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Brock chuckled, giving me that evil look that said he was about to pull some shit. “You know, this is quite the coincidence. They’re Luke and Laura,” he said, pointing at the screen. “And you’re Luke and Laura.”
“I thought his name was Dash,” Lee muttered, not bothering to look at me.
“That’s just a nickname. How cute is that?” Brock continued. “Luke and Laura. The only difference being that they had this amazing love affair. They were the couple everyone was rooting for. And you’re this amazing couple…of friends. Ah, the parallels that could be drawn…”
That was it. I patted Laura’s leg and she scooted off me just enough for me to stand. I went right, avoiding shoving my very hard general in her face as I motioned for Brock to join me in the kitchen. As expected, that cocky grin was still there, still begging for me to wipe it off his face.
“What the fuck are you doing?”
“What? I just find it funny.”
“You’re being an ass.”
He nodded with a grin. “But you’re the only one that seems to mind. Notice how she didn’t even respond to the comment.”
That’s because she wasn’t in love with me like I was with her. “Would you just fucking stop? It’s not funny anymore.”
“When are you going to man up and see this for what it is?”
“See what for what is?”
“Your relationship with her,” he stressed. “And before you tell me there’s no relationship, may I remind you that you sleep in bed with her every night. She spends all her free time here, and you two were just sharing a fucking chair like a couple. If that’s not a relationship, I don’t know what is.”
“Look, I get it. I don’t understand any of this either. I wish to God I did because then I wouldn’t be walking around all the time with a woody that I can’t shake. But I can’t…I can’t lose her.”
“Do you really have her now?”
“Not in the way I want, but isn’t something better than nothing?” I asked pathetically.
His eyebrows shot up and he shook his head slowly. “I don’t know, man. If I were you, I wouldn’t be able to sleep with a woman I was in love with every night, but not touch her the way I wanted. I don’t know how you do that.”
I ran my fingers through my hair in frustration. To be honest, it was a question I asked myself every fucking day. “What would you have me do?”
“Be honest with yourself, first of all, and then be honest with her. Tell her that you’re in love with her,” he insisted.
“Yeah? And what do I do when she says she doesn’t feel the same?”
“How can she not? She came over here in pajamas at two in the morning!”
“Yeah, because she was used to sleeping next to me. That’s not the same as wanting to jump my bones. If she even attempted to kiss me at some point, I would make a move, but I’m getting nothing from her.”
“Then end it,” he said solemnly. “For your sake, you have to stop doing this to yourself. Yeah, it’ll be hard and it’ll suck, but how are you going to feel when she goes out with the fireman again? Or when she falls in love and stops coming around? It’ll crush you, man.”
He was right. If I didn’t do something soon, this was going to blow up in my face and break my heart. But how was I supposed to remove the one person from my life that made me feel things I’d never felt before? I looked into the other room where she was sitting on my chair and tried to imagine what it would be like to come home without her here.
Hell.
It would be pure hell. Lonely nights were not something I cared to go back to. I was so used to her being around, cooking dinner, and snuggling with me at night. We had something I would never find with another woman. And now I was about to remove her from my life to spare myself the pain that would eventually tear me apart down the road.
But I had to do it.
Just not today.
36
LAURA
“I found a new place for us,”Lee said as we walked into the grocery store.