Total pages in book: 63
Estimated words: 58346 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 292(@200wpm)___ 233(@250wpm)___ 194(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 58346 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 292(@200wpm)___ 233(@250wpm)___ 194(@300wpm)
Before I can answer verbally, I sense him settle back in his seat. “But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. Please, continue on with what happened that night.”
My line of vision gets closer to the handsome man, but I’m not ready to meet his gaze quite yet, focusing instead on one of his bookcases rather than his seemingly all-knowing eyes. “Her response had been My sweet man. We’ll see each other again soon, and I felt like I was going to faint.” My chin trembles, my breath hitching in my chest. “She called my husband ‘her man.’ Said they’d see each other ‘again’?” I shake my head at the thought of Roman meeting up with some woman, and I had no idea. “My heart was pounding in my ears, and I started shaking as I scrolled up to the beginning of the text thread. But there wasn’t much. He had been very diligent about deleting their messages, obviously, because he never even one time seemed unwilling to let me near his phone. I mean, isn’t that the first sign someone is cheating? When they’re super protective over their phone or computer?” I shake my head, my voice beginning to quiver with my questions as I finally meet his eyes before he looks down at his pad of cream-colored paper.
“I’d say that’s a fair assessment,” Doc concedes, making a note with his woodgrain-and-brass pen.
“There was never, not once, a single red flag. At least, at the time. Looking back, I see all sorts of warning signs. But when it was happening, it was easy to blow off. But hindsight is 20/20, as they say.” I sigh, flipping through all my random thoughts as if they’re on a Rolodex.
“The only other messages were from earlier in the night. And when I thought back to what we were doing at the moment of the texts’ timestamp, I was requesting our wedding song at the DJ booth like I always do, so we could dance to it. It’s a tradition we’ve always had. It’s the song he taught me—” My voice breaks then, my throat involuntarily swallowing loudly, at least to my own ears. I take a breath. “And the idea that he was looking through the crowd, while he was holding me close, dancing with me to our song—” My tone rises through an octave, bordering on hysteria by the time I finish my thought aloud. “—but wishing he’d see her face…?” My chin trembles, the pain in my heart turning my blood to fire as it spreads outward and up to my face, then down to my stomach, making it sour. “I wanted to die, right there in our room. Holding his phone. While he slept so peacefully, I was falling apart.”
I sob, the tears flowing freely now. Doc hands me the box of tissues beside him on the small round table that always holds his notepad and pen before a session begins.
“What did you do then?” he urges me on.
I wipe angrily at my nose, so very tired of all the tears I spilled over the past eight months. “First, I messaged this Farrah bitch back from his phone,” I sneer, my nose twitching in an attempt to snarl as I think of the other woman. “I said This is Roman’s wife. Hope you have a wonderful New Year. In my mind, I imagined her receiving the message and feeling all sorts of shitty, especially since I’d been so nice. For some reason, I just knew she knew he was married. I felt it down to my bones. Maybe I read it between the lines of their messages, like she knew he was out with his wife for New Year’s Eve, and that’s why he wasn’t celebrating it with her instead.”
And eventually I found out I was correct in that assumption, after Roman told me as much as I could stomach each time he wanted to explain. Call me weak, but I could only stand hearing bits and pieces of his side of the story since it happened. I felt like getting the entire download at one time might overwhelm my system, and then I’d suddenly snap and shut all the way down, never to be the same again.
“But anyway, she never said a thing after I sent that. I shook Roman awake, which wasn’t easy because of the alcohol in his system, and by that time, I wasn’t just heartbroken and sad; I was angry. Soul-deep furious. And it made me even more hysterically pissed when I shoved his phone in his groggy face, demanding him to explain himself, and all he said was he didn’t know what I was talking about, that it wasn’t what I thought it was, before passing back out again. That’s all the explanation I got… at two in the morning on New Year’s Day. How…? How was I supposed to sleep after that? He lay there dead-asleep, while I just sat in my misery, with nothing to keep me company but my thoughts, which were growing darker and more devastating by the second.” I shake my head. “It was the worst night of my entire life.”