Human? Was human?
Cheat?
A couple of the voices separated themselves. Still throaty and animalistic, but with a touch of something almost human. My gut churned, and I waited. Whatever I’d done to them, would they have enough human left in them to actually step forward?
To my astonishment, two frogs or toads or whatever, hopped quickly toward us.
Me. Human.The voice held a note of my husband’s.
Not floozy.Said a voice, with a feminine touch.
Beth pulled a small bag out of her pocket. “Hop in, jerks. And we’ll get you back to normal.”
Astonished, I laughed as they did as she asked. I should’ve been feeling guilty for putting them in this predicament to begin with, but somehow… I didn’t.
Oh, well.
Chapter Eight
Emma
My nerves were shot by the time we got home. The toads had been muttering all sorts of weird things until Beth used her magic to turn their words back into ribbits, but even that hadn’t soothed my nerves. Carol upended the bag and dumped the toads onto the middle of the kitchen floor, while Buster went to take, what he described as,the much needed nap of a hero.
And then, it was just us and the toads. It was strange to see them. Two toads in the middle of the floor, on the tile that I’d picked out that looked like wood. In a kitchen that I’d put so many little touches on over years. Heck, I still had pictures of Travis and his various school pictures over the years hanging up. And for some reason, as my gaze roamed over the images of my son growing up, looking at his smile full of braces made this all feel real in a way it hadn’t.
I’d turned my ex into a toad.
My husband of so many years had betrayed me, had cheated on me, and made me feel like I wasn’t worthy of love. All of that had happened. All of it was part of the fabric of who I am now. Including these two toads. It felt like they were a representation of all the pain I’d felt when he’d cheat on me. Every time he had to “work late” and told me that I had been working so hard for so long, he wanted to help more, I dismissed the gut feeling that told me he would never do more work than he had to. I dismissed the gut feeling I had that him working late didn’t seem to be lessening my workload. That voice in the back of my head was just too scary to listen to. I’d convinced myself that he was finally stepping up. That maybe, just maybe, things would actually get better for us in our golden years.
And then I found out he’d been banging his secretary, a girl I had helped mentor when he’d claimed to be working. I’d found out he’d taken her toourrestaurant. And that the reason all our joint friends were suddenly too busy to hang out was because he’d introduced her to them…
I hadn’t just been angry. I’d been hurt. Deeply hurt.
How was it that I moved from hurt to angry so fast and never actually stepped back to give myself a break and say it was okay to be hurt? I deserved to be upset. Just because Rick was a bad guy didn’t mean I was somehow to blame for what happened to me.
I let out a slow breath, and it felt like so much of that hurt left in that breath. Maybe there would always be a tiny part of my heart that thought of the man I fell in love with and wished for that innocent love again. But most of me? Most of me was really ready to be done with this. I was ready to move on in my life, but also to move on from the ghosts of my past.
Starting with these two.
“You okay?” Beth asked.
I forced a smile but felt my eyes burning. “I’m okay.”
She squeezed my shoulder. “When everything happened with my ex, your calls got me through some of the darkest times. Watching him and my sister all throughout town, not even bothering to hide their relationship, it hurt. A lot. If I could’ve turned them into toads, I think I would have.”
I laughed. “You’re too nice for that.”
Beth lifted a brow. “I was a doormat for a long time. I know you weren’t around to see everything, but I’m not anymore. It took some therapy and some time to learn the difference between being nice and being a doormat, but now I know. And I don’t let people push me around like that anymore.”
I was surprised. I never knew Beth had gone through therapy. “You never said…”
She shrugged. “Sometimes people treat therapy like it’s something to be ashamed of. And maybe, at first, I was. But we go to a doctor when we have a broken leg, why shouldn’t we go to therapy when we have a broken heart?”
Damn. She was absolutely right.
“I went too,” Deva said, squaring her shoulders.
I honestly felt shocked. Deva seemed like the kind of person who never needed anyone else to help her through hard times. She just took everything in strides.
