Total pages in book: 97
Estimated words: 96586 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 483(@200wpm)___ 386(@250wpm)___ 322(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 96586 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 483(@200wpm)___ 386(@250wpm)___ 322(@300wpm)
Fuck!
It’s really me they’re laughing at.
How pathetic I am.
How pathetic I’ve become.
How I fuck up everything I love.
All of a sudden, I hear the sound of the front door opening and my head snaps that direction.
Relief that she actually came home is the first emotion to fill me while undeniable rage is the next. “Where the fuck have you been?!”
Her tone remains surprisingly even. “Work.”
“Not since fucking three o’clock when I last called your office.” I’m up on my feet wanting to be close to her. Needing to be. “Where the fuck did you go?!”
She heads for the kitchen to place down her bag in one of the barstool seats. “Out.”
“Out?!” I swing myself wide so that I’m on the opposite side of the island. “Out where?!”
Her hands wind around the back of the chair. “A place.”
“Pres.”
“Oh no,” her voice takes a mocking tone, “do you not like having only part of the fucking information to a situation?”
The verbal punch lands in the chest like she intended.
“I went to a late lunch.”
“It’s almost fucking nine.”
“And it turned into enjoying the first two performers of Piano in the Park.”
Irateness makes the craving for something stronger than candy deepen. “That sounds like a fucking date.”
“It wasn’t.”
“Who the fuck were you with?” Folding my arms across my white t-shirt is done in unhappiness. “It wasn’t Katherine because she’s out of town for work, and it wasn’t Jo because she sent me picks of the newest McCoy to be born.”
“Xander.”
“Xander?!” His name tenses much more than all of my muscles. “As in your fucking ex-boyfriend?!”
“Yup.”
The casualness of her attitude claws at my dangerously unstable conscience. “Why the fuck would you go on a date with your ex-boyfriend?!”
“Wasn’t a date.”
“That shit sounds exactly like a fucking date!”
“And you having a naked fucking female on your couch looks exactly like you cheating on me!”
“I’m not fucking cheating on you!”
“And I didn’t fucking go on a date with my ex!”
My vibrating cell attempts to redirect my attention to it. “Why did you go out with him? Why would you have any contact with him?” Rather than let her answer, I bark out a more important question. “Have you been fucking seeing him the entire time we’ve been together?!”
“No.”
“Is this the first time he’s tried to…fuck, be with you?”
“No.”
“What the fuck, Pres?!” I toss my hands upward in frustration. “Has he been trying shit this whole fucking time?”
“Not…exactly?”
“What the fuck does that mean?!”
“First of all,” she lifts a finger, teacher voice activated, “you lower your voice, or you go take a two minute breath break until you’re ready to talk without yelling.”
Displeased grumbles linger in the back of my throat.
“Second of all,” my girlfriend cautiously continues, “it means that he’s tried calling and texting and emailing and sending things and I’ve ignored them all because I didn’t care. I didn’t care that he wanted to talk. I didn’t care that he missed me. I did not care that he was still in love with me.”
“Is that why you went to lunch with him. To tell him that you aren’t in love with him, anymore. That you’re in love with me?”
“No.”
Fuck, I don’t know if I’ve ever hated that word more than I do right now.
The vibrating in my pocket begins again at the same time I prod, “No, what?”
“That’s not why I went to lunch with him. He showed up at work today – he had made an appointment. He didn’t pull I’m already in the house Scream style stalker shit. He wanted to talk about what happened between us, which was fair considering, he proposed and-”
“He fucking proposed to you?!”
She winces at the screeching. “Yeah.”
There’s no stopping my jaw from dropping.
“The same day that I got your letter. And honestly, I wasn’t gonna say yes, even if I hadn’t got it, but getting that message, getting that card of hope that maybe we’d have a second chance some day definitely brought a truth to light that I hadn’t been willing to face.”
“Which was?”
“That not only had I spent five, long years with someone I didn’t love, but that I was still in love with someone I hadn’t seen or been with for a fucking decade.”
It’s impossible to describe the emotion that chains me in place.
It’s an uneven mixture of understanding.
Gratefulness.
Longing.
Pain.
My phone starts another cycle of vibrating as she adds, “And you would think, after all that fucking time, you’d fall out of love with a person you haven’t seen in so long, someone you don’t even really know anymore, and let yourself figure out how to fall in love with someone you live with and eat with and sleep with.”
I let my gurgle of disapproval be heard.
“But that moment…that moment, Ry, never came.”
The same cycle of feelings flares a second time.
“Apparently, it doesn’t fucking matter how many times you go through the actions or mindlessly say the words, it doesn’t make it real.”