“Well, you’ve convinced me. That sounds like a horrible life.” Was he rolling his eyes? “Besides, I was under the impression that you wanted to move to New York for the next phase of your career. Just because you’re not working for my company doesn’t mean we couldn’t see each other.”
“Conflict of interest,” Lana pointed out. “Depending on the firm, it could be considered me turning traitor.”
“Why, Ms. Losers,” Ken said. “If I didn’t know any better, I’d think you were coming up with excuses for us to not keep seeing each other.”
“I’m being practical.” Honestly, Lana hadn’t intended to get this quarrelsome, let alone about this subject. “It’s not practical to date when we live hours apart. I’m guessing we work enough weekends that we would rarely see each other. How often do you come down to DC?”
“Not very often, I admit.”
“Exactly, and I don’t come up to New York all that much.”
“Anything could change.”
“I suppose.”
“Bunny.” That softly spoken name always made her heart do erratic things in her chest. Who is he to call me something like that? My boyfriend? My husband? Yet I fall for it like some girl with her first love… “Come back to the present, please. We’ll worry about that nonsense later. Tonight is supposed to be fun.”
She abashedly pushed aside her mostly-eaten dinner. “Would you want to keep seeing me after the conference is over?”
“You’re the one who said this was a fling, not me.”
I feel like some tides have been turned somewhere. Wasn’t this supposed to be the other way around? Ken aloof about a more serious connection while Lana coyly begged him to take her on as his girlfriend? Oh, who was she kidding? He didn’t want her to be his girlfriend. Maybe he thought he did, but Lana knew better than to believe something like that. It was almost too good to be true. In fact, she knew it was. No one was more cynical about the realities of love than Lana. She couldn’t remember a single time in her life where she harbored those kinds of romantic fantasies.
Because she had always known they were impossible.
Her mother was the first one to break the news to her when she was a small child drawing up drama galore with her Barbies. “How long until that Ken doll cheats on his Barbie bride with that slut Midge?” Juliet Losers spent half her time drunk around Lana. The only time she let up was when she was pregnant with her second daughter, not that her behavior improved much. “No, wait, dickless Ken would want a brunette honey like Teresa. Calling it now.” Lana barely understood what her mother was talking about back then. One thing she could say, though? She had made it this far in her life and was never once cheated on. Her relationships never got serious enough for something like that to happen.
Thanks, Mom. Mothers. Always finding new and exciting ways to scar their daughters for life. Lana was glad she didn’t want children. I bet Ken – and what an ironic name that seemed like now – wants kids. A guy like him? Of course he does. If he was as tender as he came off, then it was highly likely he wanted a small brood of little Andrews babies. He had a lot of brothers. Wouldn’t he want a family like that too?
“I did say it was a fling. That’s the only thing it could be, right?”
Ken’s grip on her loosened. “If you say it’s the only thing it could be, then it is. I won’t argue with it.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Why are you sorry? You know what you want. Or don’t want, in this case.”
“I’m sorry because I got ahead of myself. You were right. Let’s focus on tonight.”
“Yes.” Ken signed off on how much their dinner cost and gestured to the door. “Shall we?”
Lana sat up straight for the first time in forty-five minutes. Yikes. My back. Had it been worth it to hold that man’s hand for so long? Lana was almost afraid to find out.
***
Goodness, did this woman ever really shut up?
Ken surprised himself with that thought, but Lana was a special case. It wasn’t so much that she talked a lot. That didn’t bother him. If he wanted to date a woman, then he wanted to hear her talk, right?