I ran my tongue along her neck, and she sighed beneath me. I flipped us over so she was on top of me, and a moan escaped her lips as I rubbed her clit. She held onto my headboard above me as she circled her hips over me, and the view of her over me made me lose all control.
I grabbed her hips and pushed her up and down as I exploded into her.
She yelled out wildly as her entire body tightened and then uncoiled around me.
She collapsed over me, and we both panted for a moment.
“Jesus,” I moaned.
“Holy fuck, Grant,” she muttered.
“I know,” I said.
She rolled off of me and fell into the nook of my arms, the one place made for her and only her.
I didn’t want to sleep because I didn’t want to miss a moment we could spend together, but we both drifted from the exertion our bodies had just endured.
When I woke, it was because Rachelle was shaking my arm. It was morning. Rachelle’s flight was a little after noon, so she had to leave for the airport by ten.
I glanced over at the clock. It was just after nine.
We only had an hour left together.
She was already showered and dressed. She was ready to go. Her luggage was already sitting by the door.
But I was far from being ready to let her go.
CHAPTER 24
PRESENT TIME
I hadn’t slept more than a few shitty hours at a time since the first night I had spent with Avery. I stared at my ceiling in the darkness of my room. Images took shape around my periphery. I saw Avery’s beautiful blonde hair that was always soft under my hands. I saw her brown eyes that expressed exactly how she was feeling when words weren’t necessary.
And on the other side, I saw Rachelle. Her silky, thick hair. Her dark and mysterious eyes that told me different things than her words.
The two were polar opposites, yet they had both taken up residence in different places in my heart.
I had all of these new feelings for Avery, this freshness I couldn’t recall ever having experienced in my life before. But I had the history with Rachelle.
It was a painful and sordid past, but it was ours.
And as I lay there in bed staring into the darkness, I made my decision.
I was pretty sure I’d always known what I was going to do. I had to see her.
I had to know why. She’d left me with too many questions. She’d walked out on me twice, but I was smarter now. I knew better than to allow her to walk out on me a third time.
I’d have my guard up this time.
Besides, I had Avery to think about now. The last time I’d seen Rachelle, she had still been the center of my world. But now I had these intense feelings for someone else. And maybe that would give me the strength I’d need to face her after the way she’d shattered me the last time I had seen her.
CHAPTER 25
FOUR YEARS EARLIER
“Let me drive you to the airport, at least.”
She shook her head. “I already called a cab.” Her voice was soft, and she wasn’t looking me in the eye.
I was still oblivious as to what was about to happen.
Her bags were by the door. She was ready to leave. All she had to do was walk her bag out the front door, and she’d be gone.
“I think it’s time for our talk,” she said. She wrung her hands together in her lap. She was fidgety.
She was never fidgety. She was always calm and composed.
It was my first hint that morning that things weren’t going to work out the way I had assumed they would.
She stood and paced. “Look, Grant. I—”
She was cut off by the ringing of my doorbell.
I stood to answer it, and she held up a hand. “That’ll be my cab.”
She walked to the door, and I followed behind her. She opened it and motioned to her luggage. “I’ll be out in a minute, okay?” she told the cab driver.
He nodded, and she shut the door. She turned to face me. I was close behind her, close enough to touch her when she turned toward me.
She put a hand on my chest and gently pushed me back a few steps. She took a deep breath, and all I could do was stand there helplessly as I awaited her words.
“Grant, I came here to see what I’d been missing in our years apart. I had to know if I’d made a mistake three years ago.”
Those words gave me hope, but that hope was immediately massacred with her next words.
“While this week has been amazing, full of old memories and what we were like together, I realized it’s not what I’m looking for. You are not what I’m looking for.”
I heard her words, but I felt like I was having an out of body experience. It was like she was speaking the words, but she didn’t mean to say them to me. Those words weren’t about me. She couldn’t possibly mean them.
I wasn’t what she was looking for?
But she was everything.
She was everything.
I was ready to build my life around her. I was ready to give up my life to be with her.
I was ready to spend the rest of my life with her.
But I wasn’t what she was looking for.
I couldn’t speak, and that only made it worse for me. Nervous Rachelle decided to fill the silence with more hurtful words, but these were the ones that would stay with me, that would claw their way into me and never let me go.
These were the words that would ruin me for other women for the rest of my life. These were the words that would kill a piece of me I’d never recover.
Her eyes wouldn’t meet mine. “I’m getting married tomorrow.” Her voice was quiet, but her words were loud. They punched me in the gut. They made me bleed. They fucked every piece of sanity I was holding onto.
They ruined me.
They told me she had meant her words from three years earlier. She never saw me as someone she could marry, but there was someone else who she did see that way.
“Tomorrow,” I echoed. How the hell was she getting married the next day when we’d spent the entire last week together?
It was one of those questions I’d never get the answer to.
She was getting married, and in that moment, it was all that mattered.
