onto the street. I slapped the window, my fingers smearing and streaking, clawing at the glass. They fell when he pulled out and sped down the street.
A silent scream scraped past my lips, and I dropped to the sidewalk, unaware of my surroundings. Uncaring of the noises I might have been making as his departure opened cracks that sent salty rivers flooding my cheeks.
Arms came around me, lifting, and then I was inside. The door was kicked shut, and before I knew it, I was being carried into my room and placed on the bed. The scent of tobacco and clean linen enveloped me as a gentle hand pushed the wet hair from my face.
“Did you know he was there?” I blubbered out. “Don’t lie to me.”
Everett’s sigh stirred my hair. “I didn’t.”
The disbelief, the injustice, the regret—they wouldn’t stop squeezing every breath, every heartbeat. Even when the tears dried.
Everett’s chest vibrated against my back as he held me, and his abrasive humming eventually lulled me to sleep.
For weeks, I called his number, only to eventually be told it’d been disconnected.
What had changed in a month that he could cut me out like that? In a way so permanent, I could already feel the scar.
Nothing had changed for me. Not even having Everett here, who checked in on me every day, had changed the way I felt about Aiden.
But then again, not even Aiden could change the way I felt about Everett.
Love was a messy, drunk-ass son of a bitch.
I didn’t stop there. I checked his Facebook and caved after he’d been gone for seven weeks and sent him a message there. All that did was get me blocked, of which he made sure to do on Instagram too. But not before I saw him at some charity gala with a model named Latoya Adams draped over his arm in all her designer, uber-contoured glory.
It took me a while to even find out what team had picked him up. Google searches didn’t provide much until the season had started, and I now caught myself watching a game I’d never cared much for just to catch a glimpse of him.
My fingers deftly wrapped the twine around the bridal bouquet, and I studied it in the light, scrutinizing every petal, every leaf, each visible stem before setting it on the stand and fussing some more.
“One might think that bouquet is for you with the way you keep clucking over it like a mother hen.” Gloria dumped a box of ribbon on the counter with a light thump, then smacked my hand away from the flowers.
I scowled but got to work on the ones for the bridesmaids. “I’d want it perfect if it were me.”
It could’ve been me, a catty voice echoed. It was almost me. I snuffed it and sipped from my mug of warm tea.
“Oh look, Mr. Rugged is here again,” Sabrina mused, dusting the shelves by the front windows.
Gloria shot me a look that I studiously ignored.
Sabrina and Gloria took Aiden’s absence almost as hard as I had, and to say they’d warmed to Everett instantly would be a blatant lie. But they were cordial, and I could tell that the way he’d been coming by, doting in his own quiet way, was wearing them down.
They weren’t the only ones.
I’d half expected him to bail after mere days of watching me mope around. Heartbroken or not, I was no longer a sure bet where he was concerned, and he knew it.
Yet he was still here.
Everett pushed open the door, causing the wind chimes to sing, and the smile that hitched his lips higher into those cheeks of his had me smiling back. It was strange to see this man show up with that same smile every day when he did nothing but leave, break, and ruin me. Part of me still waited, still poised in preparation for the moment he disappeared again.
“Clover.” He nodded. Retrieving something from the pocket of his denim jacket, he then slid it over the worn countertop.
Placing my tea down, I grinned when I saw the tickets to Breakfast at Tiffany’s. The cinema in town played old films one night a week in the springtime. We’d already been to see Casablanca and Gone with the Wind.
“Not a date,” I’d told him the first time.
“It’s whatever you need it to be, Clover.”
Those words came back to me as I surveyed the tickets, my teeth denting my lip. “I’m not sure you’ll like this one.”