Taking Back His Bride

I’m not listening. I’m looking at him, but I’m looking right through Jeff, the senior analyst sitting across the small table from me, and my thoughts are a million miles away from whatever he’s talking about.

…My thoughts are always a million miles away these days.

In my lap, over my lily-white Black Halo Jackie sheath dress, my thumb rubs against my bare ring finger. Like every time I do this, there’s this second of panic that somehow I’ve lost the ring before my brain remembers that it’s been gone for a year. But there’s my thumb rubbing at the ghost of it. You know what they say about old habits.

The thing is, I did lose the ring. But I lost it purposefully, yanking it off in a whirlwind of hurt and betrayal and tears, cursing his name before winding back and throwing it as far off of our front porch as I could. I looked for it later, but I knew it was useless. The ring was gone, lost forever on the sandy and rocky shore of the Pacific.

Lost and gone, like Brooks.

We’d been married for a whopping two months when my father approached him with the job offer to run a crew on one of his rigs. The pay was fantastic, but the time commitment…

I remember flinching when he told me.

Three years. The man of my dreams, the love of my life, the one person I wanted to grow old with, and have a family with—I’d be without him for three freaking years.

I knew the job offer wasn’t kindness. Not from my father. It was a wedge. It was another way for him to try and break Brooks and I apart—part of his ongoing crusade to prove to me that I’d made the wrong choice. One more way for him to try and convince me Brooks wasn’t “good enough” for me. That his being not of “our world” made him somehow unsuitable.

I’d pleaded with my husband not to take the offer. I begged, and cried, and told him we didn’t need the money. Not with the trust fund I had waiting for me, and not with the job offer looming at Carson Financial. But Brooks wouldn’t listen. Or couldn’t, maybe. My father had found the one weak spot in our armor, and he’d gone for it hard.

It was the fact that I came from old money, and that Brooks came from nothing. I didn’t give one single shit about that. I didn’t care, and all I ever wanted in life was him. We had a simple life together. A simple house we’d made into a home together, north of San Francisco, and near the water.

But there was a fire in Brooks that even my pleas couldn’t put out. It was the urge to provide, and my father exploited that fire with every fiber of his being. And so, the man I loved, the man whose eyes made my pulse skip, and whose hands made me shiver and moan, and whose heart was my rock, left.

At first, we met up whenever we could. I flew to meet him, or him to me. We wrote emails all the time, texted all day, video-chatted every night. A year went by, and then a second. And the distance couldn’t touch the love we had.

And then one day, it all stopped cold. One day, my texts went unanswered, my calls declined, and my emails lost somewhere in internet land. A day turned into many days, which turned into a week. And I was in full panic breakdown mode going out of my mind trying to get an answer about what the hell was going on, when I finally got one short little email from him, like a bullet to the heart.

There was another girl. He claimed he’d never felt this way, and that he wouldn’t be held back from finding “true” happiness, and that he was leaving me for her.

And that was it. One email, four lines, and my life as I knew it was over.

There was darkness for a while. But after that, I turned the fury and the pain into fuel. I pushed hard at work and took on twice the clients I was expected to. I rose through the ranks, moving from junior to the senior commodities trader I was now at Carson Financial, the hedge fund I worked for.

And that pretty much brings us here, to the upscale restaurant in the North Beach area. Glittering candlelight, expensive cocktails, white tablecloths, waiters in suits. And Jeff, the senior analyst, sitting across the table from me, his eyes lingering on me long enough for me to know this isn’t just two co-workers “getting a drink” after work.

Jeff isn’t a bad looking guy. He’s quite handsome, actually, in that monied, high-class way. And yet, he’s also a total smarmy prick. Rich, handsome, and a douchebag, and for all intents and purposes, I’m out on a date with him.