by Devin Sawyer
“I found Ari.” The look on her face softens. “I found her, and she played me for a fool.” Laurie sits down on the couch, the side opposite me. I review the last few week’s events with her. I detach myself from the emotions and share the timeline of our devastation in a monotonous voice that doesn’t sound like my own. At some point, despite my own emotional distancing, I look over to see Laurie with tears in her eyes.
When I finish, I lean my head back on the couch staring up at her ceiling.
“Torren, again, I’m going to ask, what are you doing here?”
“I don’t know. You’re a counselor, counsel me.”
“You don’t need me to tell you what to do. You already know, plus your brother told me you have your own therapist. You’re here again, because I have always been a distraction, and I won’t be that for you anymore.”
“Wait, you’ve talked to Gavin?” When had she met him?
“Yes, I go to his shop to get my car serviced.”
“I don’t know what to do, Laurie. The only girl I have ever loved just made a job out of breaking my heart. That’s not love.” I feel guilty for pushing this on her, but my own pain takes priority. It’s selfish.
“No, you’re right, what she did, that’s not love, but it doesn’t mean she doesn’t love you. What I heard was fear. What I heard was her searching for answers. It all came out poorly and for that I’m sorry. I don’t like to see you hurt, but more than anything I won’t watch you self-destruct over it. Go to her. Or you will spend more years down the road asking yourself ‘what if.’ Go to her.”
This isn’t the answer I was expecting. This is the part where she’s supposed to jump my bones and I find an outlet outside of whiskey to hide my pain. You use sex as a tool. Her old words ring in my ears.
“You love her. Both of you need a fair shot this time. Go into this with an awareness and an openness you didn’t have before. Go find her. Apologize for running off when she needed you to be there, even when you were hurting, and then talk it out.”
I remain seated, taking everything in.
“Look, whatever you decide, to go back for her or to suffer, you’re officially booted from my apartment. That’s all the professional advice I have for you.”
I push myself up off her couch and head for the door with a glum look on my face and shadowed in my presence. I hope she feels my disappointment in her. She walks me to the door, ignoring my obvious stature, and opens the door, showing me out.
“Make the right choice, Torren. Put yourself out of this misery.” I nod gruffly and return home, locking myself up again, needing time to process this.
If I could make all of this disappear, I would. But I can’t do that, so I know that Laurie is right. I have to do the next best thing, I have to make it better. Ari is everything I have been missing for the last eight years. I wish she weren’t the answer. For my pride’s sake I’d like any other thing to be the answer, but its her and it always will be. She may be inpatient, quick to judge, and even slow to divulge truths, but I can’t go back to living the way I was before. I know that much. I can’t be that person anymore. I have been happier in the last few weeks than ever before, and it’s because I had her again.
Finally I make the call. I pack my bag, write a note to Dad, apologizing and thanking him, and I head back to Houston.
Chapter 32
Ari
I head out of work for the day, grateful to be done with the chaotic schedule. I need a lot of time to myself right now. I have a hot date with a bottle of wine and a bath tonight. The office is empty. When I reach the elevator doors, I see a small yellow note on the door. This thing wasn’t out of order when I used it earlier today, I say a silent prayer that it’s not broken because I don’t have it in me to walk down twelve flights of stairs. When I reach the doors, a familiar handwriting is scratched out on it.
Not giving up that easily, it reads. My heart begins to race, picking up speed as I look around, wanting to know if he’s still here. My nerves kick into overdrive. On the elevator ride down, I text him.
Is that note from you? I question him in the text. I know it is. I received enough of those little yellow notes in my office when he was here to recognize his chicken scratch. I await a response but don’t get one and I feel vulnerable that maybe I just reached out to him first and this is all some sick joke to pay me back. I panic, worry furrowing my brow until I reach my car. Another yellow note.
“Come. Find. Me. 913.” His old apartment number. He must still be in the company suite or at least have come back to it. I rush back to the apartments trying to collect my thoughts as I go. He was back, that had to mean something. I needed it to mean something. I wasn’t even sure what I wanted, given I had a choice. I had resigned myself to that decision being made for me.
I speed to his building in the complex, park out front, and race up a flight of stairs. I stop in my tracks. The door, his door, it’s covered in yellow Post-its. Tears began streaming down my cheeks and I want to be able to stop them, to control them but I have no power. My heart and my brain are warring with each other. I don’t know how to process what’s happening. I walk up to it, until I’m close enough to touch them, and read each one. They all say something different.
I’m sorry.
We are better together.
I miss you already.
I always knew it was you.
You are everything.
I can’t live without you again.
Give this a chance.
Let’s start over.
But the one in the very middle is the one I can’t take my eyes off of.
I love you.
