I remained still, squeezing my eyes shut. The usual thought spiral began, the self-hatred shouting me down, pulling me into the rage that overtook everything, that told me to find Cal and kick off what would become either the end of him, or me, or both of us. Because this time, I wasn’t sure I’d be able to stop.
Getting up slowly – abandoning my bag, my clothes, anything that once belonged to that Hestia – I walked out of the room, clutching my phone in one hand and my headphones in the other.
Cal was waiting in the doorway to the living room, an anticipation in his features that I knew better than my own face. All of it had been planned. He would take whatever opportunity he could to force me to where he wanted me.
But now, in the decimated remains of whatever we had been on the verge of rediscovering, I remembered the version of myself that Jesse knew.
That he loved.
That he’d protected and supported, held and cared for.
That Hestia wouldn’t reach for the kitchen knife on the side just there. She wouldn’t threaten Cal with it, maybe even throw it at him.
Holding onto that with everything I had, I approached him. He tensed, waiting.
The plastic of my headphones creaked under the force of the fist I’d created as I bared my teeth to him.
‘My lawyer will be in touch,’ I hissed, taking the first step down the stairs, gripping the handrail.
‘What?’ he scoffed as I started to walk down, forcing one step after another. ‘What the fuck for?’
‘For this place. For the business,’ I added, willing myself to the door, feeling the pull back to him, the rage begging to be unleashed.
He laughed.
‘What? No fight left in you? Did your big cowboy fuck it all out of you? Or should that be ex-cowboy? He hung up pretty fucking quick.’
I need you. I love you.I choked on the lump in my throat as Jesse’s words replayed.
‘Bye, Cal,’ I replied, registering the stunned silence behind me as I pulled open the front door. ‘I hope you get the help you need one day.’
I stepped outside and pulled the door shut behind me, forcing myself to breathe again as I sank down into a crouch against the brick wall.
Only Jesse’s words held me upright as I repeated them, over and over.
CHAPTER20
JESSE
I dropped the phone onto the bed, the weight of it suddenly more than I could hold.
So this was it – this was what it felt like.
Before now, before Hestia, I’d always been the one to walk away, to break up and cut my losses in relationships before anything real happened. Guarding myself was natural, I figured. Watching Mom for all that time alone; catching those moments when she thought we were asleep, her head in her hands in the kitchen, tears pooling on the chipped plastic tabletop. Me, fucking helpless, as my whole chest caved in with the hurt on her behalf, hating the asshole who’d called himself my father for barely six years, before leaving . . . for good.
Mom was the victim of having loved someone who didn’t deserve it, a man who’d walked away from all four of us. My sisters were old enough to remember when it happened. The tears she had shed during our childhood had hardened into frown lines and pursed lips as we grew older, the silence of forced restraint rather than peace.
But now, for the first time in my damn life, I understood it. What it felt like to have your heart ripped out, to see the love you’d offered up be tossed aside like trash.
I folded over at the waist, the pain from my wrist streaking white-hot fire up my arm. But for the first time in a week, I couldn’t feel it. Not over the pain in my fucking chest.
But this . . . this wasn’t the Hestia I’d come to know, was it? The person I’d felt, held, kissed . . . the one who’d looked at me like she was finally able to trust a man, to seeme– the real me, right in the fucking core of my bones.
What if this was the real her? The one in London who’d fallen back into bed, into life with her ex? Back in love with him?
The hope that’d welled up from her messages, the hours spent contemplating whether to risk it – all of that collapsed in on itself. Even looking up London flights, ready to back out of the rodeo . . . for nothing. For something that had clearly just been in my head.
Fucking tears, more fucking tears formed and fell in silence. I was a wreck, a goddamn burnt-out shell.
