What if I had let him finish what he started? What if I had gone up to his apartment to continue? Maybe, just maybe, it would have restartedour passionate affair. Maybe he would have fallen in love with me after a few weeks. Maybe we could have been happy together.
Shit, I’m relapsing so fucking hard.
I grab my phone and open my conversation with Lex. For what feels like the thousandth time, I scroll up to look at the three pictures I sent him. The ones I took while we were trying to watchThe Fellowship of the Ring.
I impulsively deleted them from my phone a few weeks ago, as if it could help erase my feelings for him. But they’re the only pictures that exist of us, so I regretted it pretty much immediately. Thankfully, they are still in this conversation, but I’m not downloading them because it’s… too much.
I look at us, at how happy we seem. Well, Lex is confused as hell in one of them, but it only adds to their authenticity. His smile is so genuine in the one where I kissed him on the cheek. It always gets to me.
My heart tightens in my chest, and a lump forms in my throat. Shit, no. I won’t cry again.
I’m about to lock the screen when typing bubbles pop up at the bottom. Shit! Fuck! Damnit! He’s typing. My heart races at the thought. I worry I accidentally sent something, so I carefully scroll to the bottom. But no, there’s nothing. The last messages are still from when he tried to make me answer my phone after the Oliver incident.
What is he typing? Will he apologize again? Is he going to say he misses more than the sex?
I wait, so focused I’m not even breathing. The bubbles disappear, but no message comes in, and my heart clenches. Was it a glitch?
They return, and I’m honestly unsure how to feel about it. They only last for a moment before disappearing again.
Seconds stretch as I wait for them to come back. Then, an entire minute. And another. After a while, I force myself to accept that if he was actually about to send something, he changed his mind. I really need to stop getting my hopes up. I won’t get him back—unless I’m down for slex and he’s drunk.
A tear rolls down my temple before I even know I’m crying. Shit, I’m such a mess.
I angrily return the phone to my nightstand and twist around, wondering how much of this I can take before I go completely insane.
Probably not that much.
Chapter 04
What happened with Andrea was a mistake. A stupid, idiotic mistake that I never should have made. Until that inebriated moment of weakness, I’d say I was doing quite good, staying away from her and pretending I don’t feel empty inside. I’ve been suffering for weeks as I watched her slowly get better from afar. I fought against my need to be close to her like a devil, enduring the painful withdrawal in silence and contained agony. But on Friday evening, the desperate and incommensurable yearning won.
I should never have gotten in her car to start with, but knowing she still cared about me tore down the wall I’ve been trying so hard to rebuild since letting her go.
And then it was just us, the only two people in the world it seemed, and I forgot why I needed to keep my distance from her.
Those few moments in her car have tormented me the entire weekend. I’ve relived them countless times—her sighs, her warmth, the way she clung to me… and how she stopped me. Part of me wishes I was drunk enough to forget the expression on her face at that moment, but the image is still so vivid I can close my eyes and see it perfectly. She looked so hurt and distressed, it killed me inside. That was when I realized just how much I messed up.
For her sake, I can’t let that happen again.
But how the fuck am I supposed to stay away from her when she’s been like a magnet for me from the start? I never wanted to get closer to her, never meant to let her in so deeply, or to fall for her as hard as I did. But she was an unstoppable force who crashed into me, an unmovable object, and took me along for the ride of my life.
“Lex?” Shelly calls in a way that makes me realize it’s at least the second time.
“Hm?” I distractedly answer, returning my attention to her and the baby in her arms.
“Do you want to hold her?” she asks.
I gaze at Kevin, standing by her side, and he lays a tender hand on her shoulder. “Of course he does. Maddison is his goddaughter-to-be, after all.”
Before I can answer, he takes the sleeping bundle from his wife’s arms, and I notice that he already seems more comfortable handling her than he did two weeks ago—when their precious girl was born.
I barely have time to get into position before he sets her on my awaiting forearms. “Hold her head, and don’t drop her,” he instructs.
“You do remember I have several nieces and nephews, right?” I ask as I adjust my hold on her, sending him a caustic look.
“One can never be too careful,” he dismisses.
I look down at Maddison, feeling the same kind of warmth I did when I held my sisters’ newborn children. The decision to not have progeny dates back to when I was a teenager, and it hasn’t wavered since. Or it almost hasn’t. Upon visiting Shelly and Kev, mere hours after the birth of little Maddy, I was struck by their state of utter joy despite the visible exhaustion veiling their smiling faces. For the first time, I saw the act of reproduction as something that goes beyond a biological instinct we’re all programmed with.
