“Let go of me.”
“We’re not done talking—“
“Let go of my arm Brendon.”
He didn’t. He pulled me back toward the closet and I stumbled slightly and felt the heat of it move through me fast. I set my bags down and reached past him to my safe on the shelf, put in the code, and had my hand around the grip of my gun before the door fully swung open.
I turned around and pointed it at him.
“Get out of my face,” I said. Completely calm. “And let me leave.”
He looked at the gun and his hands came up slowly. The Brendon I thought I knew was completely gone. What was standing in front of me was a man I had never actually met before tonight.
“Step back,” I said.
He stepped back.
I picked up my bags without taking my eyes off him, walked out of that closet, walked through that bedroom, walked out thefront door and put my bags in my truck and pulled out of the driveway.
I drove three blocks before I had to pull over.
I sat there on the side of the road and pressed both hands flat on my steering wheel and just breathed. In and out. The gun was back in my purse. My hands were steady but my chest wasn’t. Everything I had just done and everything he had just shown me was sitting in the car with me all at once and I needed a minute before I could drive again.
He had been cheating since the beginning. The only good thing about that was that the trifling dog didn’t bring me back any STDs. I just had my yearly check up a month ago, and for his sake, he better be lucky. I was still gonna make another appointment, because hearing him say that was making me feel sick.
I had been tearing myself apart with guilt over a man who had been lying to me from the jump. Now, I didn’t regret anything I did.
After a few minutes I picked up my phone and called Griz.
He answered on the first ring.
“I’m on my way,” I said. “I already have the address from the tracker I put on your car.”
—
The next week moved the way things moved after a storm. Slow and necessary. Brendon and I had minimal contact, just what was required to untangle three years of shared assets and joint accounts. I moved my money first, transferred everything that was mine into accounts that were mine only, had my name removed from anything we had shared that I didn’t want attached to me anymore.
He asked me almost every conversation if there was someone else.
I never answered.
He offered me a portion of the money from the house closing and I declined every time. I didn’t want his money. I wanted it clean and I wanted it done.
I had been staying with Griz for the past week and the contrast between the two lives was not something I had to work to feel. I just felt it. Waking up in the morning and taking Goldie out and coming back to a man who moved through his space with the kind of certainty that made everything around him feel settled. He was rough in all the ways I had always needed somebody to be rough and soft in the specific places that mattered and he didn’t force either one. It was just him. He loved me genuinely, always had. And I felt it every day. This was where I belonged, wherever he was.
We would leave in the mornings separately, handle our days, and come back together at night. We would sit on his back patio sometimes and just talk, about everything and nothing, the way two people talked when they were learning each other in real time and finding out that what they already knew was just the surface. I knew that the life he lived was a risky one, but I respected his grind and his hustle. I wasn’t here to judge him.
He got me everything before I even asked for it. The right coffee, my specific brand, the first morning I woke up there it was already on the counter. Goldie’s food, her specific grain free formula, already in the cabinet. I didn’t know how he knew and I didn’t ask because somehow that was more meaningful than the answer would have been.
The only thing that sat wrong was the feeling that somebody was watching me.
It had started a few days in. A feeling at the back of my neck when I left in the mornings. A car that seemed to appear in my rearview one too many times on different routes. I mentioned it to Griz once and he went quiet in a way that told me he was taking it seriously even if he didn’t say much about it out loud. I started taking different routes every morning without being told to.
—
Closing day I let him go alone.
He hadn’t asked me to stay away, I just made the decision. Brendon was going to be there and whatever was going to happen between them in that room, I didn’t need to be in the middle of it. I knew that Brendon was still in the blind about us, but if I went today, then he will know. I didn’t want that to mess up this day for a Grizzley. He was so excited about this new house, and so was I. It was our new beginning together. Did I feel bad that our new home was purchased through my ex fiancé? Of course not. Fuck him.
