1
Iwasn’t sure how long I was standing there staring at the door after she left. My breath was coming in short, sharp, ragged bursts, tearing in my throat, and I was having trouble keeping myself upright. I wanted to sink down to the floor, to beat my fists against the polished hardwood, to tear down all the pictures we had hung up together a few days before. I wished I could time-travel back to that moment when she’d been laughing and joking with me, when she had looked at me with that soft warmth in her eyes and made something in me feel whole for the first time.
But she was gone. No getting away from that. Just gone. And I was stuck here in this empty apartment staring at the door and willing it, with every fiber of my being, to open once more so she could come back in and tell me this had all been nothing but a bad joke.
But she didn’t, and eventually, I unstuck my feet from the floor and began pacing furiously up and down the apartment. The energy was crackling through my body, and I felt like I could have shot bolts of lightning out of my fingertips. She couldn’t just walk out on me like that. That was why I’d had the contracts drawn up in the first place, to avoid a scenario just like this one. Well, fat fucking lot of good that had done me because she just straight-up hadn’t signed them, leaving them on the counter where they could sit and taunt me for the rest of the night.
By the time I calmed down enough to start thinking straight again, some light had begun to seep through the windows and morning was on its way. I would have to go back to work soon, to plaster that happy face on long enough that nobody would guess what the fuck was going on with me, and I had no clue how the fuck I was supposed to do that. Coming back to her was one of the only things that had kept my days rolling, and now she was gone—God knew where—and there wasn’t any legal recourse I could take to bring her back.
That was when the anger really started to burn up inside of me. I stormed over to the bar and grabbed the expensive bottle of vodka Cleo had brought back from her last trip abroad. Where it was from, I had no idea, but as long as it was strong enough to scrub the memories of this bad fucking day out of my brain, I would take it happily. I poured a shot out, spilling a little over the sides of the glass as my hands shook with fury, and tossed it back. It helped a little. I did another. My mind finally focused. About damn time. I needed to figure out what the fuck was going on.
I wasn’t going to go after her. It wasn’t who I was. If she didn’t want to be married to me, then she could get the hell out of my life and stay out. I had offered her everything, money, status, sex, a home, support for her sister when she needed it, and she had turned her back on all of it for—well, because of what? Because she loved me?
Those words hung in my head, and I tried my best to make sense of them. It had been a long time since a woman had told me she loved me. I couldn’t remember the last time. But I wasn’t going to forget this one after the way she had said those words like she was ripping open some deep-down part of her she’d tried her best to keep hidden all this time. Maybe she would have been better off keeping her mouth shut, sucking it up and dealing with it. Wasn’t what I gave her enough? I didn’t understand why, if her feelings had grown for me, this would all suddenly turn into a problem. We were married. So she loved me. Wasn’t that the way things were meant to be?
But I knew why she had left. She knew damn well that I was never going to love her the way she loved me. I just couldn’t do it, no matter how hard I tried. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to have that kind of love in my life, just that I had no idea how to build it, cultivate it, tend it so it grew into something positive. It was far easier to pay off some woman I barely knew to play at being my wife than it was to think about falling in love for real.
I slammed the bottle of vodka down, the shock of the bottle on the bar enough to whip me back to reality. She had fucked me over. I wasn’t about to start getting sentimental about it now. All that time, when she had been pushing for the contracts, she’d had no intention of signing them. She just wanted the power of knowing she could take my cash whenever she wanted to. She was just another fucking gold digger like all those women who had come before her who I’d shot down for that very reason. She had stuck around long enough for me to pay up her sister’s home and to take advantage of my apartment and get her car fixed up. Now that she had what she wanted, she was out of there. “In love,” my ass. She was doing what she had to in order to keep me at arm’s length. She knew I was too broken to love her back, and she knew it would keep me away.
I stormed over to the table and grabbed the contracts. Pages upon pages of them, drawn up to make sure she couldn’t do this to me, and what had it been worth at the end of the day? Nothing. Nothing at all. She had still fucked me over, still left me, still never signed these. How long had it taken her to decide she was just going to keep hold of them to hang over my head? Why would she even push for them to be drawn up in the first place? It didn’t make any sense.
Well, she wasn’t coming back, and I was going to make damn sure of that. I ripped the pages in two, all of them, and tossed them to the floor of the apartment, letting them splay wildly across the floor. I watched them as they drifted out in front of me, and I ran my hands through my hair and let out a grunt of annoyance. I wanted to yell at the top of my lungs, but even the booze hadn’t got me losing control that much.
I slumped down against the counter and then slipped down against the floor. She was gone. Nothing was going to change that. The worst part was that some small part of me had been wondering since the moment she’d moved in if there could have been something between us. Sure, the start was unorthodox, but maybe, just maybe, we could have made something work.
I shoved those thoughts angrily to the back of my head. Nothing would have worked between us because she was just a gold digger, a liar who had taken me for a ride and wrung me dry. I was lucky she had left after only a few weeks. Fuck knew what else she would have tried to squeeze out of me if I’d given her the chance. I wondered what else she’d been playing me on as well. Was her sister really disabled? Surely, they couldn’t have faked that on top of everything else, but I was questioning everything now, going back over every single one of our interactions, combing them out to see where the lies might have started, where she had changed her mind.
I could put my finger on the moment it cracked. The night we’d fucked. It had felt so damn right at the time. Shit, I’d been pulling for us to wind up in bed or elsewhere again since the day we had woken up next to each other and this whole thing had started. Had she even been that drunk when we’d ended up heading down the aisle together? Perhaps she’d known who I was and planned this all from the start.
I pushed my face into my hands and let out a groan. I felt as though my brain was turning to mush in my head, all the questions that had followed her leaving crushing down on me, the weight of them hurting. My chest felt constricted like I couldn’t pull in all the air I needed to keep functioning. How had she done this to me? How could she do this to me? Didn’t she understand how hard this was for me?
Yes. The answer to that was yes. She knew that, and she had still gotten up and walked out of here, lying to me and avoiding me because her own guilty conscience was nagging at her. At least she had a scrap of decency left in her, enough to see what she was doing was wrong.
I dragged myself back to my feet and leaned on the counter, shooting another look at the bottle of vodka. I could take another shot, but it wasn’t going to fix anything. She had gotten me drinking before breakfast, so I could already say with some certainty that the rest of the day was going to be some kind of a bust. My chest ached hollowly at the thought of going to work and then coming home and knowing that she wasn’t going to be here. She had taken most of her stuff, from what I could see, but there was no way I could go into her room and clear out the last of it. Fuck, up until last month, that had been my bedroom and my bedroom alone, and now I couldn’t even think about looking in there. I kicked the door shut as I headed through to take a shower, hoping to sweat out the worst of the booze I’d poured down my throat. I was such a fucking idiot. What was I, a college student thinking this was going to help, that vodka shots were going to make anything better?
I scrubbed myself near-raw under the shower, the water burning hot. It felt good, even though I knew it probably wasn’t doing me any good. I got dressed and headed through to the kitchen, running on autopilot and hoping if I tried hard enough, I could pretend none of this was happening and life was the same as it had been before she turned up. I had been happy without her before, and I would be happy without her now. It was that simple.
I stepped over the shredded papers scattered on the floor and started to make breakfast, smacking a pan down on the stove and switching it on. Eggs. Eggs would make it better, along with enough coffee to make me forget I’d thought vodka was a good idea this early in the morning. I just had to make it through the next eight hours, and then I could come home and sleep the rest of this twenty-four hours off and make like none of this had gone down in the first place.