She was in love with someone else. Someone else had asked her to marry him, and she’d said yes. She’d said yes to him when she’d said no to me.
“I was never certain if I had made the right decision three years ago, but now I am. I had to see you one more time to make sure I was doing the right thing.”
I finally found my voice.
“So you fucking slept with me for the last week and led me to believe we’d find our way back to each other?”
“I never meant to hurt you. I never meant to lead you on.”
“You cheated on someone,” I spat my words at her. My composure was gone as I raised my voice. “With me. What the fuck, Rachelle? What the fuck made you think that would be okay on any level?”
She’d never been one to back down, and this situation was no different. “I knew it wasn’t okay. But I couldn’t stay away from you.”
“That doesn’t make it okay! God dammit!” I slammed my fist into the wall.
The drywall cracked around my fist as I punched right through it. I pulled my hand out of a dusty hole. Blood tricked from my knuckles, but I didn’t give a fuck. I didn’t feel it against the searing pain in my chest.
Rachelle stood tall. She wasn’t afraid of my rage, but she had an out. There was a cab waiting to take her home to her fiancé.
To the man she was going to marry.
My fucking brain hadn’t even had time to process that fact yet. My Rachelle, the one woman who I’d always assumed I’d marry someday, was getting married to some other man.
After she’d fucked me for the last week, after she’d whispered memories as I held her through the night, she was marrying someone else.
She was leaving me alone.
Again.
Hatred filled my heart as
I looked at the woman I’d once loved, the woman who’d made me fall in love with her all over again in the short week we had spent together, the woman who had broken me once and just when I’d started to recover, she had broken me again. But this time I was beyond repair.
I hated her even though I loved her.
I would always love her. My heart belonged to her.
But what she had done was unforgivable.
It was evil, pure and simple.
“Get the fuck out of my house.”
I didn’t look at her, but I could tell she was brushing her tears away. She didn’t have a right to be sad. She didn’t have a right to cry.
Not after what she had done to me.
“I’m sorry, Grant,” she whispered, and then she let herself quietly out the door as she walked out of my life and toward her future with another man.
CHAPTER 26
PRESENT TIME
The details of the week after Rachelle left me are fuzzy in my memory, probably because I spent the majority of that week drunk off my ass. All I could think about when I was sober was that Rachelle was married. She was probably off on her honeymoon enjoying all of the sex, and I was home alone, drowning my sorrows mostly in tequila.
But none of it really mattered anymore, and as I lay in bed after a shitty night’s sleep, I finally came to a pretty huge realization.
People fear change. It’s a fact of life.
When Rachelle smashed my heart into a million fractured pieces, I thought I’d never heal. I made mistakes. I hurt women. I didn’t allow myself to get too close to anyone because I was afraid I’d never pull myself out of another heartbreak.
But then I saw this blonde woman with brown eyes who I’d known for years in a totally different light.
Avery was my savior, and I hadn’t even known it. Ditching her for the night and reminiscing on my past with Rachelle had shown me I needed her. She’d healed those parts of me I thought were unhealable.
She’d singlehandedly shown me maybe there was someone else out there for me when I’d been convinced for far too long that Rachelle was the only one.
It was too soon to call it forever, but it wasn’t too soon to admit Avery had managed to fix some things that had been broken for a very long time.
And it was time to let her know that.
I wanted to tell her everything. I’d already relived all of those memories in the past ten hours; it couldn’t get worse than reliving them alone.
Change is difficult. It’s scary. But most of the time, change has to happen to get us to the right place. And the right place for me was beside Avery.
But first I needed to see Rachelle. I needed to bury the past, to get my questions answered so I could move on.
I finally texted her back. I didn’t wait until “our time,” because it wasn’t our time anymore. It no longer held that meaning for me. Now it just represented the time when I’d stupidly left Avery’s in favor of a past that haunted me.
Her text composed of ten little words, two short sentences, and forty-one characters got a reply that was the exact same length.
I can meet u today at ten. Bfast @ Wrens.
As the brother of an English teacher, I hated abbreviating “you” to “u,” but I was texting her back to let her know I understood her secret message.
Ten, two, forty-one was significant to both of us.
Ten was my room number in the fraternity house where I’d first made love to her the night of the Captain Morgan Confessional. And 241 was the classroom where we’d first met in COM105.
Somehow ten, two, forty-one became significant to both of us.
I wasn’t sure why I felt the need to craft a text that met the same numerical significance hers had, but I did it anyway. It hadn’t taken much thought considering it had once been a habit for both of us.
Her reply was instantaneous: I’ll be there @ 10. Can’t wait 2 see you.
I didn’t have the mental energy to reply. I needed to save my energy for two things: first, to actually meet her in person, and second, for the night I had planned for Avery.
I texted Avery next. So sorry about last night. I’ll explain it all tonight. Dinner at my place? –G
Her reply was not instantaneous.
