Ethan smiled grimly. “Not this time.”
The bell above the door jingled as he pushed it open and stepped out into the frigid night air, and that time, Ethan Wilde headed home.
Setting the tumbler on the counter with a thud, Ethan Wilde dropped in a couple of ice cubes before pouring a generous amount of amber liquid into the glass.
Much better.
He took a swig before peeking into the grocery bags on the counter, making sure he hadn't forgotten to put away anything that needed to be refrigerated.
Satisfied that nothing perishable was left out, he abandoned the bags, grabbed his tumbler, and headed to the living room.
On second thought, he stopped and turned back, bringing the whiskey bottle with him.
God bless Saturdays. When he didn't have to work, anyway.
Sure, some may judge him for drinking alone at two in the afternoon, but he didn't give a fuck about those people.
The only people he did give a fuck about wanted nothing to do with him, and if his friend Jack Daniels helped him stop agonizing over that, then to hell with popular opinion.
While he spent the next hour putting a dent in his bottle, he hate-watched some show on Netflix. Instead of the calming effect he’d been hoping for, however, enhanced irritability set in.
He should’ve known better. Most days he didn't talk to Amanda—her choice, not his—but since waking up that morning to a barrage of text messages, itemizing the things she needed him to do for Caleb's first birthday party the following Sunday, he felt the void in his life more keenly. He shouldn't drink on days he talked to Amanda; it made him surly.
Not that there was anyone around to care, but he had to deal with it.
It was also a waste of perfectly good whiskey.
Draining the last drops of liquid from the tumbler, he set it in the floor along with the half-empty bottle and folded his hands over his stomach.
"What the hell am I even watching?" he muttered, reaching for the control to turn on something else.
The phone went off again, alerting him to a new text message. He sighed as he picked it up, prepared to see an addendum to his list—after he’d gone to the store, of course.
What he saw instead nearly made him lose his buzz.
He didn't recognize the number, but lighting up his screen was a picture of Willow Kensington, a smile on her face, decked out in her graduation cap and gown.
Sliding his finger across the screen, he opened the text to see if any words accompanied the picture.
Nothing.
Hauling himself up off the couch, he walked over to his desk, wedged in the corner behind the couch, and turned on his computer to check out the phone number.
A couple minutes later he verified that the number did, in fact, belong to Willow.
He brought his phone back to life and stared at the message, but his fingers froze, unsure of what to type back.
It had been six months since he kissed Willow goodbye at the door of their hotel room, and nearly four since he gave up keeping track of her.
He hadn't even known her for six whole months when his association with her blew his dependable, ordinary life all to hell. Now, less than a year after first laying eyes on her, he was drinking whiskey by himself in his one-bedroom apartment with around two weeks' worth of facial hair. Not because he was actively trying to grow it out, but because he couldn't be bothered to give a fuck.
His wife and kids, the only life he’d even known since college, were gone. Mostly gone. He was still able to visit them, but only when Amanda had time. As much as he resented her for denying him unsupervised visits with his own kids, when she argued that no sane woman would let her children spend the night with a rapist, he couldn't fault her logic.
There’d been a time when he had defended himself, attempted to explain things, vehemently tried to reason with Amanda—she knew him, knew he would never, ever pose a risk to his children.
Except he already had, as she reminded him, when Willow's father swooped into his house, threatening to kill not only him, but his wife and daughter as collateral for the damage he’d done to Willow.
In a sense, responding to Willow's message seemed like clear lunacy.