supposed to bash him and talk about how small his dick is.”
Regardless of what I want to be doing, my thoughts remain on: I’m a home-wrecker!
Temptation gets the better of me and I drop the bottle at my feet.
Bang!
The sound of glass breaking against concrete shrieks through the bar. Immediately, the frown surfaces. It’s not as rewarding as I thought it’d be.
Silence stretches between us, Presley and I staring at the shards of glass at our feet. With a gasp, she holds up her hands and smiles. “It wasn’t me, Avie!”
Traitor.
“Journey!” Avie growls, surfacing from the office around the corner. He scrubs his hands over his tired face and then flops them down at his sides. “Damn it, I told you to be careful!”
I know it’s coming out of my paycheck by the expression on his face. His brow drawn up tight, his lips thinned in a set form.
Avie Weldon wears the weight of our lives on his shoulders. He’s had to. Our parents died when I was thirteen, and he was eighteen. Legally old enough to take care of me, since there was no way in hell I was living with our Aunt Lea—she’s borderline bi-polar, smokes a pack a day, and smells like fried chicken and peach rings—so Avie left behind the life he thought he’d have. The one where he had a full-ride baseball scholarship and is now the owner of a tavern in Westport Washington.
I’m sure it’s not the life he wanted for either of us.
“Clean it up,” he barks, despondent of emotion, his eyes on his phone in hand.
“Sorry,” I mumble, reaching for the broom.
A little bit of honesty? I’m not sorry. I’m hating.
Devereux Belmont, I hate you.
Believe me when I say you’re going to hear that name again, probably soon, and it’s going to be because I killed him. It’ll be in the papers later. Just kidding. I’m not a killer. I googled the traits of a killer and I have none of them. I wouldn’t hurt a spider. I’m that person that “relocates” the damn things.
My only victim here is a poor, unsuspecting bottle of tequila.
You might be wondering how this happened? The part where I fell for a married man? I’m going to have to start from the beginning for it to make sense.
Remember when I said I’m on borrowed time? Let’s revisit that. I was eight when I found out I had a heart muscle disease. Cardiomyopathy. It’s a condition that causes your heart muscles to become thick, stiff, and less able to pump blood. I was stable for years, and then, two weeks after my parents died, I went into acute heart failure. A week later, I was living on a LVAD machine and waiting for a heart transplant.
That day came November third. I was seventeen years old. I’ll remember it for the rest of my life because it’s the day I got a second chance, and someone else had their last. I went through a lot of grief knowing I was getting a heart because I knew someone had to die for me to get a new one. It’s not like I could go out and buy one, or borrow it. Their life ended so mine could continue. Avie tells me I’m living with survivor’s guilt because I’m afraid to live my life now.
Restless by nature, I told myself when I was eighteen, I would leave this small coastal town and go away to some fancy college to become a marine biologist. Make the best of the life I’d been given. After the childhood I had, going away to college seemed like something that would never happen for me. I was lucky to see sixteen, and then eighteen... but, sadly, now I’m twenty-three, I’ve become the other woman.
So how’d I meet Devereux? At this very bar. He ordered a rum and Coke and then asked me out. Impressionable and naïve, I fell madly in love with the idea that someone would love a girl whose life had been temporary. Isn’t that how it always happens? Not the temporary life, the meeting of the guy who changes everything you thought you knew about what you wanted in life. The damsel in distress meets the man of her dreams and forgets all about the life she had planned for herself. Then she finds out he has a wife in another town and an entire life she didn’t know about. True story.