Wretched Love

THREE WEEKS LATER

I had come to discover that I loved the sounds my house made in the middle of the night.

My house.

It felt insane to even think such a thing.

Okay, it wasn’t technically mine since it was owned by Macy and Hansen, but I was paying rent here. Or I was going to be once I figured out how to slip the money into her purse.

But I picked out the comforter. Rugs. There were framed pictures of Violet scattered around the house. Violet, who was coming home in just over a week. She’d had her weekend with Jacques that was ah-mazing and was making preparations to come home.

I’d half expected that she’d announce she was engaged to him. That thought, among other things, kept me up at night. She was still ignorant as to what exactly was going on with her parents. I needed to tell her. I knew I needed to tell her. But I had to garner the strength.

Preston and I were divorced.

Just like that.

Well, not just like that if you considered everything that had happened. But I didn’t have a hand in anything. I just signed the papers prepared for me. Papers that originally said I had ownership over the house, the stocks and bonds that Preston held and a bunch of other assets.

I’d donated it all, except a sum that I’d calculated I’d need and for Violet’s college fund.

Everyone had thought I was crazy for refusing the donating and assets. Everyone had tried to talk me out of it.

I’d held firm, something that was new to me but that I’d enjoyed. I’d lived a life of excess and been miserable. Been damn near suicidal. I did not want money to keep me in a lifestyle to which I had been accustomed.

Just the thought of that lifestyle made me sick.

Instead, I liquified all of his investments and donated all of the cash to various domestic violence charities, to women’s shelters, to paying legal fees for women trying to divorce abusive husbands.

The house was trickier, though.

I certainly didn’t want my name on a house that had been a prison for years. Macy suggested I sell it, take the money. I’d considered that, but for better or for worse, Violet grew up in that house. She had wonderful memories there. She deserved the option to go home there, if she wished.

I nurtured a hope that she would want to come home, here, to New Mexico. Of course, she had to go back to school. She was going to Brown. Brown. I was exceptionally proud of her. But it was just so far.

I itched to be close to her. Close enough to drive and take her out for dinner, go shopping. But this was my home now. And my precious girl was turning into a woman.

Planes existed. I could and would visit her whenever I wanted.

I’d make it work.

Somehow.

Although the logistics of Violet’s homecoming had been on my mind for some time now, it was not what kept me up.

It was the couch.

The purple couch that Hansen had teased Macy about. The purple couch that I just happened to love.

It was a couch that currently had a six-foot, hulking biker sleeping on it. The biker who had been sleeping on it ever since I moved in here. Ever since he decided we were going to take it slow.

That we were going to be fucking friends.

He still slept in this house every night. He was still with me every free moment he had. If I went anywhere with him, it was on the back of his bike. My body pressed against his, the Harley vibrating between my legs… It was pure torture. From the pained look on his face every time we got off, it wasn’t just torture for me.

Yeah, he was going near mad with need too. But he’d held fast in this friends bullshit. And I was too stubborn, too hurt, too freaking confused to try and seduce him, argue against this.

Well, until that very moment.