I start to sob, real ugly-cry. The door cracks open and I see him standing there. He embraces me, pulling my body into his and I crash against him as support to hold my own body up. I continue to memorize his messages. He pulls me inside.
“I’m sorry for leaving,” he whispers to me.
I shake my head. “No, I deserved it. I’m sorry for lying to you, about everything.”
“I need to know one thing.” He pauses, nerves evident. “Did you regret it? Our relationship back then?”
“Never.” I try to say it with all the conviction I can find in me. “I wished the pain would go away, I wished I could reverse the events of that night, but I always knew that what I felt made me feel more alive than anything else in the world. As if I had been living in a bubble, never truly feeling or sensing life around me, and when I was with you, it all came alive. The loss of you, it never went away. I had convinced myself that this was safer, better for my life, and the path I was on.” I stop trying to gain control of my voice, feeling the overwhelming emotion. Trying desperately to communicate with this man on a level that he might gain some insight and possibly forgive me so we can move past this. He waits quietly for me to continue. “Somedays the pain felt duller than others, and then out of nowhere I would be reminded, and it would hit me so sharply in the chest that I’d walk around in a fog for days. If I learned anything, it was that the heart is not a calendar or even a clock. It can’t measure time or distance. It only knows what feels right. And I knew. I knew back then, I knew all these years, and I still know now.” My voice is ragged, and the breach of tears sit on the sills of my eyelids.
He grasps my face between his hands and looks at me intently. “I love you,” he finally says aloud, and I relish in the sound of his deep voice professing himself to me.
“I love you too. So much,” I say between sobs. “I spent years wishing I had said those words to you and wondering if things might have been different if I had.”
He shakes his head at me. “This was our path. We were supposed to live it this way.”
“Love shouldn’t have to be this complicated,” I respond between more sobs.
“I know. I know. No one writes love stories about the easy ones.” He wipes my tears from my eyes, and I know he’s right. I hold onto him, not wanting to let him go.
“I called my realtor. I to
ld her I might be interested in putting my home up for sale.”
I pull my head away just far enough to stare up at him. “You’re moving?” I ask, unbelievingly. Is this goodbye? Did I miss all the clues here?
“I hope so.” He tucks a strand of hair behind my ear. “I was thinking I might move here, you know, closer to you? We can take things slow, date. Really date, and if everything goes okay, I thought we might find a place of our own later on, because I had a talk with John today and he offered me a year’s contract. I already signed it, so I’m going to need you to really mean it when you say you love me.” He signed a contract before he even apologized? What if this had gone poorly. No, that wasn’t going to happen. We are overdue for our happiness together.
Tears find their way out of my eyes again and I nod at him. “I do. I love you so much that it hurts.”
His grin widens, and he picks me up and spins me in a circle with his lips pressed to my neck. “I never knew how not to,” he admits.
“And now you never will,” I tell him. This is our happily ever after. It’s not perfect, and it’s not painless, but we are going to work at it until its easy or at least worth all the heartbreak we’ve gone through.
THE END
Acknowledgments
Writing this book has been one of the hardest things I’ve ever done. It’s also been one of the most rewarding. I’ll always be grateful to my husband for the days he let me shut him out. My mom, who always encouraged my different facets of creativity, but who still trumps me in all of them.
To my Beta readers: I am so grateful for your assistance. Your feedback helped me to shape my words and ideas into an even stronger work. I’m sure without some of y’all’s supportive remarks I would not have moved forward with this process.
To My Brother’s Editor: Thank you to Ellie and Petra for guiding me on a journey that I entered into totally blind. As a debut author, the tools and advice and encouragement are so appreciated. The second I met Ellie in person I knew I wanted to go with her as the editor for my first work.
To my website designer and formatter Abby: Thank you for not only making my website into something functional but beautiful. You were a breeze to work with and explained things so simply to this new author that it was an easy choice to also book you for formatting. Thank you for your guidance and experience.
To my cover designer, Michelle Preast- Thank you for spending so much time in edits with me. Your feedback and creative eye nailed the perfect design.
And last, but not least, to the readers. I thank you for making it this far and giving my book a chance. I only endeavor to improve my creative process with each book and I hope you find more works by me in the future.
About the Author
Devin Sawyer is a contemporary romance writer who enjoys a bit of dirty humor. If you have a dirty joke, she’s the first one that wants to hear it. She grew up in a small Texas town called Comfort and still enjoys quiet country towns. She started out writing at a young age with moody, depressing, poetry—mostly about unrequited teenage love. But enough about the dark times. Now, Devin prefers to write witty romantic comedies with hard-hitting issues. Devin has a master’s in social work and is independently licensed as a therapist. She finds reading and writing a pleasant escape from real-world stressors. Her favorite reads are forbidden love stories.
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