Flirting With Forever by Kim Boykin

I’ve been such a mess. Then I started the tour and I began to feel like, I don’t know, like I was somebody. Not just some woman who got dumped by her husband. But the truth is, I’m still a mess.”
    “I don’t see it that way. But can you at least admit we’re attracted to each other?” I’d offered him an out, but he wasn’t taking it. “But I think it’s better that we don’t do anything about it. For now.”
    Okay, so he was taking the out. My stomach pulsed in time with my heartbeat. I sucked at rejection, which probably explained why it took me so long to get published. I looked at the cars beside us, the buttons on the dashboard, anywhere but at him.
    “I understand, Jake.”
    “No, I don’t think you do. I like you, Tara, and it’s hell trying to keep my hands off of you. But if we’re involved, it’ll be harder for me to do my job.” Jake Randall likes me? But where does that leave us? “You need this tour, so let’s start out as friends and see where it goes.”
    “Friends.” I repeated.
    “Wait. That didn’t come out the way I meant. What I should have said was, let’s use this time to get to know each other.”
    You can learn a lot about a new friend when you’re cooped up in a car with them hours on end. Turned out Jake had been a swimmer and a baseball player in high school but swam butterfly and freestyle in college at the University of Wisconsin.
    “And girlfriends?”
    “How far back do you want to go?” he asked.
    “Serious girlfriends?”
    He wasn’t laughing now. “One, in college. Kate.”
    I had shared my sad story with Jake, but I could tell by his tone, he wasn’t ready to share his with me. “Next question. Where did you grow up?”
    “I was raised on a horse farm about twenty minutes west of Milwaukee. My parents still live there.” He looked at the smile plastered on my face from the image of Jake on a horse in a pair of tight, low slung jeans. Cowboy boots. Maybe a hat. Maybe not, but definitely no shirt. “What? You think that’s funny?”
    I shook my head, red faced, laughing so hard I snorted. “Just picturing you on a horse, that’s all.” Naked.
    “Between chores and school and practice, I worked my ass off.” I told him to take the exit to I-95 North. “So do you want to tell me where we’re going?”
    “Guess.”
    “Your place on the Isle of Palms?”
    “How did you know?” I socked him in the arm.
    “Lucky guess.” He shrugged. “Tara, I read your bio. I read your website. I read all of your blog posts.”
    “Nobody has read that blog. I shut it down over a year ago.”
    “The internet is forever, Tara. Remember that.” He said it playfully but there was an edge to his voice. “So is it my turn to grill you?”
    “I thought you knew everything there is to know about me.”
    “I do have one question.” He paused like he was trying to find the right words.
    “I read the blog post you wrote when you and—when you bought the beach house. I know what it means to you. So why are you taking me there?”
    Turns out Jake didn’t know everything. Most of my blog was about the best parts of the Lowcountry and how much I loved our home. I didn’t write about how Jim and I built the house with the intention of furnishing it and flipping it as a high-end beach rental. By the time we got it ready to sell, the bottom had fallen out of the market. We were stuck with a ten-thousand-dollar-a-month second home mortgage payment and the bank had our seven hundred thousand dollar nest egg. We never intended to hold onto the house this long, but the market was so bad, even selling it now would mean a huge a loss.
    A little over two years ago, Jim’s company restructured and his commissions were cut in half. Things got hard financially; Melissa rented the beach house for us to at least try to cover some of the expenses. That was when I started hating the place.
    I hated the taxes that came with the house, the six different kinds of insurance we had