Free A Rose Revealed by Gayle Roper

Jake stopped. He looked at my clenched jaw and stormy expression.
    “I seem to be asking this of you a lot, but are you okay?”
    “I’m fine,” I ground out.
    He raised his eyebrow. “I can tell.”
    “Did you see that ring?” I demanded.
    “Not really. I’m not into engagement rings.” Jake studied me. “Why does the ring bother you?”
    “I used to be engaged to him.”
    He nodded. “Do you still love him or something?”
    “Ben?” I stared, aghast. “Are you kidding? It was one of the greatest escapes in recorded history that I got away from him before it was too late.”
    “Then are you upset because you resent Allie so much? She got your man and all that, even though you no longer wanted him?”
    I sputtered at the idea. “Hardly. They deserve each other.”
    “Then what’s the problem?”
    “The ring!” I held out my left hand and pointed to the third finger with my popcorn tub. “It was my ring! I picked it out! He bought it for me and now he gave it to her!”
    “It was your ring?”
    “My ring!”
    “And you want it back?”
    “Never!”
    He shook his head and shrugged his massive shoulders. “Then what?”
    “He threw it away!”
    Jake looked at me, confused. “He threw it away?”
    I nodded. “He was so mad when I broke up with him that he raced to the bottom of my mother’s yard and tossed the ring as far as he could, right into the field across the street!”
    Jake picked up a handful of popcorn. “He actually threw away a ring worth all that money?” He stuffed the popcorn in his mouth. “No wonder you broke up with him. He’s too dumb to be on the loose.”
    I stilled for a moment. Dumb? I’d always thought egotistical, but dumb might be better.
    “But he never threw it away, did he?” Jake was right with me, as usual. “What a grandstander!” Jake grabbed another handful of popcorn. A huge grin spread over his face as the absurdity of it all hit him.
    “Don’t you dare laugh!” I was livid at Ben, my jaw so tightly clenched I might have had tetanus. “This is no laughing matter! Why, he probably didn’t even care that I broke up with him! He probably never really loved me after all!” I was breathing fire. “I’d like to strangle him!”
    “You’re just mad because he put one over on you,” Jake said.
    “And that’s not the worst of it!” I spun around in a circle in my frustration, several kernels spilling from my tub onto the rug. Jake pointed to them and I picked them up without being totally aware of what I was doing. My mind was going in agitated spirals, and I stood staring at the popcorn in my palm.
    “Trash receptacle.” Jake nodded in its direction.
    “Right.” I walked across the hall and dumped the corn. I was still frowning when I came back. “Mom and I spent hours over in that field looking for that ring! Hours!”
    Jake stared at me for a moment. Then he began to laugh. “Oh, Rosie, I can just see you out there, down on your hands and knees, sifting through the dirt and grass, hoping against hope that you could find the thing, thinking of all the stuff you could buy when you traded it in.” And he began to laugh harder.
    He was much too close to the truth for comfort. “Wait until my mother hears about this. She’ll have a fit over all those lost hours.”
    For some reason this statement made Jake laugh even harder. That was because he’d never met my mother.
    I stared at him through slitted eyes until the absurdity of the whole thing finally washed over me. Ben’s great show of pique that was only that, a show. And all those hours searching for a ring that was never there! I started to laugh too, and soon we were wheezing, gasping for breath. I had to use the wall to hold myself up.
    Into this scene of great merriment walked Allie and Ben. Ben took one look at the two of us and spun Allie around on her heels, rushing her into the first auditorium they came to, the one showing a bland kiddie flick that had been creamed by the