Page 39 of Where Roads Lead

“Because you asked to go twelve times a day!”

“Yeah, well, that time I clearly had to.”

“Hey, you remember that story about the boy who cried wolf?”

“Whatever.” He waved me off. “The point is, it’s nice dating someone without any history between you. And you know better than anyone that’s hard to find here.”

“Dating?” I whirled. “Like, you’re going to take her out to dinner and ask her about her life and dreams and all that shit?”

“Well, yeah.” He shrugged. “I mean, why not?”

Well, I don’t know why not, but I’m sure there are plenty of reasons that I’ll think of later.

Or, more likely, I was just being completely irrational to a mind-bending degree for probably the first time in my life. It unnerved me that I was letting the girl affect me. I knew I had to nip that in the bud right away.

Who cares if Theo liked her? What did it matter to me, anyway?

“So,” Theo asked again, raising his brows in a question that had my insides twisting uncomfortably, “what do you think? Should I go for it?”

I looked back at the television, took a swig of beer and said, “Yeah, you should go for it.”

Chapter Twelve

Elsie

It’s a funny feeling, to finally get the thing you’d spent so long wishing for. Something you thought might never come, probably knew shouldn’t happen, but hoped and prayed for, regardless.

In my case, it was a phone call.

One that by all accounts was better left unmade, sure, but I wanted it. God, I wanted it.

In fact, I’d had to give myself multiple scoldings and a handful of firm lectures in the mirror before I finally stopped obsessively checking my phone and resigned myself to the fact that it was over and Andrew was never calling. I just had to suck it up, move on and seek my bizarre wish fulfilment fantasies through my writing.

Until the day he did.

And the feeling when I felt when his name flashed across my phone wasn’t one I’d been expecting. It wasn’t relief. Or longing. A floodgate hadn’t opened up, reminding me how much I’d missed him and wanted to make it work.

It was pure rage.

How dare he? I thought.

How dare he call two weeks into the aftermath of the shitstorm he turned my life into?

How dare he let me spend all that time camped out in the landscape of my wildly self-pitying thoughts? And most of all, how dare he call me after all this time and everything he’d done, expecting that I’d pick up?

And what was worst of all, I wanted to—if only for morbid curiosity’s sake—which was the only reason I didn’t. Not even to tell him off.

Clearly I wasn’t in the right state of mind for that phone call if I actually wanted to talk to the guy who’d hit me with the missile that was, ‘I’m not sure if I love you.’

Yeah, screw him.

Without giving myself the opportunity to wait until he called again and I inevitably caved on my decision to ignore him, which I knew would only fuel his massive ego, I turned my phone off and tossed it into the other room for safekeeping.

I hadn’t written Ellie to be the type of girl to put up with her ex’s shit, and neither was I!

In a torrent of emotion, I opened up my manuscript and edited the hell out of it, removing every redeemable quality I’d exaggerated into his fictional counterpart, back when I thought, maybe he was right about me. Maybe it had all been my fault after all.

Passage after flowery passage, I’d described him as some type of tortured poet, accrediting his motives to some type of Byronic hero type of characterization rather than the pretentious asshole he was.