I made my way to Reynolds’， and Lila told me Hugh was down in his office.
“Hey,” I said, closing the door before dropping into the chair across from his desk.
“What happened? You look like shit.”
I spent the next thirty minutes filling him in on all of it. Reese being with Carl. Her not wanting to tell me what was going on. The horrible things I’d said to her. And the things she’d said back.
He sat back in his chair, not saying a word. He just listened.
“You want my opinion, or do you want me to just take your side?” he finally said, intertwining his fingers as he leaned forward on his desk.
“Both.”
“Well, I’ll always have your back, you know that. But this is not some woman that you don’t know, brother. This is Reese. You’ve been best friends since fucking birth. She wouldn’t lie to you if she were sleeping with Carl. It’s not who she is. You know that. I don’t believe there’s anything going on there, and I think you overreacted.”
“So why not tell me that she met with him? Why lie about it?”
He blew out a breath and shrugged. “She didn’t lie. She just didn’t offer it up. There could be a lot of reasons why, but none of those are because she’s playing you. That girl is madly in love with you. If she wanted to get back together with Carl, she’d never have crossed the line with you. I don’t think she knew it at the time, but I’m guessing something inside her knew it. Just like something inside you knew it was right.”
“Yet she doesn’t think I’m capable of having a relationship with her. She insists that I’ll go away, and she won’t even stay at the house because she has so little faith in me.”
“Is that really what you think, Finny?”
I scrubbed a hand down my face. “I don’t know what I fucking think. I’m going out of my mind over this girl. I can’t think straight.”
He chuckled this annoying, cocky sound, and I wanted to dive over the desk and tackle him. He saw the look on my face and held up a hand. “There you go again, overreacting. I’m not laughing at you. I’m laughing because you’ve got it bad. I know it. You know it. But she doesn’t know it yet, brother. And it’s fair of her to be cautious.”
“What? I thought you were on my side.”
“I am. Always. But, Finn, come on, man. You’ve never had a relationship that lasted longer than a few drinks and a fun weekend. She’s scared to death. You’re a fucking movie star. You’ve always had women chasing after you. She lives here. She wants the fairy tale, brother. The picket fence and the kids and the whole nine yards. Of course, she’s fucking nervous. I can’t really blame her. She isn’t saying that she’s going to date anyone or run back to her ex. What did she actually say? Be honest. What did she ask you to do?”
I leaned back in my chair and thought it over. “She didn’t want us to make any decisions before I left about—us. She told me to go to Tokyo and have the time of my life, and if I missed her the way she would miss me, she’d move back into the house when I got home next month. She said she didn’t want me to go there feeling pressure with her living at my house, and that if I came back and didn’t feel the same way, we’d go back to being best friends, or some shit like that.”
“You dumb fucker.” He threw his hands in the air. “She’s worried about you. She doesn’t want you to feel trapped. But that sure as shit doesn’t mean she doesn’t want you to come back and want the same things she wants. That’s why she said she’d move back in with you if you still felt the same.”
“Of course, I’ll feel the same. She’s driving me fucking crazy. She’s all I think about.”
“She doesn’t want to hear it, Finn. She wants you to show her. Go to Tokyo. Find a way to show her that you miss her every fucking day. Show her, for fuck’s sake. It’s not a lot to ask. She’s giving you a pass to figure it out. She already knows what she wants. She wants to make sure that you want the same fucking thing. Because she loves you enough to let you go if you don’t.”
“Goddamn it. Should I go to the rental house and bring her home with me? Try to talk to her?”
He laughed so loud that it bellowed around the small office. “I think you’ve gone caveman one too many times already. Demanding her to come home with you right now will not go over well.”
“How do you know?”