“And that pissed you off so much that you hit the streetlamp?” she asked as she pressed the Band-Aid softly over his knuckles.

He nodded, a heaviness to his voice. “Yep. That’s the whole story. I should have taken you up on your offer to smash the sculpture. I swear, I should have.”

She brought his hand to her lips and brushed a soft kiss to his skin. “It’s better not to expend that type of negative energy on her. You did the right thing. It may not feel that way now, but it’s part of the healing.”

He scoffed. “You sound like a shrink now.”

“Maybe Michelle is rubbing off on me.”

“Maybe. I still think I should have dropped it from ten flights,” he said with a sigh, then ran his fingers through her hair. His touch felt good; it probably always would. But the gesture didn’t reach all the way inside her soul. The emptiness in him was evident even in how he touched her—it wasn’t the way he’d touched her all their other nights together. It was hollow. He was not her Nate right now. He was the Nate defeated once again by his ex-wife. Her heart cried, leaking crimson tears inside her chest as the evidence mounted, so clearly pointing to one conclusion: he wasn’t over that woman. He wasn’t ready. She had no idea if he was ever going to be ready.

“Enough about my fine night. Tell me all about Mr. Abbott,” Nate said, that bitter edge still present in his voice.

She chose to ignore it, focusing on answering as she would have one month ago, one year ago. He was her friend, and she craved his comfort as a friend now. “Turns out Grant never thought of me romantically. I went to the meeting ready to tell him I was happy to be business partners, but there was nothing happening between the two of us. But he served first, making it pretty damn clear that he had no attraction for me whatsoever,” she said, holding out her hands wide.

“That’s a damn good thing,” Nate said with a smirk.

“Maybe it’s technically a good thing, but it kind of made me feel shitty about myself.”

“Did you want him to be interested in you?”

“No. But I felt completely stupid. Don’t you get that? I went there to tell him that I had feelings for somebody else, but before I could even say that he told me he never even saw me romantically and that he was sorry for leading me on. My God, I was so sure he was interested in me, Nate. I asked you to teach me how to be seductive for him because I was damn certain he was attracted to me. And it turns out I was completely off the mark with that,” she said, shaking her head in frustration. She’d felt like such an ass at Speakeasy with Grant.

“Do you wish you’d never asked me?” he asked in a measured voice.