CalenI ignored the look of hurt on my ex-wife’s face as I carried on walking with my son into the mall. I was told that the baby store here was the best in the immediate area for now, and since I didn’t want her bringing any of her shit to my place, I needed to be here until I could work out something better.
I’d called a friend of mine and gotten the name of the safest car seat for him, which needed to be picked up somewhere else and had taken a three-hour drive unless I wanted to wait until tomorrow to receive it by mail. I wasn’t willing to wait a second longer than was necessary to have my seed in my home under my roof, where I could watch over him.
I have yet to deal with the anger I feel over having missed out on the first year of his life, but then again, when it comes to Giselle, I have a lot of deep-rooted anger that needs to be dealt with. I’ve put off even thinking about her for the last two years, but now, now that she’d stolen my seed and kept him hidden from me, she can have no idea of the hell I’m about to unleash on her disloyal ass.
I’ve never known hate like the one I feel for her. I’ve had strong dislike before, but she’s the one and only person who’s ever tapped into the darkest side of me, a side I didn’t even know I had until she walked out on me. It had taken me days, weeks, months, to get over what she’d done, and the pain was so raw in the beginning that my only recourse was to wipe her from my mind completely.
It was like cauterizing a wound or, worse, amputating a limb. I didn’t drink or do anything that would further harm myself; I’m not that weak. Instead, I’d turned my rage into something more. I’d thrown myself into work even more than I had in the past, which only made me richer than I already was. And I guess you can say the extreme sports I’d taken up was a drug of sorts. Whatever it was, it had helped me put her out of my mind as if she’d never been.
It’s not wise to think of the person you hate most in the world and what you’d like to do to them while scaling a treacherous rock face on the side of a steep mountain overlooking a cliff. My mother had been terrified that she would lose her son, but had I not thrown myself into those things, she’d have lost me to jail instead because I would’ve hunted this bitch down and knocked her fucking head off had I seen her at any time in that first year.
I’d held onto the house for some twisted reason, knowing that bringing another woman there would be the nail in her coffin. I’m still not sure how I knew that seeing as she’d disappeared without a trace. But somewhere deep inside, I knew that the love she’d had for that place had been real, and being a damn female, the thought of another woman being in the place she’d seen as hers would gut her.
I couldn’t leave it as it had been, though, fuck no. Each time I walked through the door and saw the evidence of her touch, I’d wanted to commit murder. So I’d hired someone to gut the place from top to bottom and remove all the froufrou shit she’d been into, turning it into a more modern state of the art home. I hated it, her designs had been more suited to the place, but I was killing her with each piece I removed and replaced. At least in my mind, I was.
I’d taken on more work, traveled more and more to get away, to keep my mind occupied so that it wasn’t filled with her. The one time I tried to fuck someone else had been a disaster and had made me hate her even more than I already did. And then the thought of her in someone else’s arms had turned me into a complete fucking monster.
I’d gone on a tear that had lasted months, something only my mother had been able to bring me back from. But I barely paid her any mind even then, since she was the only one who still sided with my ex-wife. Of everyone around me, it was only my mother who insisted that Giselle hadn’t left me on her own, that she hadn’t deceived me all those months we were together.
Everyone else agreed with me that she was a gold-digging slut who deserved to have her throat slit and left in a gutter to bleed out. Something I’d sworn I’d do if I’d seen her in those first few days after she left. It didn’t matter that she hadn’t taken anything when she left, that even the account I’d opened for her had gone untouched all this time. I convinced myself that she’d been after my money, and the only reason she hadn’t taken me for more is because something had come up or she’d realized that I wasn’t an easy mark and had moved onto someone else.