Until the World Stops - L.A. Witt Page 0,19

No job. No money. No distance between me and Casey.

It didn’t even matter that it was barely noon—a drink sounded seriously tempting. Except I never felt quite right dipping into our booze stash. There wasn’t a lot in the house, and that shit was expensive.

I briefly considered just biting the bullet and walking to the weed shop across the street, but… no. My DD214 caused me enough grief when I was trying to get a job. I didn’t need to also add that I’d been fired for popping on a drug test, and it would be just my luck that I’d get myself good and fucked up, and then the event center would reopen, my hours would come back, and there’d be a random piss test. And like alcohol, weed was expensive.

Fine. Fine. No weed.

On the school’s website, I pulled up the page with my transcript and current credits, as if it might have changed since one of the thirteen times I’d looked last week. It hadn’t. I still had at least two, probably three years left before I finished this degree.

Damn it. There was nothing I could do to speed things along unless I wanted my advisor to put me in more classes next term. That was an option, but it could blow up in my face if I started working regular hours again.

The best thing I could do today was stop screwing around and get cracking on my homework. Focus on passing this class, because God knew I didn’t need to fail something and have to retake a class, extending this arrangement with Casey by another term.

The sooner I graduated, the sooner I divorced Casey, and that day couldn‘t come fast enough. I was grateful to him for this arrangement, and I felt like an asshole for wanting to avoid him the way I did, but feelings were what they were.

And the sooner this was over, the better it would be for both of us.

Chapter 5

Casey

Awesome. So now I was singlehandedly supporting both of us. On a Navy salary. This must have been what it was like for other Sailors when they were stationed overseas and their spouses couldn’t work. That was one of the fun things about military life—how quickly a struggling two-income household could become a struggling single-income household with few if any solutions.

Except we weren’t overseas. Tristan wasn’t legally forbidden from working.

My resentment swelled, but this wasn’t Tristan’s fault. I told myself that repeatedly. Events were getting canceled, and without those events, there was no reason to have security. Even if he found another job today, there was no telling if that place would have to shut down. Plus if they started doing layoffs or cutting hours, the new guys would be the first to go, which meant Tristan would be SOL.

Neither of us had seen this coming when we’d made our arrangement, and there was nothing we could do except roll with it and get through it. There was no point in letting more resentment fester.

That didn’t stop me, of course. Did anything stop me from jumping on a reason to wish I’d wake up one morning and have my life back? That I’d come downstairs or come home from work and find his parking spot empty and a note that said See ya? Nope. It was what it was. Why not add a little gas to the fire?

Or maybe I just needed coffee. I fumbled for my phone on the nightstand. The screen lit up, blinding me for a second before I squinted hard enough to make out that it was 0645. Ugh. Definitely needed coffee, because there was no going back to sleep now.

I put on some sweats, shuffled downstairs to feed the cat and get that coffee, and then I went back to bed to screw off on my phone until I actually felt like getting up. That was a normal thing for me. On my days off, I was usually awake by 0700 just because I was used to it. I just…didn’t get out of bed.

Instead, I lay back against the pillows, scrolling through social media with one hand while I absently petted Tilly with the other. She was snoozing beside me, purring softly with her head down between her outstretched paws. Now that she’d finished her breakfast, she slept and I browsed, and it was exactly the kind of blissful, lazy start that I wished I could have every day.

I was halfway through an article on what was going