Total pages in book: 78
Estimated words: 75095 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 375(@200wpm)___ 300(@250wpm)___ 250(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 75095 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 375(@200wpm)___ 300(@250wpm)___ 250(@300wpm)
I heard bits and pieces from Molly and my sister, so I knew he was okay, but they didn’t give me any details and I didn’t ask for them.
I also hadn’t filed for divorce.
I wrote it in my calendar at least once a week, but I ignored the reminder every time, finding something else to do instead. I just… couldn’t make myself do it.
I couldn’t go back to him, but I also couldn’t seem to sever the connection.
He was my husband. Our marriage might have started out for the least romantic reasons, but somewhere along the line I’d started to care for him beyond the friendship we’d started with.
Weeks without him turned to months without him, and I still didn’t file the paperwork.
I missed him and the longer I went without him the worse it got. I’d always assumed when you lost someone, you might not ever fully recover, but at least it got easier to deal with as time went by. That wasn’t the case for me. Every day that passed was harder than the one before it.
A part of me was waiting, I guess. A small kernel of hope just sat there in the back of my mind, waiting for the day he came back and promised me he was healed.
The only problem was I wasn’t sure I could trust him if he did.
Chapter 18
Thomas
I was pretty sure if my psychologist ever decided to actually talk back to me instead of just asking the leading questions that had me spilling my guts, he’d call me a giant pussy and start laughing.
I’d started seeing the guy just days after the clusterfuck that had gone down at the club, but I wasn’t sure if it was helping. He’d warned me on the first day dealing with my shit would be a process, but I hadn’t quite believed him. I got shit done. That’s what I did.
I’d always seen a problem and solved it. It was why I liked working on cars and houses. If I didn’t like the placement of a wall, I changed it. If I saw something busted on a vehicle, I fixed it. Those things were black and white.
I was finding that wading through the years of shit I’d been dealing with wasn’t so easy. Just because I talked about the shooting didn’t mean my guilt lessened. My anger didn’t abate. If anything, I felt worse. I always left the psychologist’s office covered in sweat and practically shaking with emotion.
I fucking hated it. The psychologist had asked me to stop what he considered to be self-medicating, so I’d stopped smoking pot, which meant my dreams got more vivid and I woke up yelling all the fucking time. Sleeping was a joke, and for the first few weeks I spent most nights sitting awake half the night, chain-smoking cigarettes on my parents’ back porch. Usually my mom or dad would slip outside not long after I’d gone out there, and we’d sit in silence until the sun came up. We didn’t talk, but they stayed with me anyway. I rarely slept at the club.
It took months for anything to change. The first night I slept without nightmares, I’d woken up confused by the sun shining in my window and for a second I’d been completely disoriented. That hadn’t lasted, though. The next night the nightmares had been back, and I’d felt like I was back at square one.
I hadn’t seen Heather.
My mom had let me know she’d gone to see her and that Heather was okay, but I’d known from what she didn’t say that Heather was done with me. I didn’t blame her.
My wife had been brutalized by someone she’d trusted when she was just a little kid. Someone without a background of abuse would have a hard time trusting a person that couldn’t control their anger, but for Heather that distrust was multiplied by a thousand. I understood.
Every day I expected to be served with divorce papers, but it didn’t happen. I didn’t hear a word from Heather, but she didn’t try to sever ties either.
It gave me a little bit of hope.
I knew I shouldn’t contact her, though. Not yet.
Instead, I just went to work. Took care of business. I sat down with the Aces officers and laid everything out for them. The idea that our club would have an issue with someone because of an anger problem was ludicrous. They didn’t give a shit about that. They didn’t even give a fuck that I had a form of PTSD. Shit, half the original members had come back from Vietnam more fucked up than I was. It wasn’t anything new. It was the fact I couldn’t control myself that they had a problem with. It’s impossible to trust a man who can’t control his reactions and someone like that could get everyone killed in our line of work. It took time, but eventually I smoothed shit out with them.