“Nope. I love that man,” she says, reaching for another handful of candy. “My Jude.”
Since I hate and loathe M&Ms, I’m pretty sure I keep the bowl stocked mostly for her cravings. I’d do just about anything for Leigh. I adore her.
Her husband, Jude, whom I also adore, is scary-big. Half-Maori with a few missing teeth and tribal facial tattoos, at first sight, he may look like he eats small children for breakfast every morning…but when he looks at Leigh, his expression is filled with so much tenderness, it hurts me. That’s crazy, ri
ght? But it does. It makes my chest ache and my eyes water because I want what they have.
I can’t imagine either of them cheating on each other the way Bryce cheated on me.
I clear my throat of the lump attempting to lodge there. “How many more days?”
“Technically? Ten.” She chuckles, then raises her voice a little, leaning down to talk to her baby. “But I wouldn’t mind sooner if that works for you, sugar.”
I laugh with her as I follow her to the conference room, noting that her once graceful gait is now a pronounced waddle. And fuck, but I’m jealous. I’m jealous of my best friend’s waddle.
At thirty-two years old, my biological clock has been on alarm mode for two years, loudly reminding me that time’s running down, a fact that sends me into sweat-induced panics in the middle of the night. Especially now that I’m single.
After five years together, I truly believed that Bryce was the proverbial “one,” right up until the day he broke it off and moved in with Ruby, a bartender at our favorite bar. Erstwhile favorite. Sometimes I don’t know what was worse: losing my possible forever-someone or losing the place where I would have gone to drown my sorrows.
Anyway, the net-net is that here I am, single all over again, without a prospect in sight, while my best friend is blissfully married with her first baby on the way. It’s so depressing, I wonder how the heck I’m going to make it through the summer.
Leigh looks at me over her shoulder, easily reading my mind after a friendship that started in college and spans several years of working together at the Seattle Sentinel. “He’s out there, Manda.”
“So you say.”
“Bryce was an asshole. I never liked him.”
“You say that too.”
“For real? Let Ruby have him. She’s a first-class skank for poaching him right from under your nose…and he’s blind if he can’t see what he lost.”
While I appreciate Leigh’s support, I feel too pathetic to muster a rousing, “Hell, yes, sister-friend!” so I mumble a quiet “Thanks.”
She stops mid-waddle and turns to look at me, scanning my green eyes with her brown. “Hey. Don’t get down on yourself. You don’t want to be half of ‘Manda and Bryce’ anymore, do you?”
“Manda and Bryce sounds better than Manda and no one.”
“No, it does not! He wasn’t the one, sweet thing. You were just passing time with him. The right one’s still out there waiting. You’re not giving up, are you?”
“Giving up? Hmm.” I tap my chin. “Well, my boyfriend of five years dumped me because he wasn’t “into us” anymore, which we all know means he wasn’t into me…and then he moved in with Ruby the bartender, who’s all of twenty-two. A whole decade younger than me,” I say. “Doesn’t exactly make a girl feel like a million bucks, Leigh.”
She moves the folder she’s holding under her arm and reaches for my hands, taking them in hers. “He’s out there.”
I drop her eyes because her faith in me doesn’t feel warranted. “Sure.”
“Manda!”
When Leigh uses her no-nonsense, almost-a-mom voice, I listen. “What?”
“Hear my words, girl. He’s…Out…There. You just have to believe.”
“Right. Okay.”
“You believe me?” she asks, her dark eyes searching mine.
“Yes…No…I want to, but…” I take a deep breath and sigh, looking away from her and blinking away the fat, unwanted tears that are suddenly blurring my vision. “Where? Where is he?”
“He’s not going to fly through your bedroom window with a three-carat princess cut, Manda. You gotta find him. You gotta put yourself in his path.”