Promise Me (The Me Novellas) by Shelby Gates Page A

Dex leaned back in his chair, his drink in his hand.
    “How’s your drink?” he asked.
    “ Good.” It was. I’d drank enough of it to relax and I felt the tension lessen in my shoulders, noticed my pulse slow just a little.
    He nodded. “Good. Like I said, you looked like you could use one.”
    “Guess I’m pretty easy to read,” I said.
    “ Maybe.” He looked at me. “Or maybe I’m just perceptive.”
    I swallowed a mouthful of rum and Coke. “Maybe.”
    “Do you want to talk about it now?” he asked quietly.
    I knew what he was asking. But still, I said, “About what?”
    “About whatever happened today that has you single.”
    I sighed. “Not really.”
    “That bad, huh?” His voice was sympathetic.
    “ He messed around when I was gone.”
    Dex nodded, his eyebrows drawn together. “OK.”
    I picked up the plastic stirrer in my drink and twirled it between my fingers. “He didn’t tell me.”
    “ So how did you find out?”
    “ I stopped by to see him at work. Overheard him talking to someone. Her.”
    Dex made a face. “Ugh.”
    I nodded. “Yeah. It pretty much sucked.”
    “ I’m sorry.”
    “ Me, too,” I said.
    “ Were you guys serious?”
    I dropped the stir stick back into my drink and picked up the glass. It was half-empty now. “I don’t know what we were,” I said honestly.
    “Right,” he said, and it sounded like he understood perfectly. “It still sucks, though. To trust someone and then have them break that trust.”
    “ It’s funny,” I said. The waiter arrived with our food and I waited until he set down our plates and left before I continued. “I wasn’t really hurt by it.”
    “ No?” He sounded surprised.
    I grabbed the bottle of ketchup and lifted the top bun off the burger. “No.” I squirted ketchup on the inside of the bun. “I was just mad. Mad that he didn’t tell me, not mad that it happened.”
    “Hmm.”
    He held out his hand and I handed him the ketchup. He squirted a huge dollop on his bun and then smashed it back on top of his burger. He picked up the sandwich and bit into it and I realized not once did a bottle of hand sanitizer make an appearance at our dinner table. I started to laugh.
    “What?” he asked after he swallowed his mouthful of burger.
    “ Nothing.”
    “ Not nothing,” he said. “Tell me.”
    “ I was just thinking that it feels good to be here. Eating dinner. With you. So thank you.”
    He cocked his head and smiled. “I was thinking the exact same thing.”
    I smiled.
    He smiled back. “You know, I might know a way that we could eat a lot more dinners together.”

    EIGHTEEN
     
     
    I dropped my burger. “What?”
    Dex wiped at his mouth with his napkin. “The meeting I went to the other day.”
    Clearly, there had been more alcohol in my drink than I’d realized. Because he wasn’t making an ounce of sense. “What?” I repeated.
    He swirled a french fry in the pool of ketchup he’d poured onto his plate and ate it. “The meeting I had yesterday was with a local company. Wave Apparel. Heard of them?”
    I shook my head.
    “They make suits. Swim suits. Wet suits. That kind of stuff.”
    I was pretty sure he was speaking in riddles. “OK.”
    “I’ve been trying to find sponsors. Investors. Whatever you want to call it.” He sipped his drink. “I’ve got people lined up to help on the front line, you know? But funding has been an issue.”
    “ For your projects, you mean?”
    “ Yeah. I’ve been talking to these guys for a while. Laid out a proposal, pitched it a couple of months ago but hadn’t heard anything.” He grabbed another fry. “I wasn’t sure anything was going to come of it so I went ahead and enrolled in some business classes. Figured if I was going to be running my own organization, I’d better figure out what the hell I was doing on the business end of things.”
    So that was why he’d been at Mesa, enrolling in business classes.
    “But I got a call that afternoon. After I’d