Page 13 of Love At Peace

He stopped driving over. He didn’t walk by and visit. No calls. No texts.

Nothing.

It was a jarring sense of whiplash, to go from him staying in my small home with me and lying in my bed as he looked online in a form of house hunting to nothing. His presence was so prominent, like he was somehow larger than life with how much he’d snuck under my skin so quickly.

Without him in my days—or nights—it was too damn easy to feel like I’d completely and irrevocably lost him.

“Isn’t that what you wanted?” I muttered to myself as I finished lunch. I was in the breakroom at the office eating later than usual because I’d been stuck on a call with the bank’s IT representative. But I wasn’t alone in here to get away with talking to myself.

“What’s that?” Nance asked as she walked in to get a water bottle from the fridge.

“Nothing.” I smiled quickly and stayed busy with cleaning up my wrappers.

It was difficult for me to accept that my feelings had changed. It was wishy-washy of me to go back and forth like this—to tell Roarke to back off and that “we” were done, then in the next moment of loneliness wish he was still in my life.

If I couldn’t rationalize missing him and hanging on to a wish that we could try to be together, I wouldn’t be successful in talking about it with Nance either. She was a great sounding board, but I didn’t want to expose how messy the matters of my heart were at the moment.

I was right to keep my distance from him for as long as he represented a connection to David. And since Nevaeh was with my ex, that made him connected by association.

Nance didn’t leave the breakroom, furrowing her brow as she looked at me for a long beat. “You sure you’re doing okay?”

I held in a sigh, not wanting her to think that she was bothering me. She wasn’t.

“I know you were stuck on that call for hours,” she said. “But that will all smooth out. I know it.”

I don’t.

“Is that man bothering you again?” She glanced around, as if someone could overhear. “David?”

I shook my head. “He hasn’t approached me again.” Yet.

It was coming up on two month since I’d seen him. While that should’ve been a promising sign that he was no longer a worry, I knew better. He would lurk out of sight and reach as a threat. There was no end to games with a sadistic narcissist like him.

She sighed, still looking so worried. “I’ll keep an eye out for him.”

“Thanks, Nance.”

“But you do need to unwind. You’re stressed about those files being compromised. And that’s understandable. Anyone would feel like that in your position. But you need to balance out the stress with relaxing too.”

I smiled now. “Hey, I already said I’d come to movie night.”

She’d officially rescheduled it for the following week, and I was looking forward to hanging out with not only her but also Fergus for that.

Closing one eye and pointing at me, she grinned. “And no chance of another raincheck this time.”

I saluted her. “I wouldn’t dream of it.”

She let me be after that, but her question about David reinforced the worries about him. As I left the breakroom, I spent more time thinking about him and what he could be plotting against me than I did on the toy drive and charity program.

Between debating about if I’d messed up with Roarke and wondering when David would approach me, I was a bundle of nerves and full of stress. Nance called it accurately.

Staying busy at the bank was the only means of escape I could count on, but even that wasn’t working anymore. Numbers just weren’t that interesting. I went to school more with the goal of a public relations career, and being delegated to a bank job like this wasn’t challenging enough to keep me feeling preoccupied.

The only thing that almost distracted me was walking around with Fergus for the toy donation collections. He was funny, even if I could tell he was trying too hard to amuse me. Those walks through town were better with him at my side. When I went into all the old places that I grew up with, it was easier to not think about how I was treated back then. How some stores or places of business would tell me that I wasn’t welcome because my parents had gotten on bad terms with the managers or owners. Walking into them with Fergus made it seem like I had backup. They never minded him, and with his clear friendship with me as a coworker, he paved the way for lots of them to accept me—at least to my face and outwardly.

I bet that staying here and actually having a job made a difference too. Before I left for college, I held down as many part-time gigs as I could. I had the goal to make money, not look for all the ways to just find it and demand it like my mooching parents had.

I’d been working at the bank all this time, and that, more than anything, had to go a long way in changing people’s attitudes about me.