1
Emma
I cry for the first hour of the two-and-a-half-hour flight to Orlando. I can’t help it. My heart isn’t just broken; it feels like it’s been ripped out of my chest.
And I did it to myself.
I told Marcus I can’t move in with him.
I told him it was over.
My seatmates—a balding fifty-something man by the window and a blond teenage girl in the aisle seat—try to scoot away as I blow my nose for the fifth time. Only there’s nowhere to go. Well, the blond girl can technically get up and go to the bathroom, but she’s already done it three times to get away from me, so she stays put, giving me the occasional side-eye.
I don’t blame her. The only thing worse than a crying baby on a plane is a crying adult.
“You, um… okay?” the balding man finally ventures, and I bob my head, forcing out a watery smile.
“Yes, sorry. Just a…” I swallow a lump in my throat. “A bad breakup.”
“Oh, cool,” the teenager says, visibly brightening. “I thought you’d just learned you had cancer or something.”
I wince, feeling like an asshole. Because she’s right: it could be so much worse. People have real tragedies, bad things they can’t avoid. Whereas the pain I’m feeling is entirely self-inflicted.
I hooked up with Marcus Carelli, a hedge fund billionaire who’s so far out of my league as to reside on a different planet.
I fell for him, knowing we have no future, and now I’m paying the price.
“I once had a bad breakup too,” the teenager confides, chewing on her green, sparkly thumbnail. “The asshole cheated on me with my best friend in middle school. Kissed her behind the bleachers, can you believe that?”
“Oh, wow, that’s terrible. I’m sorry,” I say sincerely. Middle school or not, that had to have hurt. At least Marcus never cheated on me. He disappeared for three days after an amazing weekend together, but as far as I know, no other women were involved.
Well, except Emmeline.
She—or her equally perfect clone—was always there between us.
“Yeah, well, happens,” the girl says, shrugging philosophically. “What about you? What did the jerk do?”
“He…” I swallow again. “He chased me down at the airport and asked me to move in.”
Both the girl and the man stare at me like a jellyfish just sprouted from my head, so I rush to explain. “He didn’t mean it. Not the way people normally do. It’s just a convenience thing for him. He’s going to marry someone else. He told me so when we first met and—”
“He’s engaged?” the girl exclaims in horror, and I shake my head.
“No, no. They haven’t started dating yet. It might not even be her, necessarily. It’s just that he has a very particular criteria, you see, and I don’t fit it. At all. We have chemistry, but that’s not enough for a long-term relationship. I’m not the type of girl he’d want to introduce to his friends or clients. At best, I’m just a diversion for him, and sooner or later, he’s going to get bored and walk away. And then”—I drag in a shaky breath—“then it’ll be so much worse.”
“So you, what… sent this fellow packing preemptively?” The man looks fascinated, like he’s getting special insight into the female psyche. “Kind of like striking first in battle to minimize your losses?”
I nod and blow my nose again. “Something like that.”
Except if the goal was to win said battle, I’ve already lost. My heart belongs to the man I walked away from, and it’s hard to imagine it hurting more than it does now. Still, I’m sure I made the right choice when I broke it off with him.
If I feel this way after a weekend together, how much worse would it be if I’d actually been with Marcus for some time?
No, this is the only way. Rip off the Band-Aid—along with a chunk of my heart, in this case—and move on.
The wound is bound to heal over time.
Isn’t it?
2
Emma
By the time we land, I know way too much about my seatmates, as they seem to have jointly decided that the best way to keep me from crying over my breakup is to entertain me with detailed stories about themselves. As a result, I’ve learned that Donny—the fifty-something man—is originally from Pennsylvania but resides in Florida, has been divorced twice, owns a car dealership in Winter Park, and can’t eat anything green, while Ayla—the teenager—is a rare Florida native, has a sister who’s been divorced three times, and is graduating from high school next year. Ayla, not the sister, that is. The sister dropped out of high school. Oh, and Ayla’s allergic to tree nuts but has no issues with green stuff.
“Bye! Nice meeting you!” I wave to them as they hurry past me with their bags, and they wave back, obviously relieved to be done with the flight and the crazy redhead crying over a man who asked her to move in.