okay, I hear you, but if I’m being honest, I’m not really sure how I got her to fall in love with me. We’ve been together since college, but you already knew that. We just fit together.”
“How did you get her to realize that, though?”
He shrugged, his gaze narrowing as he stared off into the distance. “That’s a fucking good question. I don’t have an answer for you, man. I don’t even know if I got her to realize anything. I don’t think either of us fought it very hard. We met, fell in love, and just went with it.”
“Sounds like a dream come true to me,” I said and tipped a long sip of my beer down my throat. “It feels like all Isabella and I do is fight it. Fight each other. We just seem to fight a lot, but the fighting doesn’t come anywhere near as naturally as being with her.”
“If she can’t see what a good guy you are, then maybe you should break off your fake engagement and find a woman who wants to love you for real.”
We kept talking for that beer and the next, but his words stayed with me even after we stopped talking about it and long after he left. Isabella intrigued me and I really was into her, but I didn’t know if she was in a place where she could love anything other than her job. All signs pointed to a big fat no on that front, and maybe it was time for me to accept that.