when a colleague had gotten too close one night in a drunken stupor.
I thought Calen was going to kill the man until Donovan, the same friend who’d found me, and the baby at the mall had stepped in and cooled things down. I’d since learned that Calen had destroyed some deal he and the other man had been working on, something that had cost the other man millions. All because he’d made a pass at me while intoxicated.
I got out of the car now and walked around to get the baby, but Calen beat me to it. He’d climbed from the backseat at the same time, and I was just in time to see that he now had a car seat back there already and what looked like a mountain of packages, which the driver was now moving to the trunk of the luxury town car.
I stood almost stupefied as Calen reached in and unbuckled our son before lifting him in his arms. He didn’t say a word to me as he turned and started heading for the mall entrance, and I swallowed the hurt as I walked behind them. It warmed my heart, though when my baby chortled at me over his daddy’s shoulder and waved his little fingers at me.
I reached out to him, just to touch his fingers lightly, but the look Calen threw at me over his shoulder had me drawing back in surprise. He seemed to catch himself as he turned and started walking again. It’s obvious that it’s going to take time to get used to this new dynamic, but I’m not sure my heart can take it.
Eyes that used to watch me with such heat were now filled with ice. His heart had been locked off from me, and it was obvious that he only cared about his son. I didn’t know how much it would hurt. I’d made up my mind never to see him again in this life. I knew the pain of knowing what I’d lost would be too much to bear if our paths should ever cross.
At night I’d take out a memory from our time together and relive it in my lonely bed until I fell asleep. I never allowed myself to think of the present; of the life, he was probably living without me now that I was gone. I didn’t let myself think of what he must feel towards me, and the thought of him finding someone else which I knew would be no hardship for him was almost more than my poor heart could take. I didn’t know the half of it.
Calen
I ignored the look of hurt on my ex-wife’s face as I carried on walking with my son into the mall. I was told that the baby store here was the best in the immediate area for now, and since I didn’t want her bringing any of her shit to my place, I needed to be here until I could work out something better.
I’d called a friend of mine and gotten the name of the safest car seat for him, which needed to be picked up somewhere else and had taken a three-hour drive unless I wanted to wait until tomorrow to receive it by mail. I wasn’t willing to wait a second longer than was necessary to have my seed in my home under my roof, where I could watch over him.
I have yet to deal with the anger I feel over having missed out on the first year of his life, but then again, when it comes to Giselle, I have a lot of deep-rooted anger that needs to be dealt with. I’ve put off even thinking about her for the last two years, but now, now that she’d stolen my seed and kept him hidden from me, she can have no idea of the hell I’m about to unleash on her disloyal ass.
I’ve never known hate like the one I feel for her. I’ve had strong dislike before, but she’s the one and only person who’s ever tapped into the darkest side of me, a side I didn’t even know I had until she walked out on me. It had taken me days, weeks, months, to get over what she’d done, and the pain was so raw in the beginning that my only recourse was to wipe her from my mind completely.
It was like cauterizing a wound or, worse, amputating a limb. I didn’t drink or do anything that would further