Page 30 of Another Life

I don’t need pretty lies to make me feel special. I’m not these other women. He doesn’t have to woo me.

All he’d have to do is…no longer be my professor. And shut the hell up sometimes.

You don’t have to lie to me.

Another immediate response.

I’m an asshole, not a liar.

I’m still standing outside when I peer up at the building, wondering where he is inside. But I don’t have to wonder for long.

He’s leaning against one of the hallway windows, his hands in his pockets, uncaring that he’s been caught. One of his brows lift, as if challenging me.

To what? To take him up on his offer? To give him a chance?

With anyone else, this would’ve been fucking weird. But with Abraham, it justworks. His ease with being enthralled, his lack of façade when it comes to me, the way he doesn’t give a shit if I turn him down because he knows, with every responding text message of mine, that I’m just as curious as he is.

The young men around me no longer interest me, withtheir faux confidence that breaks easily under the pressure of my strong personality. Their desire to appear uninterested, their want to be chased because they didn’t get enough attention in high school.

Abraham is a breath of fresh air.

I turn away, typing a response as I walk away. I press send and tuck my phone away, not wanting to second-guess my moment of impulse.

I’m free tomorrow.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

I DREAM MY WAY BACK

PRESENT

Ishouldn’t have given in and called Abraham. And now, I’m paying dearly for it.

As in, now he’s getting on my fucking nerves about continuing our conversation. Our conversation that happened nearly a month ago.

I’m good at dodging people I don’t feel like interacting with. But Abraham is even better at pestering me to the point of complete animosity.

We need to talk, Sabrina

The idea that he can storm into my life and upend it on a whim infuriates me. But this is Abraham. He is a force, and he expects the world to bend to his will the same way his actors and actresses do. The same way his students did in college.

The same way I used to…in every way.

I’m not ready

It’s all I can tell him; it’s all I can muster to get him off my back.

Divorce is messy without adding him popping back up into the mix. Parenthood is tough enough without the past trying to storm back in and take all of my focus.

“You still there?” Peter asks through the speakerphone on my work desk. We’re in the middle of comparing our schedules so the girls are accounted for. And while our hours haven’t changed much, it’s finagling two different homes and the full weight of being single parents without having someone else to lean on that makes these things tough.

“Yeah,” I mutter, tempted to tell him what’s going on. For so many years, Peter had been my ear, my shoulder, my best friend. I sigh as I lean back in my chair, running my hands through my hair.

“You okay?” he asks and it’s a kindness I don’t deserve.

I’m so tempted to tell him that I’m not, and that Abraham has come back into my life. But I can’t. I can’t tell the only person who knows even an inkling about that man and I.

Sharing that would kill any amicability between us; it would send this calm separating of lives into a fucking spiral that neither of us would be prepared to handle.