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This is horrible. He might want to be someone who isn’t so cold and heartless, but I can’t be with someone who could so callously destroy lives like that, even if he swears it won’t happen to me.
I can’t wage war and fight back. I can’t pretend it’s in me. It’s not me. I’m not Carly 2.0. I’m just not built that way.
I broke almost all of my Carly 2.0 rules, except the F-word one. I’m not Carly 2.0; I’m just Carly.
47
AIDEN
It has been a week since she left. A week of hell. And I’m about to put an end to it.
She stormed out of my office and out of my life.
I stayed at work until midnight that night, working, being a stubborn asshole with the door shut and the blinds closed, expecting to come home to more of a fight with her, but my apartment was just empty. She left the spare room just as she’d found it. No trace of her there except a bunch of banana Post-its strangely tucked into her drawer. She was saving them.
Fuck me. That was when I sat on the floor in her room and drank almost a whole bottle of bourbon. And my life has been shit for a solid week.
The next morning, my father was at my apartment, standing over me where I was passed out on her bedroom floor, telling me Carly had tried to tender her resignation by email to him.
“I refused it. I told her to take a week and think about it. We’d cover her.”
“She’s done with me,” I said.
And then I told him what I did. I told him how I fucked back the bitch who did that to me. I told him how I’d fuck over anyone who fucked me first, that fucked Audra over. I did it red-faced and rage-filled, and expected him to be proud of me or something.
And he was so fucking disappointed in me, it hurt. It fucking hurt.
He told me to take the day off, to think about my actions. I was still holding my anger in. I refused. I went it late and I kept working, kept ripping into my employees and making them cower.
Ally showed up at my apartment door that night, wanting to talk to Carly.
“She left,” I told her. “She must’ve gone back to Buffalo.”
“Why?” Ally asked. “What happened with you two?”
“I’m an alpha male asshole, I guess.” I shrugged. “Now go.” I opened the door and waved her out.
She gave me a supremely disappointed look. “You’re gonna be sorry if you don’t bust your ass to win her back.”
She left. And then I put my fist through a wall.
There are flowers on my dresser that are dying. There?
?s food in my fridge that is rotting. There’s her shampoo and conditioner in my shower beside my fucking pocket pussy, that hasn’t been used since she last used it on me. There’s the smell of her on my sheets.
I told myself, fuck this shit. If she found it easy to cut and run just like that, maybe it was better I knew it now rather than down the road before she destroyed my heart.
But a week later, and I know it was already too late. I’m gutted without her.
I need to fix this.
***
I get a text from Jude while I’m on the way to the airport. The text is about a piece of jewelry at a shop in Rochester that matches the description of one of the photos. He’s had the shop owner put it aside for inspection.
***
I fly to New York on day seven. I pick up my New York SUV, a Range Rover that’s parked in the underground garage at the condo, and drive toward Rochester.
