“Yeah.”
“You crying?”
“I’m not crying,” I said quickly, wiping under my eye anyway.I was.
Laila stared at me before laughing softly. “Girl…”
“It’s just my period making me emotional,” I muttered, looking out the window. “He was talking to me crazy today, and Mother Nature ain’t like it.”
“You can tell he was irritated, too.”
“Well, he can stay irritated.”
She started the car. “Let’s go have a smoke break at my place. My husband already rolled up.”
That actually sounded perfect right now.
Milan Braxton
“The problem with toxic love is that eventually somebody survives it.”
Isat in the high-rise Vaughn paid for, staring at the city with my rent reminder email still open on my laptop.
Final month.
That’s what the subject line said.
Final month covered by St. Clair Holdings.
I read it three times before closing the laptop hard enough to make the wine glass beside it shake.
Four years with Vaughn St. Clair, and this was how the shit ended? A payment confirmation and silence?
No.
Absolutely the fuck not.
I got up from the couch and walked barefoot through the condo he once spent almost every night in. This place used to feel exciting. Toxic. Fun. Now it just felt empty.
That was the thing about Vaughn and me. We never had a healthy relationship. We had a consuming one. The type of love that made you check phones while somebody was asleep. Thetype that made you scream, fight, fuck, cry, then order food together an hour later.
We cheated on each other constantly.
Not even secretly after a while.
At one point, we got so toxic that we started bringing women into our relationship, trying to save it. That shit made everything worse. Vaughn would touch another woman while staring at me the whole time, and somehow that irritated me more than regular cheating.
We used sex to avoid real conversations.
Used money to avoid consequences.
Used drugs to avoid ourselves.
I went to the kitchen and poured more wine.
The memories just kept coming anyway.
The abortions.
