“That would suck balls.”

She laughed, then realized Ford wasn’t joking. “Wait, that’s your answer?”

“Yes, because it’s the truth,” he said.

“Well, I don’t want the truth. I want to be pumped up, given a pep talk, the whole you-go-girl, you-can-do-this shebang. I want you to say, ‘That’s just crazy talk, Brooke. Of course Cade wants to be with you. You two are great together. In fact, I bet he’s been moping around for the last two weeks, unshowered and barely able to leave his apartment because he’s so depressed you haven’t called.’ Or something—anything—that gives me hope that I won’t end up crashing and burning if I do this.”

“That’s what I was supposed to say?”

“Yes, that is what you were supposed to say, Ford Dixon,” she said, all worked up now.

“Oh.” He mulled this over. “On the upside, I do think there’s at least a good forty to fifty percent chance that what you said is true. Well, not the part about him not showering and unable to leave his apartment. Guys don’t do that. We avoid issues, we get drunk, sometimes we pick up another chick to forget the old one—” he must’ve seen the look of panic in her face—“not suggesting that’s the situation here, I’m just talking, you know, about the gender in general, and . . . I’m thinking I should probably shut up now.”

Brooke covered her face. “Thank you, Ford. And here I’d been worried before.” She stared down, hands rubbing her temples as she tried really, really hard not to imagine Cade with another woman. Then something slid across the table and into her view.

Ford’s iPhone.

With a photo of a bare-chested Ryan Gosling.

Despite everything, she smiled.

“Sorry,” Ford said with a sheepish grin. “Clearly, we’ve established that I’m not the best at the motivational pep talks. But can I say one more thing?”

“Just, please, try not to freak me out anymore, okay? I’m already far out of my wheelhouse just by considering this whole lay-everything-on-the-line scenario.”

“The only way you’ll know for certain what Cade is thinking is if you ask him.”

Brooke considered this, and then nodded.

Reluctantly, she had to admit that her “best friend with the penis attached” had gotten that part right.

Thirty-three

CADE ASKED THE cabdriver to drop him off a few blocks from his apartment, thinking some fresh air would do him good. He wasn’t drunk, but he’d had a few drinks and wanted to clear his head—especially after his talk with Vaughn.

The main issue he had with Vaughn’s surprisingly non-terrible advice was that it didn’t address the real problem. Brooke moving to Charlotte was not the real problem. Sure, it didn’t make the situation any easier, but lots of couples dealt with job relocations and transfers, they made sacrifices for each other or they had long-distance relationships, and they figured it out.

The real problem was him.

The moment he’d heard from Charlie about Brooke’s job offer, and he’d felt that stab of disappointment, he’d closed himself off emotionally. He’d gone into his hey-it-doesn’t-matter mode, and had put on his nothing-fazes-me grin, and he’d told himself—and, essentially, Brooke, too—that it didn’t matter if she left.

That was what he did. That was what he’d always done. He pushed things away that hurt, and then he moved on. His father? Don’t want to think about the ass**le. Football? Yeah, that was great back in the day, but let’s talk about something else. Move on.

He remembered that very first morning with Brooke, watching her sleep in his bed and wondering if he could allow himself to get close to her. And slowly, he’d been doing that, whether he’d realized it at the time or not, but as soon as the other shoe had dropped and he’d felt foolish for thinking they were on the same page, he’d thrown on an easy smile and had walked away.

Typically, that was a good play for him. One that had always worked in the past. Noah’s rejection had hurt, so he took all that anger and negative energy and he’d channeled it, positively, onto the football field. Then when fate had yanked football away from him, he’d gone to law school, and had funneled his ambition and drive into a successful legal career.

And he’d been doing just fine since then. Until everything had upended like the damn Titanic when a sixteen-year-old kid and a sassy lawyer had waltzed into his life. After that, it had suddenly become all Oh, let’s open up and share and Oh, isn’t it cool having a brother and Oh, Brooke, it’s so perfect with you and there’d been voices in his head, and all these weird feelings, and now, for the first time in his life, he was a mess.

Cade took a moment to let that sink in as he turned onto his block.

Huh. Zach had been right.

It really wasn’t that much fun being a mess.

He was in uncharted waters here, and he had a decision to make. He could keep doing his self-protective thing, and let Brooke walk out of his life, and continue on with his string of unfulfilling four-month relationships with women who didn’t challenge him, didn’t make him laugh over a simple text message, and didn’t push him to be better. Or he could go find Brooke—a woman moving halfway across the country, a woman who’d specifically told him, in their very last conversation, that they’d both known from the beginning their relationship wasn’t anything permanent—and lay it all on the line, and hope that he didn’t look like a complete jackass in the process.