Wash

“Mike!” I said, blushing. “You know I’m just one of the regular folks.” I grinned.

Mike walked over and gave me a friendly hug. “I’ve missed you, girl. It’s been years.” He kissed me on the cheek. “I heard you and Nadia started a fashion line and even own a boutique.”

Jake smiled at me. “Congratulations.”

“Thanks. We’ve got big plans, and we’ve gotta start somewhere.”

“Reach for the stars, I always say. Anyway, we’ll catch up later,” Mike said. “I know seeing Jake again must be, uh…quite the shock,” he whispered.

“I didn’t mean to lose touch,” I said. “I just…”

He winked. “Don’t even worry about it. Just give me a call sometime, and we’ll play catch-up over lunch. I’m in the phonebook.”

“Definitely,” I promised.

Another one of his buddies slapped me on the back. “Does Jake still look the same?”

“I’m sure any minute, Earth will fall off its axis from all his hotness,” I said sarcastically.

They all laughed, and I could only grin.

Jake finally managed to tear his gaze away from my cleavage and smiled. “How about that drink?” he offered again, sounding like he needed it more than I did.

I pushed my long brown tresses behind my ears. “Thank you, but I won’t be staying long.”

“I was hoping we could catch up,” Jake said.

Right on cue, another of Jake’s friends walked in and hugged me. “Ashly! It’s been years. You must be here for Jake.”

“Yes, I’m here to talk to my absentee groom. And I was the dumpee, so get your stares and whispers out of the way or forever hold your peace.”

Most of his friends just said hello, then left. Either they wanted to give Jake a little privacy or they were too uncomfortable to face me.

“Look,” I said. “I chased your entourage away.” I blinked. “Imagine that. It seems I still have that effect on people. I mean, I did somehow chase you away on our big day.”

“I asked them to leave so we could have a little privacy, Ashly. I know the White Coyote isn’t the best place to meet to hash out our differences, but I couldn’t have you going off on me at a restaurant or something.”

“So you’re expecting me to go off on you?”

“I know I deserve it. What I did was rotten, and I’ve never been able to forgive myself.” He inched closer. “I’m so sorry, Ashly. If I could take it all back, you know I would.”

I reached into my purse and grabbed one of the pictures of me in my lovely wedding gown. “Since you never got to see me in my wedding dress, here,” I said, shoving it into his hand.

He glanced down and pondered for a long moment. “Wow. You’re so beautiful. I was such an idiot.”

“You got that right. How could you just leave like that, Jake? How could you do that to me? And the worst part was that you humiliated me in front of all our friends and relatives. I didn’t deserve that.”

“Ashly, you know as well as I do that I never fit in with your rich family. I was a bad boy from the wrong side of the tracks.”

“But love conquers all, right? I didn’t care, and you shouldn’t have cared either.”

“We were so young. I had just turned twenty, and…” he said, trailing off before he blurted out yet another lame excuse.

Images flooded into my mind. I remembered Nadia helping me take down all of his pictures a few weeks after what I’d deemed Black Saturday. I’d felt shock and rage, depression, and the most intense loneliness anyone could ever feel. For weeks, I couldn’t get out of bed, and taking a shower and getting dressed seemed like pointless, impossible chores. After Jake walked out of my life without ever looking back, Nadia also helped me pack up his belongings. I cleared out the medicine cabinet and threw out his blue toothbrush in the wastebasket, one of the hardest things I ever had to do. I learned the hard way just how much heartbreak could hurt. I worked through the pain eventually, and that helped me to get on with my life, but if it weren’t for my job, friends, and family, I never would have survived the havoc that Jake wreaked on me. I still wasn’t sure I’d ever get past the anger completely, because it was still sitting like a lump in the pit of my stomach.

“Ashly?”

I snapped back into reality and stared at his blue eyes glittering in the dim light.