Hot Mess - Elise Faber
One
Hot Mess
Shannon
She sealed the box with a loud, screeching roll of the packing tape dragged across the top of the cardboard, stinging her ears, disturbing the quiet of the house one final time.
Brian disturbing her quiet one final time.
But then, right on cue, her reason for existing, for pushing through and carrying on with her life instead of being a giant, pathetic ball of ice-cream-and-wine-inhaling hysterical female, screeched in complete joy. Rylie’s laughter drifted in through the open windows.
Salt breeze.
A child’s laughter.
Crashing waves and pale beige sand.
Happiness.
Or so Shannon had thought when she had married Brian and they’d scrimped and saved and worked their asses off to afford this property.
Work he’d squandered by fucking every female he could charm while on business trips.
Work he’d dismantled by creating a new family with a new little boy.
Work . . . he’d broken into pieces that could never be reassembled.
Or maybe that was just her.
Broken into pieces, floundering to gather them all up, even while knowing it wouldn’t make one fucking bit of difference.
“Ugh!” she snapped, eyes stinging but spine stiffening determinedly because no longer would she cry over the man who’d once been her prince but had changed into a monster who’d devasted her. It was done.
She was done.
Rylie was the center of her focus. Her job, and Pepper and Derek, and her other friends in town were the rest of it.
And this—the last fucking box of Brian’s things she was packing up to ship off to him—was the end of it.
Enough wallowing.
Enough tears.
Rylie and her students. Her friends . . . and wine.
Yeah, the wine would help.
Speaking of that, she figured she deserved a glass of red to punctuate the end of her time with The Ex Who’d No Longer Be Named, and so she got on with shoving the box out onto the front porch to join the others, ready for pickup.
She reached for the knob, balancing the box in her arms, using her foot to tug open the wooden panel, and—
“Oof—”
The box hit the deck.
The air squeezed out of her lungs.
The . . . man she’d collided with rocked back on his heels.
“Oh, shit,” she said, noticing his brown shirt and realizing that she’d almost barreled down the man who was picking up the boxes to get her husband out of her life once and for all. “I’m sorry,” she murmured.
“It’s okay,” he said. “Let me help you. Where would you like it?”
Shannon frowned. “Um . . . on the truck with the rest of them?”
Silence.
She glanced beyond the tan shirt, up to brown eyes that were looking around in confusion. “What truck?”
Okaay . . .
“Your truck.”
He frowned. “I drive a sedan.”
Her brows drew together. “How are you going to fit all of these boxes”—she waved a hand at the dozen or so littering her front deck—“into a sedan?”
“I wasn’t planning on it.”
“But you’re here to pick them up.”
A shake of his head. “No, I’m here to check out the house.”
She rubbed her forehead, a throb beginning to form. “To figure out where the boxes are or what vehicle is needed for pickup?”
Another shake of his head. “No. For the house.”
She sighed, striving for patience. “These boxes are supposed to go out today. I paid extra for them to be picked up on Saturday and shipped out.”
“Okaaay,” the man said, taking her mental sentiment and drawing it out one extra A. “That’s good, I guess. The house will need to be cleared out for this to work best.”
“The house is cleared out of Brian’s stuff.” A beat. “Or it will be, if you just take the damn boxes.”
So, yes, the last was gritted out between clenched teeth.
But, fuck, come on. Wine was calling, her emotions were on edge, and Shannon tended to reserve her calm, nice tone for her students, not men who were deliberately trying her patience.
He seemed just as annoyed. “What is your obsession with these damn boxes?”
“My obsession,” she snapped, taking a step closer and glaring up at him, “is that I’ve paid a hundred extra dollars for the fucking boxes to get the hell out of my life and. You. Will. Not. Take. Them.”
“I—”
“Excuse me.”
A chipper female voice interrupted, making them both turn and take in the mid-twenty-something woman in a brown shirt very much like the one the man wore. Except . . . this one had a logo of the shipping company Shannon had paid to pick up Brian’s things embroidered over her breast pocket.
“These the boxes?” she asked.
Shannon nodded, dread pooling in her