Fated An Alpha Male Romance - K. Alex Walker Page 0,69

assigning someone else to your position,” he added.

Then, he left me with that. With those words. He left me standing in the middle of the room feeling weak and undone. Inside, I felt totally destroyed, my organs eviscerated. At that point, I couldn’t even find where my heart was, or rather yet, used to be.

“Alle?”

I turned around and for the first time, felt the hot tears on my cheeks. Gia was shaking her head at me. I knew that she’d come back here to scold me and tell me to throw Roderick’s ring back into his face, but he didn’t deserve that either. Like I said, he was obnoxious, but not malicious. I was the only person wrong in all of this. I’d shucked my responsibilities due to fear. In truth, I never really grew. I was like Midas, except everything I touched turned into “fucked up.”

“I’m not here to yell at you,” she said, crossing the room. I fell to my knees before she could catch me, my abs clenching as I convulsed in agony. She knelt with me, tilted my face up to hers, and swiped her hands across my cheeks.

“Alexandra, for the first time in my life, I don’t know what to say,” she offered. “I don’t know what to tell you, and I don’t know how to make it better. So, I won’t say anything. I’ll just hold you. Is that okay?”

I barely got out a nod and she pulled me into her arms. My tears saturated her shirt and I locked a grip onto her body.

Chapter Twelve

Ethan

I was crumbling. Pieces of my sanity tumbled from me every day. I did what I could to hold on for my patients and students, but being at home alone would always eventually prove itself to be an unyielding type of torture. It was as though someone had ripped my soul from my body, blanketed it in lighter fluid, and then carelessly tossed a match on top. This was the feeling that I’d spent years trying to avoid, but I’d willingly walked right into its fiery pit. None of the textbooks on my shelf knew a damn thing about dealing with it, so I went to my other shelf every evening: the one that held the good bourbon.

Alexandra’s replacement had come swiftly and I’d assumed that seeing her empty office would offer some sort of closure, but it just brought with it another granule of pain.

I ignored her calls, texts, and emails. I’d thought about blocking her number altogether, but then was somehow able to convince myself that it would be a bitch move. In reality, I still held out a modicum of hope that I would get the call or text that would pull me out of my depression. The one that said that she’d called everything off.

Tayler and Kellen had already called and offered to come “spend some time” with me, but I declined. I wanted to wallow alone.

To add insult to injury, their entire wedding escapade had been turned into a reality TV mini-series. Thankfully, however, no one that I knew seemed to be watching it and if they did, they didn’t mention it to me. Once the entire fiasco was over, I planned to bury myself between the legs of someone that would never rise above the level of baseless. Then, I wanted to get on with my fucking life. Yet, every time I thought about the day I’d wake up and not be drenched beneath this perpetual cloud of agony, something inside of me still insisted that Alexandra was it. No matter what, anyone who came after her would fail to subsume her shadow.

At the office, although I tried to hide it, everyone could sense that something wasn’t quite right with me. Then, I would randomly feel a reassuring hand on the shoulder from one of the nurses or overhear them talking about my change in attitude before I rounded the corner and they scattered like roaches.

Even my grandfather had sensed it and although he didn’t ask me outright, he’d still said, “If it was meant to be, it will be.” He was more optimistic than I ever could have been as nowadays, whenever I even thought about Alexandra, everything was in the past tense.

I also had a tendency to randomly zone out, as I was doing now while my grandfather eyed me and waited for my next move in our third game of checkers. Truth be told, I had more mastery