Hard Checked (Ice Kings #4) - Stacey Lynn Page 0,12
college for a few years and when our friends started getting engaged and married even before graduation, I think we both felt like it was the next step. The problem is Evan’s an accountant and back then I was an art major. I’m art and colors and constantly reinventing things, even if it’s only living spaces. He’s straight lines and black and white and neatly pressed button-down shirts and slacks with the perfect seam ironed into them. Seams. He’s the only guy I know under fifty who still insists on them.
I’m different colored hair and tattoos and Evan has always been, and always will be, short, conservatively styled haircuts, perfect posture, and content to drive a simple Ford Escort the rest of his life because it’s practical. Yet somehow, for years we worked together. We partied and had great sex and he helped keep me focused on my studies and I forced him away from Excel spreadsheets. We worked… until we didn’t.
I’m still pretty sure that day came when he came home from work and I’d painted a wall in our small living room in our first townhome a dark, very dark, purple.
He’d dropped his briefcase, ran a hand through his hair that didn’t even move it was so gelled into perfection and sighed. “That’s going to kill our resale value, Georgia.”
I remember turning to him, head tilting to the side. There was still paint on my cheek and my T-shirt, and he’d cringed when he saw the splatters on my white shirt.
It was the cringe, the startling revelation of how vastly opposite we were with what we wanted out of life that made me ask, “Do you really think we should be married?”
It took him approximately two days and I’m still certain a half-dozen spreadsheets before he came home, with flowers—because he’s such a nice guy—and a sad smile and agreed. “It’s possible we made a mistake.”
Months later we were divorced. I’d been the office assistant at an interior design firm at the time, a job I absolutely didn’t want but made decent money.
Once the divorce was final, I was over all of it. I quit my job, looked at my dad and said, “I need to see the world.”
He’d hugged me, cried, and replied, “Then spread your wings, butterfly.”
That was my dad. It’d always been my mom, too. They were full of encouragement and love and laughter and dances in their kitchen and kisses when they knew it skeeved me out.
I’d been back for a year and my apartment still didn’t feel like mine. This life didn’t feel like mine and I had nothing… absolutely nothing I loved inside of it except for the prints I’d started to tell Sebastian about the other day. They were the only important thing in my life outside my dad. He’d cut me off, jumped like I’d electrocuted him while I told my stories and he’d hightailed it out of there so fast that me still enjoying the freaking scent of him on my pillowcases is borderline crazy.
It’s time to clean. And armed with a fresh supply of heaving duty cleaning supplies, I get to work.
I hopped on a plane three years ago to see the world and figure out who I was.
I might not have figured it out in my travels, but the one thing I do know is that I am not the kind of girl who gets hung up on a married guy, gets a crush on him, and then refuses to remove the scent of him from a pillow.
The sheets get tossed off the bed first, thrown on a pile of my clothes and then I head to my kitchen where I fill four garbage bags with all my dirty clothes.
Once those are filled and my floors are relatively clean, the job seems much less daunting.
I spend the next three hours cleaning my room, scrubbing every inch of my floor. I get on Amazon and spend way too much money on bathroom and bedroom organizing shelves and bins and drawers. Any second-guessing myself is thrown to the curb along with the rest of junk I don’t need.
No way am I stopping to consider I’m doing all of this on the off-chance Sebastian Hendrix ever steps foot into my apartment again.
By the time I’m done cleaning, sweat clings to parts of my body where no sweat belongs. My hair is a ratted mess. Cleaning chemicals are my new perfume and my muscles shake so much I can barely start