Free Racing Outside the Line: A Love Story at 190 Mph by Kimberly Montague Page A

visit," I gave a weak smile.
    "What’s number one? Something food related, I bet?" He smiled as if he had me all figured out. What a moron. Wiping the tears from my cheeks and not caring whether he noticed the action, I turned and looked at him, raising my eyebrows, as if to ask, "Are you stupid?"
    After a moment of staring at my face, he seemed to figure it out, "Oh," was his response. We both looked off into the distance for several minutes. The lake was calm, and the world seemed very still around us. The moon gave off just enough light to make the clouds look backlit, but it was hidden now behind the thick expanse of clouds. I can’t really say that sitting in silence with him was comfortable, not with the mention of having missed him the most while I was at school, but it wasn’t uncomfortable either. There was always a sense of calm that Seth could bring out in me; a sense of rightness, as if I were meant to sit next to him and, as they say, "therein lies the problem."
    After several moments, he had me eating my words, or thoughts, rather, "Why didn’t you sleep with Brad?"
    What a question! How the hell was I supposed to answer that? Uh, gee brainiac, possibly because I’m stuck on you! No, I couldn’t just blurt that out. How best to phrase this... something he would understand without having to explain details, I let out a heavy sigh… "It was Josh all over again."
    "Oh," was apparently all he could come up with this evening. I thought that would be the end of this line of questioning when he threw another fast ball my way, "Why don’t you hate me?"
    Stunned silence overtook me for a moment while I worked my way up to being completely taken aback by his question. I was left staring wide-eyed at him, like a deer caught in headlights. Why didn’t I hate him? The question bothered me partly because it was odd that he was admitting to a reason for me to hate him, most of the time he avoided the subject entirely, but also because there were so many times that I wished I could just hate him and leave it at that.
    I finally decided to give him brutal honesty. "I do—fervently and passionately—a lot of the time." Shaking my head in an attempt to clear it, I continued, "And life would be much easier if my emotions ended there. Clearly," I paused to let out a sad sigh, "they don’t." We sat in silence for several more minutes. He seemed as lost in his own thoughts as I was.
    Did he think I was so fickle that I could sleep with him and then hate him the next day? How could he not know that I was beyond hurt? And why the hell didn’t I hate him? After all that had happened, after all this time without any sort of explanation, I should never want to see him again. He was sitting here questioning me pointedly about my sex life when he himself had a fiancé. A fiancé! If he really cared about me, then how could he be engaged to another woman? Before I could think about phrasing it properly, I blurted out the large question floating around in my head. "Do you love her?"
    He turned to me looking startled by my question. He must not have been expecting me to take this into consideration. Hell, I surprised myself since the truth was I hadn’t even given it a first thought, let alone a second one when plotting my attack on him. For some reason though, sitting here with him, knowing that he thought I should hate him, made me feel guilty for the situation I was putting him in. It was necessary to find out, necessary because no matter how much pain he had and was putting me through, I never wanted to put him through that too. But what would I do if he said yes? What if he did love her and truly wanted to marry her? Would I walk away? Could I walk away? We sat there in silence as more minutes passed by.
    It didn’t seem as if he was going to respond. I had just begun to convince myself that it was better not to know his response when he spoke. "I don’t have an easy answer for that one, Lex," he sounded dejected, tired, and