Page 7 of First in Line

She was my first love. The girl I would have given it all up for. The one I knew I’d marry on our second encounter. And I fucking did. Then one day, she walked out, leaving me with what felt like a gaping hole in the middle of my chest.

As she looks up at me with her hazel eyes, I’m thrown back to the first time I let myself drown in them—in front of that liquor store as she wore her uniform and that denim jacket. Meeting her, and the summer that followed, redefined me entirely.

I was at that diner nearly every night, helping her out so she could finish early. I was there so often that they started giving me a few bills here and there to pay me a wage. Then, I’d drive her to her place at the trailer park, but not before we took a detour to lie on the hood and watch the stars.

Inches from her face, I take her in. She’s barely changed. The same perked-up nose, the same lush lips that used to wake me in the middle of the night for more sex, the same eyes that often begged me to take her harder, the same thick lashes thatwould get soaked with tears of pleasure as I forced orgasm upon orgasm on her.

Her cheeks are pink, lips parted with a slightly ragged breath, and I can’t help but wonder if she’s thinking about the same thing. About me lifting her up against that steel door and driving into her, fucking her until she’s forgotten any idea of divorce, until we’ve made up for those seven years apart.

The things I’d give to be inside her one more time. One last time…

Although I was hers, Evie wasn’t my first sexual partner. But it’s with her that I discovered sex—truly discovered it. Together, we explored the complexities of the human body. We learned what felt good and what felt best. We taught each other so much, I’d say we forged one another’s preferences and needs. Then she stole it all, leaving me to chase that high with others, never quite finding it.

I could fuck a million women, and it still wouldn’t be as good as it used to be with her. Or at least the memory of it. But maybe I’m wrong, maybe my melancholic mind is blowing it all out of proportion, and sex with her was never as great as my memories make it out to be.

Let’s try it,I think to myself. Let’s fuck her and see if I remember it wrong. I’ve been going mad for years, finding intercourse lacking, unsatisfactory. Maybe this is exactly what I need to exorcise the ghost of her and appreciate sex with others again.

Though I’d want to put my actions on account of the whiskey, I know it hasn’t gone to my head yet when I lower my lips to hers. This is me, not the booze, dying for a taste.

Before I can kiss her, though, she twists her face away with a shocked gasp. I remain frozen in place, my breath fanning across the tempting slope of her neck instead.

“Jax, I’m—” she starts before swallowing hard. “I’m not here for that. Please.”

When her trembling hands push against my chest to set some distance between us, I comply and take two steps back. Seven years apart, and it took less than five minutes for me to break. And she wasn’t even trying.

Angry at myself and my weakness, I take a drag of my cigarette and walk back to the tray of liquors to pour myself another whiskey.

She sighs, then steps forward, entering deeper into the penthouse. “Listen, Jackson… It was a long time ago, we were very young. Too young, honestly. And we went through so much together. But it had to end. We were miserable, and it was better that way.”

“I wasn’t miserable,” I counter with honesty. “It was hard. Rough, even. But as long as I had you, I could have handled anything.”

“Well, I was miserable. That’s why I left, and that’s why now, I’m asking you to sign those papers and finally repair a mistake we should have never made.”

She throws the heavy brown envelope she was holding onto the glass coffee table between us. I glare at it as if it contains the bubonic plague itself, then say, “It wasn’t a mistake.”

“What?”

“Marrying you wasn’t a mistake, Evie. And I won’t let you pretend it was.”

She raises a dubious eyebrow and crosses her arms. “Right. I was nineteen, you were twenty, and we were married by an Elvis Presley impersonator in a crappy little chapel in Las Vegas. How was that not a mistake, Jackson?”

I sit down on an armchair. “Did it feel like a mistake that night, after that fake Elvis married us?”

I can see the way her face warms up at the reminder of our wedding night, and then she scowls at me disapprovingly. When a clump of ash falls on my thigh, I place the glass in my other hand, holding it along with the cigarette, and swat it away. When I look up again, she’s also sat down, her back rigidly straight.

“Did it feel like a mistake during the weeks, months, years that followed?” I ask next, expecting a reply this time.

“It didn’t,” she admits.

“Then when did it start feeling like a mistake, Evangeline? Help me understand.”

“I’d say at around twenty-five, when my frontal lobe fully developed and it all clicked.”

She answers my darkened glare with one of her own.

“Why now?” I ask after downing half of my whiskey.

“I… I met someone.”