Rebuilding Valley View (Valley View Book #4)

Chapter 18

After a 90 minute flight and a four-hour drive, we finally pull into a parking spot in front of my apartment. Tyler turns the truck off and turns to kiss me.

“Do you want to come up?”

He chuckles and kisses me again, “Did you think I wasn’t going to?”

“I don’t know. I thought I’d still ask and not be too presumptuous.”

“Of course I’ll come up.” Tyler grabs my bags and I go up first, unlocking the door for him. He sets my luggage in my bedroom and then comes back out and joins me around the kitchen island. He runs his fingers through my hair and then turns me to face him more. “Charlie, what’s going on?”

“Nothing,” I try to shrug him off, but he’s not letting it go that easily.

“Please don’t do that. Something changed when we talked about the future. I’m just trying to figure out what. “

“I didn’t expect to have this conversation.”

“Are we having a bad conversation? Honestly, Char, it really fucking sucks, but I understand if you don’t see us going much further than your time here. I’m not going to say it doesn’t sting but if that is all this is to you…” he trails off.

“No, Tyler, just no.” I wrap my arms around his waist and lay my head on his chest. I can hear his heart beating faster, I’m pretty sure mine is doing the same thing.

“Can we go sit down?”

I nod my head, not moving from this position though. Tyler wraps his arms around me and hoists me up, carrying me over to the couch. He sits sit and I end up on his lap, straddling him and my face still pressed against his chest, the need to feel him was too strong to let go.

“Okay, so when I was 18 and I had just graduated high school, I started seeing this guy, except we weren’t seeing each other we were just “casually” together.”

“Like us?”

“Yeah, kind of. I thought I could handle it because I may have been eighteen, but I thought I was grown beyond my years. As the months rolled on, I found myself getting too attached. It went from casual to serious so quickly. I honestly thought I was in love with him.” 

Tyler’s arms tighten around me more. I can feel the tension coming off of him the more serious this conversation gets. “What happened? What does that have to do with us?”

“Dean warned me so many times about our relationship. He told me that I was moving too fast and that I was asking for heartbreak, but I didn’t listen. I knew what I was doing. Living in the moment, he was never going to leave me.”

“Did he not have those same feelings?”

“I thought he did. I mean, I never told him that I loved him, at least not at that moment. He spoiled me, bought me anything I wanted. He was older than me, but anytime somebody mentioned our age difference he just always said love didn’t have an age range.”

“How old was he?”

I sighed, knowing that this would come up, but I had to tell him the entire truth to understand where I was coming from. “He was thirty when we met.”

“Holy shit, Charlie! That’s a huge age difference.”

“I know that now. I was such a moron. As the months went on I was so into him. I began to imagine that we were going to get married and have kids. We were together for three years, I built an entire future in my head.”