Page 79 of The Player Next Door
Clare affected a nonchalant look and shrugged. “He probably has his settings really broad. Women in their twenties and thirties in Minneapolis and Saint Paul. It’s not surprising I showed up.”
“Is it one of the ones where he can’t see you unless you match with him?” Toni asked, leaning forward.
Clare didn’t love how everyone was acting like she was some sort of fragile, breakable wreck. Yes, breaking up with Logan had been unexpectedly difficult, just like falling for him had happened unexpectedly fast. But she was a big girl, and she had gotten over heartbreaks in the past. She’d get over this one too. And moving on, finding someone who fit her interests better, was the easiest way to do that. She’d never done it this way before, but everything about Logan had been new and unexpected, so she was going to try to move on differently, too. It wasn’t surprising that Logan had moved on too, especially given his history.
It hurt, but it was better this way. They weren’t well suited to each other. He’d find someone taller and hotter, who already understood basketball and looked right on his arm. She would find someone who already knew how to play a tabletop role-playing game, and who didn’t make people do a double-take when they saw them together.
She belatedly realized Toni was still waiting on an answer. “Yeah, it’s one of those,” she confirmed. “He won’t know I’ve swiped left.”
Annie hesitated. “Do—you don’t want to see his profile, right? I can just make it go away.”
Clare shook her head and held out her hand before she could stop herself. “No, I want to see it. It’ll help.”
“I think it’ll do the opposite of help,” Chase muttered.
Annie nodded. “It’s your funeral,” she said, slapping the phone back into Clare’s hand.
It did hurt, to be honest. But maybe not as much as it could have, since seeing Logan’s face when they left the elevator had felt like a spear being driven into her heart by a level-nine paladin. It was deep and piercing and nearly fatal, whereas this felt like a blow from a club wielded by a cleric who flubbed their attack roll—it still hurt like hell, but she knew she’d survive. She somehow could tell that Sam had taken the photo, maybe because the way he was smiling was the sort of carefree smile she’d only really seen on his face when he was joking around with Sam. It was like a weight had been lifted from his shoulders, or maybe just that she knew he could be himself around Sam. Clare forced herself to be the one to swipe him away. Logan’s photo slid off the screen and disappeared into the ether, but when she closed her eyes, she still knew the exact shape of his smile.
Chapter Forty
“I’m going to need you to tell me more about how you punched Brooks in the fucking face,” Sam said, leaning over and grabbing herself another slice of pizza.
“He was being a dick,” Logan shrugged, picking a green pepper off a piece still in the box and biting into it. “You’ve said as much yourself a dozen times.”
“More like hundreds,” Sam grumbled. She was leaning against the other side of the narrow peninsula that constituted her kitchen’s entire counter space, which also doubled as her mail room, kitchen table, and apparently, her office. Logan’s elbow nearly knocked into her laptop as he talked, and the pizza box was sitting on top of a stack of unopened mail.
He honestly couldn’t believe she lived like this.
“Right, so why do you need more information?”
Sam smacked his hand as he reached for another green pepper. “Eat the whole slice; don’t just pick at it like a goddamn vulture,” she ordered. “And I need more details about what pushed you over the edge this time, because you’ve been fine with him being a troglodyte for like, seven years.”
When she put it that way, it really did throw Logan’s personal judgment into question. He’d started hanging out with the Aidens in his early twenties, when that sort of bro-y behavior seemed to be what was expected. But their schtick had worn thin as the years went on, although Sam had been consistently disapproving of them from the start.
Logan pulled a slice from the box and steeled himself. “He was a jackass about Clare. Said she wasn’t hot.”
Sam’s face stayed carefully impassive. “Hmm.”
“Hmm? That’s all you have to say?”
“Well, I’m trying not to get punched here,” Sam said, tossing her crust into the box like that wasn’t completely disgusting. Logan picked it up and threw it at her. She caught it and stuck her tongue out at him, dropping it back onto the counter. “I wasn’t going to say she isn’t hot, because she is. But she did, uh, break your heart? I feel like we had a conversation about that like, less than an hour ago. About how you couldn’t forgive her for what she’d done—and, by the way, what exactly she did that was so unforgivable still remains extremely unclear to me—and how you were never going to speak to her again. Assuming all of that is still true, why do you also feel compelled to defend her honor?”
Logan sighed and planted his elbows on the counter. A stack of takeout flyers slid to the ground. “Because I don’t want to talk to her again, but that doesn’t mean I don’t still care about her.”
“Hmm,” Sam repeated. “That does seem like a problem.”
“Yeah.”
“Yeah,” Sam agreed, and they looked at each other over the top of the Pizza Lucé box. “You could always just, you know, see if she’d take you back.”
“No,” Logan said, shaking his head. “I broke us, and that’s—that’s that.”
“Never took you for a quitter,” she replied drily.
“There’s a first time for everything.”
Sam studied him for a long moment. “Well, then there’s only one thing left to do. Give up entirely and move on. Make a clean break.”