Chapter 1
Rory
August
What are you going to do, send your ex a booty call?
No. Of course not.
He wouldn’t be up for that even if I did.
Every muscle in my body aches from fatigue and barely restrained frustration. So there’s no good reason why I’m staring at Garrett’s text messages at eleven o’clock at night.
Since we broke up in April, we’ve exchanged five messages. All breakup related, all very polite.
But before that…
I scroll back.
Before that was an endless stream of late night messages. Me texting him that I was on my way home from the hospital. Him sending back an encouraging emoji or a funny meme. A promise of something good on the stove for a late dinner. An offer of a foot rub or a hot shower.
He always took good care of me, and I…
I put my phone down and blow a raspberry at theceiling of our too-quiet condo.Not our condo anymore.Just mine, now.
For ten more months, anyway. Then I’ll…
Well, I’m not sure where I’m going at the end of this year of residency training.Fuck.
I shove off the couch and force myself to go take a hot shower. The water feels good on my back, my shoulders…my tits.
I grab the wand off the hook and think about trying to use it to get off. I tease the spray over my nipples, then lower, over my belly to the juncture of my legs.
But it’s not easy for me to come like this, and the shower has too many memories of Garrett anyway.
I take my birth control pill, then brush my teeth.
The pill package glares at me from the shelf. It’s not like I have a pressing reason to keep taking them, other than I have every night since I was seventeen and Garrett and I started having sex.
And the quiet panic that if I stop a routine, I might never get back into it.
I don’t pick up habits easily. Completing twelve years of post-secondary school and taking birth control pills for that entire time is really the only consistent thing I’ve been successful at.
Ironic that my tunnel vision is the reason I don’t need the pills anymore. There are other ways I could manage my heavy periods. I blow a raspberry and adjust the packet on the shelf.
Stop thinking about Garrett.
My thumb taps against the perforation I just made in the foil. Smack in the middle of my cycle.
Oh, for fuck’s sake. I’m ovulating.
I laugh out loud. Okay. I just need to rub one out in bed and then crash, and I’ll feel better in the morning.
As I check that my alarms are set for the morning, I consider texting Garrett. Would he chuckle?
Have we reached that stage in our breakup where we can laugh at the past?
Rory
