Yet, in the weirdest freaking way, I had the feeling this was exactly how it was supposed to happen.
Sometimes you needed just a little bit of hurt to put a whole lot of things in perspective.
And, as I looked at my half-painted store, perspective was something I most definitely had.
***
“What’s that?” I said as soon as Sophie walked through the door the next day with a small envelope in her hand. It was no bigger than a birthday card.
She handed it to me without a word. The scrawling writing on the front was instantly recognizable to me as Chase’s, and I threw it in her direction without a word and went back to painting.
“I saw him in the café, and he asked me to give it to you. I’m not conspiring with the enemy or anything.”
I sniffed and rolled the white paint onto the walls. “You should have told him to shove it up his ass.”
“I did consider it,” she said, perching on one of the stools. “When is the plastic coming off of these?”
“When they won’t get paint on them anymore. Aren’t you supposed to be working?”
“I went to get lunch.” She held up a small white bag and moved to put her purse on the high counter.
“Don’t put your purse on the—” I stopped as she put it down. “—Counter.”
“Why?”
“I just painted its base coat.” I sighed.
Soph jumped up quicker than I’d ever seen her move before. “Holy shit, Rae! You should have said!”
“I tried,” I said dryly. “The paper towels are in the back. Go clean it up before it stains it.”
She dropped her lunch on the same counter, cursed, and grabbed it again. I had to bite back a laugh as she ran with her beloved Coach purse into the kitchen to clean it.
I took the paintbrush over to the counter and repainted it. Luckily for her, I’d only done it less than twenty minutes ago, so it was easy to cover up her mistake.
With that done, I went back to the other wall and stopped when the envelope from Chase almost had me slip up on it.
I grabbed it and threw it over the counter to the other side. I didn’t want to see it. I didn’t want to think about it. I didn’t want to know what the hell it said.
Hell, it could have been a photo of him in a mankini with a mustache and I still wouldn’t want to see it.
Well… maybe.
I’d send it to his mom for future girlfriends.
I ignored the teeny tiny pang the thought of him with another woman induced. I needed to pick an emotion and stick to it, and the one I most definitely wanted to stick to was never-ending hatred.
Because, well, hatred was no good if you stopped hating people. Thinking up ways to torture them was half the fun of hating people.
How did I know? I’d been a teenage girl once. I’m pretty sure I killed a few bitches in my dreams.
Killed a few assholes, too.
More than a few, actually.
What? Just because I didn’t date didn’t mean I didn’t have bad experiences.
“Why is the letter on the floor?” Sophie asked, going to the window seat with her now-clean purse.
“I couldn’t see the trash from over here.” I got on my knees, dipped my brush into the tin and continued on, making sure I didn’t get any on the bottom of the counter that I intended to paint a dreamy blush or lavender. Maybe both.
Sophie unwrapped her food. “I know you don’t want to hear it—”
“Which is your cue to shut up.”
“—But I don’t understand how you don’t want to know.”
She was one of the bitches I killed in my dreams.
“I just don’t,” I said firmly, sitting up and whacking my head on the lip of the counter. “Ouch.”
She dipped her head as she ate and hid her smile.
“I don’t know why that’s so hard for you to understand. I’ve been in the store, Soph. I’ve seen it. It doesn’t matter that I don’t want that store anymore. I have mine. I have this new dream, and it’s amazing, but that doesn’t mean that it doesn’t still hurt what he did.”
“I don’t—”
“He took the one thing that, at the time, was all I had left. My vision of this store was the only thing I had, and he took that away from me. It might be dramatic, but I’d just lost my parents, I was losing my aunt, and I’d gained this hot mess of a store. Those plans were the only things in my life that made any sense, and he took them from me.” I swallowed hard. “I don’t know if I can ever forgive him for that. He took the one thing I cared about more than anything in this world, and he can never, ever give that back.”