cheater. In two years, I’ve never stepped outside of our relationship and this entire time, you were screwing your coworker.”
I held my breath to avoid groaning and found Gia in the midst of the crowd. She shook her head to indicate that Ethan was also nowhere to be found. On the other side, Eli did the same.
“Look, Rick, what do you want?” I asked.
He turned me to face him, his expression a mixture of smug and sorrow. “An apology, Alexandra. Contrary to what you might believe, or have been led to believe, I care about you. It hurt me when I found out what you did, but I didn’t put two years into this relationship just to watch it go up in flames. So, I did the honorable thing. I asked you to be my wife. It wasn’t fair for me to ask so much of you but fail to offer a covenant.”
I hated how much sense he was making and how much clearer it was to me now that I’d been the worst person in all of this. I’d climbed on shoulders, using people just to get what I wanted.
“Rick,” I began, but then I spotted Ethan disappearing into the center. “I will give you all of that and more if you just give me a few.”
“You don’t need to talk to him Alexandra,” he chastised. “His feelings warrant no coddling, nor does he deserve an explanation. How many women have you met who were considered to be ‘on the side’ that ended up with their partners? This is no different.”
I ignored him and gently pushed away, quickly running away from the cameras as I trailed Ethan into the building. Although it was just as packed inside with vendors and sponsors, the meeting rooms down the hall had been locked, accessible only to those who used them on a regular basis. As expected, I found Ethan sitting on the front table in the room that he used to teach his science classes.
“E, let me explain,” I began, slipping through the door.
“Actually, Alexandra, you don’t need to.”
Although he was calm, I could feel his anger and hurt. Also, he’d called me Alexandra, something that was never a good sign.
“I think, I do.”
“Nope.” He eased off of the desk. “I don’t think that there’s anything else that we need to say to each other. Actually, I know that there’s nothing else that we need to say to each other.”
“E, I’m sorry—”
“Alexandra, you don’t need to explain. You don’t need to apologize. You don’t need to do anything. As far as I’m concerned, you made your choice.”
“And what does that mean?” I wanted to move closer to him, but everything about his stance told me to remain where I was.
“It means that I’m done with this. I’m done, Alexandra. We’re done.”
My heart resonated. “Ethan, you can’t do this.”
“I can’t do this?” His eyes flashed. “You can accept a proposal right in front of my face, but I can’t make the choice not to live on the sideline anymore? Alexandra, I don’t wait for anyone and I waited for you. Months. All I ever wanted was for you to be mine, but apparently it was too much to ask. I even tried to leverage in my mind that it would cause you a great deal of stress to choose me over your family’s wants, but I was never going to be it for you Alexandra. I was probably just fucking experimental.”
A second squeeze went off in my chest. “Experimental? Ethan, how could you have ever been experimental if you helped to mold me into the woman that I always wanted to be? You think that this was just some temporary shell that I stepped out of, just to step back into when it was all said and done? Ethan, I love you.”
“I love you too,” he replied without even the slightest twitch on his face. “But, it’s not enough. It will never be enough. Hell, if we followed your grandmother’s theory, maybe this,” he gestured between our bodies, “isn’t even real. Maybe all it’ll take is time and we won’t even have feelings for each other any—”
“That won’t happen,” I blurted out. “Ethan, a life without you isn’t a life that I want.”
He pointed to the ring on my finger. “Call me crazy, but that doesn’t seem to be the choice you made.”
I started to say more, but he brushed past me to the door.
“Oh, and you should contact the consulting agency about