Bexley
Present day
Isat waiting, my butt crammed as far into the bench of the window seat as it could go, flush against the windowpane. With my chin resting on my bent knees, I stared out the bay window into the night, hoping for a sign that I wasn’t wasting my time.
My kids had been asleep for hours, but something kept me up.A niggling, maybe ... I didn’t know what you’d actually call the feeling. A premonition, my grandma would have said, but she’d been gone since I was in grade school.
Most people would dismiss it as black magic or voodoo, or simply plain crap. Yet here I was.
Fourteen years later, I was still in tune with a man, thinking he was going to appear out of the blue, even though he hadn’t shown his face here in years. Not just any man, but the man who’d changed me, forced me to love, and then left me—not for something better, but for the life he was destined to live.
If I squeezed my eyes tightly enough, I could feel he was close. Even after so many years, warmth still blanketed my skin when I thought about him.
Nerves flitted in my belly, tickling and scratching, making me uneasy, but I couldn’t move from the window seat. I’d waited a lifetime for this night. In this moment, I wasn’t a single mom with an overactive imagination, sitting awake in the middle of the night, thinking about a man who wasn’t going to show. No, I was a recent high school graduate, waiting for her guy to come by and make me his.
For whatever reason, I was convinced he was coming back to me tonight, and no one could tell me otherwise. Not that I’d dared to share this with anyone.
Afraid to move, I’d waited so long in the window seat, I’d fallen asleep. My hair was stuck in the crook of my neck, drool running down my chin onto my knee, when the sun fully came up. The first rays shone through the crack in the blinds from where I’d been peeking all night.
He didn’t show.
I wasn’t shocked or surprised.
Not wanting to leave the window, I watched as a kid on an old-fashioned beach cruiser tossed a newspaper onto my lawn and sped off. Guilt had forced me to subscribe; the kid loved his job.
The sound of giggling came from the kitchen, knocking me out of my reverie. Over the hum of the television, I could hear spoons scraping cereal bowls.
Shit. I messed up.
After a long inhale, I swallowed a large lump of humiliation and brushed the hair out of my eyes. Standing on wobbly knees, I decided to grab the paper first.
Pleased for the first time that I didn’t drop my subscription for the paper edition, I popped open the door, desperate to stretch my legs, gulping big breaths of fresh air before meeting my reality this Saturday.
As the desert breeze smacked me square in the face, I came to a conclusion ...
Aston Prescott was never meant to be mine. He was a dream I should have let die a long time ago, right along with my right to forever happiness.
He was married and had a family with another woman. In fact, he was probably sitting with them at some fancy-ass brunch at this very moment, at his fancy-pants country club with his snotty friends and his pain-in-the-ass controlling father.
In a world where I didn’t belong.
Bexley
Back then
Three days after my eighteenth birthday, I metthe guy.
You know ... theone.
Not to disappoint, but it was your typicalgirl meets boy,insta-lust,I’m going to wither away and die if I don’t date himtype of thing. The kind of meet-cute story straight out of the movies. The second I saw him, all the mushy feelings swept over me like a sandstorm in the desert.
That particular day was no different from any other, the sun burning hot as hell in Nevada, where I lived and was spending my last few months before college. In a last-ditch effort, I was trying to make some major moolah before school loans knocked me on my ass. Lord knew I needed it.
This was meant to be my last hurrah in this desert oasis before I got the hell out of Dodge, and then I methim.
The very moment he laid eyes on me, I knew one thing for certain—he was the gold standard I’d compare every man to moving forward.
That summer, I’d gotten a job working as a sandwich girl at a fancy golf club in our small town outside Reno. My good friend, Milly, and I had been put in charge of making close to 250 sandwiches on any given day for the pickiest, most obnoxious bitches in Reno.
