What Love Looks Like by Lara Mondoux Read Free Book Online Page B

and seemed more at ease than I’d ever known him to
be. He was seated across from me and next to Jenna. Gwen and Nick were both to
my right. Each of them ordered a Bloody Mary, and Ryan asked for a light beer.
The four of them mingled and discussed the previous weekend at the restaurant,
a conversation that I couldn’t really take part in, as my position within the
company was a little different. Some of the wait staff saw me as a corporate
drone, which I suppose was technically true, but the reality was that I
couldn’t have cared less if their shirts were bleached and starched or if their
earrings were larger than the size of a quarter like the big bosses did.
    “So how was your
weekend, Elle?” Ryan asked me with a straight face, as the other three carried
on talking shop. He was clearly trying to involve me in conversation, which I
thought was considerate.
             “Relatively
uneventful.”
             “Bummer.”
             “Yeah,
I don’t have the most exciting social life. Almost all of my friends are
married now. I took my dog to the park a few times, got some things done around
the apartment, and that’s about it.” I was well aware how uninteresting I
sounded.
             “A
homebody,” he said. “I like that.”
             “How
about you?”
             “Worked
twenty-seven hours in two days—nothing out of the ordinary.” He took a
sip of the beer from his frosty mug. “I don’t have much of a social life
either,” he said with a wink.
    “Are all of your
friends married too?”
             “Well
yes, but my lack of a social life is because I work all the time. But yeah,
most of my friends are married and have
kids now. Once you get to my age, they drop like freaking flies.”
             “And
what age is that?”
             “I’m
thirty-six.”  
             “I
would have guessed thirty-two,” I said.
             He
smiled. We’d never had such an easy rapport before. I wondered if maybe we had
a shot at being friends after all.
             “You’re
too kind. You must be what, twenty-six, twenty-seven?” He was probably rounding
down so he wouldn’t offend me.
             “Twenty-eight,”
I was trying not to think about my twenty-ninth birthday in August. “So can’t
one of your married friends set you up?” I changed the subject back to Ryan,
knowing that he had the reputation in the restaurant of being a terminally
single guy. I was being nosy, but it was the first time we’d ever talked about
our personal lives, and I wanted to milk it as much as I could. The better I
got to know Ryan, the better our working relationship would become.
    “I guess they
could,” he said, “but I’m not really looking to date right now. I work too
much.”
    “You won’t be able
to use that excuse when the right person comes along.”
    “I guess not. But
I was engaged three years ago, and when that broke off I just really didn’t
have it in me to start dating again. And now I’ve just gotten used to my own
routine.”
             “I’m
sorry to hear that. Can I ask why it ended?”
    “Well, technically
she broke it off,” he said, “When she decided to sleep with someone else.”
             “Ouch!
I’m so sorry.”
             “Don’t
be sorry. I should have seen it coming. My seventy-hour-a-week schedule drove
her into the arms of someone else. At least that’s what she told the therapist
she forced me to see with her.”
    “What a lame
excuse.” I felt sympathy toward Ryan for the first time since I'd met him.     
    “What about you,
ever come close to getting married?”
             “No,
not really. I lived with someone a few years back, but he had a drinking
problem that I couldn’t deal with, so I broke it off.”
    “Yeah, that’s
definitely not something you should put up with. So,” he said, “you’re on the
market