“I know it was quick. It was a bit of a whirlwind. He proposed after six weeks of dating. I guess … I, um … got swept up in it all. In all honesty, I’d probably been feeling low when I met him. My grandparents died within two years of each other. My grandmother’s passing was only eight months before I met him.”
“You were close?”
“Very.” She releases a sad-sounding breath. “I suppose I just wanted to feel happy. So, when he proposed, I took the good feeling that came with it and ran with it. It was stupid and naive; I see that now.”
“We’re all capable of doing stupid things when we’re in pain.”
“I know,” she says, and then her eyes widen, like she’s just thought of something worrisome. “West, I hope you know I’m not doing this with you because I’m in pain. Because I’m not in pain. I mean, I am hurting, but it’s not why I had sex with you.”
“I know,” I reassure her because she sounds so concerned.
“Good.” She smiles, relaxing. “And I know now that getting engaged and married so quickly was a dumb idea. Don’t get me wrong; being engaged was exciting, and I would have waited to actually get married, but he didn’t want to wait. Then, an opening came up at the hotel he wanted to get married in, so he booked it.”
“I’m hearing a lot of what he wanted in there.”
She sighs again. “Yeah. It wasn’t like me to do something so rash. He kinda took charge. I thought it was romantic.”
She looks embarrassed, and I feel bad for her.
“I guess I can understand how that could happen.”
I can’t. But I’m not going to judge her for her decisions. We all make mistakes. I’m the fucking king of them.
“Yeah, so we were engaged and getting married.” She looks up, and I hate the sadness in her eyes. “So, I figured I should introduce him to my mum …” She trails off.
I sit forward and rest my forearms on my thighs. I remember what she told me last night when she was drunk, about how she’d caught them together. I can’t even imagine what that was like.
My dad is a monumental prick, who had a hard time keeping it in his pants when he was married to my mom, but I don’t think even he would stoop so low as to fuck my girlfriend, if I ever had one.
“So, you don’t work there now?” I ask.
She shakes her head. “I quit as soon as I found out what was going on. Probably stupid to quit a job when you don’t have another to go to, but I just couldn’t work there anymore.”
“I get it. I’d have done the same. Anyone would.”
“Yeah.” She lets out a breath. “I have some money in savings, and I earn a little from my books, but when I get back, I need to get another job to keep me afloat. I don’t want to waste all of my savings.”
“Books?”
“Oh.” She lifts her head, and I see that lightness that she lost back in her eyes. “I write them. Books. Self-published. I don’t make a lot, but yeah, that’s what I do.”
“You’re an author.”
“A badly paid one, but yeah, I guess I am,” she says shyly.
“What kind of books do you write?”
“Romance. Contemporary mostly. But I’ve written some romcoms, and I even wrote a romantic suspense once. That was fun.”
I smile. “You’d like to write full-time?”
“Yeah.” She sighs. “That’s the pipe dream. But it’s a hard dream to make happen. I know so many amazing writers who still have to work day jobs to make the ends meet.”
“But still, you’re getting to do what you love even if it doesn’t pay all the bills,” I say to her.
“Yeah.” She smiles that smile that knocked me on my ass the moment I saw her, and it makes me want to stick my dick in her and do many, many dirty things to her. “When I write … I create these whole worlds where anything can happen. There doesn’t have to be sadness or shitty people or cheating fiancés and crappy mothers …” Her smile weakens, and that I don’t like. “In the worlds I create, anything can happen. And I get to write HEAs. What could be better than that?”
“HEAs?”
“Happily ever afters.”
“Is that what you were looking for with your ex?” I ask, and then I want to smack myself in the face because her smile disappears