In fact, I didn’t get a reply from her. I kept my phone next to me all morning. I went for a quick run and had it in my pocket. I showered and kept it on full volume just outside of the curtain in case she might call. I slipped it into my pocket as I made my way to Wrens for breakfast with Rachelle.
Wrens was a local bakery and sandwich shop. It was an easy solution when I didn’t know what else to eat, and it had always been a favorite of Rachelle’s. And the bonus was it was close to my house.
I walked into the place and glanced around, but I didn’t see her. The waitress seated me, and I ordered a coffee, opting to wait for Rachelle before ordering my meal.
I didn’t have a long wait.
I saw her walk in the door and glance around, much like I had only moments before. Her eyes locked on mine.
My eyes flicked down to her left hand, third finger in.
It was empty.
I felt myself inhale a sharp breath. I wasn’t sure what emotions were attacking me in the rush that filtered through my chest and into my stomach. I’d figure it out later. For now, I had to just live in the moment and see where this conversation took us.
Besides, just because she didn’t have a ring on her finger didn’t mean she wasn’t married. It didn’t mean she wasn’t seeing somebody. It didn’t mean she wasn’t in a serious and committed relationship.
She hadn’t been wearing a ring the last time I’d seen her, either, but she sure hadn’t been available then.
Not that it had stopped her.
I stopped the direction of my thoughts as she began her walk toward me. I took a sip of coffee, needing something to do to occupy my hands while she approached. I felt awkward and unsure of myself, and it was unfamiliar and uncomfortable.
I wasn’t sure if I should stand to greet her or remain seated. I was in a booth, so it wasn’t like I could just back up my chair to stand. I’d physically have to scoot out of the booth. And standing meant a hug, but I preferred to keep my distance. I didn’t want to touch her or feel her against me. It was too goddamn dangerous.
She’d always been dangerous, but I’d never seen her that way. I’d always simply seen her as the woman I loved, the one who I adored.
But as she slid into the booth across from me, I saw someone I didn’t recognize anymore.
Her eyes betrayed her cool exterior. She took me in, warmth turning to heat as she looked at me, but her eyes showed signs of exhaustion. Deep circles shadowed her normally bright eyes. She looked older, far more than the four years that had passed since I had last seen her. Lines from laughter—or maybe from frowning—were etched around her lips, and tiny webs of wrinkles crinkled the corners of her eyes.
But despite all of that, she was still the gorgeous Rachelle I’d always known.
“You look good,” she said. Her voice was still the same voice I’d fallen in love with.
“As do you.”
Those were the first words we’d spoken to one another in four years.
“How are you?” she asked.
I shrugged. “Surprised to be sitting across the table from you.”
She chuckled, but it was more out of courtesy than anything else. The smile didn’t reach her eyes.
The waitress came by for her drink order, and I opened my menu. I already knew what I was ordering, but I needed something to do, somewhere to look.
All I could think of was the fact that this entire situation was all wrong.
I was sitting here across the table from a woman who was entrenched in my past. That was where she belonged.
Seeing her sitting across from me confirmed what I’d already realized that morning. Rachelle was my past.
Avery was my present.
And with any luck, Avery wou
ld be my future, too.
I probably didn’t deserve her, but I was done beating myself up. I’d denied myself happiness for long enough. It was time to stop punishing myself under the guise of protection. It was time to start living my life, taking risks, and allowing myself to love and be loved in return.
And Avery was the girl I wanted to do all of it with.
“Denver omelet, side of wheat toast, and pancakes.”
I glanced up at her. “Bagel with nonfat cream cheese and strawberry waffles.”
She smiled, and this time it reached her eyes. “Funny how we can so easily fall into old roles.”
“Remembering what you like to eat for breakfast isn’t falling into an old role, Rachelle. And I was actually planning on scrambled eggs instead of an omelet.”
Hurt passed briefly across her face, and I’d realized my tone had been much harsher than I had meant it to sound.
But then I realized I didn’t care. She was hurt because she didn’t know my breakfast order anymore? Well that was her goddamn fault.
Neither of us said anything for a minute, and thankfully the waitress appeared to take our orders. Sure enough, she ordered a bagel with nonfat cream cheese and strawberry waffles.
And just to be spiteful, I ordered French toast and sausage.
“What are we doing here, Rachelle?” I asked tiredly. Fuck, I was exhausted. I rubbed my eyes with the heels of my hands.
“Breakfast.”
“What are you doing in town? Another conference?” My words were laden with spite.
She sighed. “A family wedding. My cousin’s getting married tonight.”
I glanced away from her. “Where’s your date?”
“I don’t have one.”
My eyes shot back to hers. I raised an eyebrow, and she raised one back at me.
I hated it when she did that.
That was my move.
The waitress dropped off Rachelle’s coffee.
She poured in two packets of the blue sweetener and one cream, and then she stirred. The spoon’s clank against the side of her mug was loud in the silence at our table.
I heard the noisy din of a Saturday morning breakfast in a restaurant, but I couldn’t really process the noises surrounding me.
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