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“My entire life, I thought I’d marry you when I finished college. I thought we’d have a kid or two by now. I thought you’d be my first and only.” She shakes her head, but I can tell she has more to say so I keep quiet. “I used to love when you’d get hard when we were kissing. It made me feel special because I knew you wanted me as much as I wanted you. I’d dream about the first time we took that step and how we’d grow so much closer and share something neither one of us had shared with anyone else.”
“And?” I push her a little harder.
“And now it doesn’t matter. We’re not together anymore.”
I lay back down on the table and stare up at the ceiling. It doesn’t matter why I broke up with her, Charlie’s never going to forgive me.
Pain spreads through my chest and with each pump of my heart, it invades every cell of my body. I feel like I can't breathe, like getting off of this table is going to take too much effort even though I really want to be anywhere else.
I fucked up and she’s never going to forgive me.
Chapter 15
Charlie
Every muscle in his body tightens as he lays back down. He doesn’t say a word, he doesn’t even look at me. I suck in a deep breath and blow it out slowly. This is how it needs to be. I can’t apologize and tell him we can get back together no matter how badly I want him to not be upset with me. I need to put myself first.
After the longest minute of my life, Wyatt sits up and climbs off the table. He doesn’t try to cover himself, he doesn’t seem to care about giving me a clear view ofeverypart of his body. He doesn’t say a word as he exits the room and walks naked through his house.
“Wyatt,” I call as I follow him. I'm not sure I’ve ever seen him this upset.
I have to jog to keep up with him, but he’s like a man on a mission and that mission is to get as far away from me as possible.
“Wyatt, stop!” I grab his arm and try to spin him around to face me, but it’s no use. He’s too strong for me to move him. “Please, stop,” I whisper.
“Why? You’ve made it clear I'm just a job for you. I no longer want to do this. I can hire my own massage therapist.” The muscles in his back are so tense, anything I did to relax him over the past hour was just undone in thirty seconds.
“Stop that! You’re obviously more than a job.” I tug on his arm again and this time he reluctantly spins around to face me. He grabs a blanket off of the couch and quickly secures it around his waist like a towel.
“Am I? How many times have you willingly spoken to me for more than two minutes over the last eight years? How often did you initiate our communication?”
“Because I was trying to protect myself,” I hiss, getting right in his face.
“Don’t you understand, you’ve never had to protect yourself from me.” He lets out a humorless chuckle and shakes his head like I'm being ridiculous.
“Really? Because you’re the only person in the world who has ever had the power to hurt me and you did it. You fucking destroyed me, Wyatt!”
He flinches, but doesn’t respond and honestly, I don’t want him to. This rage has been building inside of me for almost a decade and I think it’s time we finally laid it all out on the table.
Did I imagine doing this with Wyatt standing practically naked in his living room, absolutely not. But I'm not someone who backs down and I'm done with this.
“Idon’t even know how I made it through that time! I don’t know how I packed up and moved across the country to go to a school I didn’t want to be at. To start a new life I wasn’t even interested in living. I swear the only thing that kept me going was how numb I felt. I just went through the motions, but I wasn’t living. I'm still barely living.”
“Yes, you are, Charlie,” he says softly.
“No! You don’t get it. I'm still just going through the motions. I'm still numb.”
“Why?” He takes a step closer and lifts his hands like he’s going to rest them on my hips, just like he always used to. But he stops himself and lets his hands fall limply to his sides again.
I don’t know why, but that makes my chest ache. It’s another reminder of how he isn't mine anymore and never will be again.
“Because I lost you and you were the most important thing in my life. I didn’t just lose a boyfriend when you broke up with me. I lost my best friend, my protector. I lost my family and friends. I lost the one person I could turn to and know everything was going to be ok.”
“I lost that too.”
“But you didn’t. Not really. After I left, you moved back to Philly. You got your family back, where I moved as far away as possible without leaving the country. I didn’t feel like I could talk to Blake or Kennedy, or really any of your siblings. Leo and Cord basically stopped talking to me, and you got to keep them.”
“I lost Cici and Macy. Hell, I got daily texts from Macy letting me know what a jackass I was and how she hoped my dick fell off. Wes hated me and Addi looked at me with a mixture of pity and disgust every time I saw her. Jax and Cody have both tried to punch me in the face multiple times over the years and Sophia told me I was the worst human to ever step foot on Mulberry Lane.”
