One ring. Two. Three. Then, just before she was kicked to voicemail,“Eve? How was the trip? Are you back early?”
“Michael…” Eve pulled her knees to her chest and hugged them tightly. “Michel, I think I fucked up.”
Somehow, Aspen managed to hold herself together as she watched Eve walk away. It took biting her tongue so hard it nearly bled, but she did it. She didn’t shout after Eve to stay. She held back the tears that built and built and built until she could barely make out the shape of Eve as she gathered her things off the far end of the conveyor belt. She kept her feet rooted to the floor and didn’t run after her.
She held herself together by the sheer force of her will and the burning desire to not let Eve see her break completely.
She dug her nails into her palms and gritted her teeth, and she held herself the fuck together until Eve had turned the corner and disappeared from sight. And it was only then that the tenuous grasp she had on her self-control snapped, and regret like she’d never known punched her in the chest and ripped out her goddamn heart. Her shoulders rounded under the crushing weight of what had just happened, and a low, keening cry scraped its way out of her throat as the tears that had been blinding her sluiced down her face.
She’d let her go.
She’d just stood here with a bullshit fake smile trying to be strong and let her fucking go.
She wiped angrily at her eyes.What kind of idiot just stands by and lets the woman they love walk away without fuckingtelling her?!
The looks from passing strangers ranged from pitying to outright concern, but she couldn’t summon the energy to do anything but stand there and cry her eyes out. She knew that she should move, but she couldn’t. It was as if, in her determination to stand tall and be a beacon of strength for Eve, her feet had grown roots and she was now anchored in place, unable to do anything but hope against hope that their whirlwind, storybook romance would magically find its way to a magical ending.
They deserved that much, right?
Surely, they deserved at least that?
But the minutes ticked by with nothing but more pitying looks and hushed comments that raked across her wounded heart like barbed wire. And when Eve’s flight status changed from ‘boarding’ to ‘departed’ on the television overhead, she was forced to accept that while their whirlwind romance might be something out of a storybook, their ending was still unwritten.
The roots holding her in place snapped one by one, leaving her feeling adrift and unmoored. Eve was gone just as she’d always been destined to be.
It was a harsh, bitter pill to swallow after everything, but she was a big girl, and she’d find a way to choke it down.
With nothing keeping her there any longer, she turned dejectedly toward the exit. Her steps were heavy with resignation as she placed one foot in front of the other. She could do this. They would be okay.
She had to believe that they would be okay.
Her phone buzzed in her pocket just as she stepped outside, and she threw a mental middle finger up at the universe for having the audacity to kick her when she was already so clearly down. She very nearly sent the call to voicemail, but answered at the last moment, instead, her voice barely intelligible to her own ears as she rasped, “Hello?”
She hadn’t expected to hear Eve’s voice on the line, but that didn’t stop her stomach from twisting painfully and making her feel like she might throw up when it was, in fact, someone besides Eve who answered.
“Hello, dear cousin,”Michael greeted her cheerily.“How’d it go with Eve?”
“You talked to her?”
“Just got off the phone with her, yeah.”
Aspen dragged a hand through her hair and seriously considered chucking her phone as far across the parking lot as she could. “Look, I know I deserve whatever shit you’re about to give me, but I’m really not in the mood right now. Can we just save it for a different day? Please?” she added, hating the way her voice cracked around the word.
“Oh, Aspen,”he murmured.“You really went and did it this time, didn’t you?”
Aspen sighed. Of course they were going to do this now. Because why the hell not? “If by ‘it’ you mean fall in love with your best friend who you explicitly told me to leave alone, then yeah. I did.”
“People don’t fall in love over a long weekend, Aspen.”
“I know, right?” Aspen choked on a laugh as a fresh wave of tears stung at her eyes. “Except I did. And I just had to watch her walk away from me, so if you could find it in your heart to give me twenty-four hours or something to just, I dunno, try to fuckingdealwith it before you start piling on—”
“I’m not— Where are you right now?”
“At the airport,” she snarled, waving a wild hand at the terminal behind her. “I told you I just dropped her off for her flight!”
“Inside?”
Aspen wanted to crawl through the phone and beat his ass. What did it matter? Eve was gone, and here he was, being hisusual asshole pedantic self about her exact location. “No. I’m at my fucking car. What does it matter?”
