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“So, what you’re saying is, that once I sign the annulment papers, it’s farewell?” His voice cuts into my thoughts, and I bite my tongue, forcing myself to remain calm.
“What else is there? We both have our lives. I highly doubt we’re going to be running into each other any time soon.”
“Is that so?” His words are soft.
Something is wrong here. I mis-stepped somewhere along the way.
He watches me with those cool, unaffected eyes, and then takes out his wallet, placing a few bills on the table for the waitress before standing up.
“I’m afraid I can’t have that.” With that, he just walks away, making me gape at his retreating back.
Wait, does that mean he isn’t going to sign the annulment papers?!
I glare down at the table.
He hasn’t even agreed to sign the papers. What the hell is he after?
I take a few deep breaths and force my tensed frame to relax. I don’t understand what he is thinking. When I said he hasn’t changed, I was lying.
The man in front of me is a far cry from the playboy who had thrown the wildest parties in Chicago. He is no longer the boy who had stolen my heart and then crushed it within the same night.
Of course, I knew what he had been up to all these years. I was unable to help myself from searching for his name in the news, or hearing about him from Agatha.
After all, he was one of the most important people in my life before I went and fell in love with him.
Stupid me.
I stand up slowly and make my way to the bus stop. It is nearing nine in the morning, and I have to get to work.
As I sit on the bus, I rest my head against the glass window. I cut ties with Philip ten years ago. I walked out of that house. But could anyone blame me?
When he returned from college, a dashing twenty-two-year-old who no longer looked at me as if I was a child, my feelings for him morphed into something stronger. I saw the way he was with other women, always flirting and touching, but with me he was gentle, as if I was special, as if I mattered.
He would talk to me for hours, just sitting on the edge of the fountain in the garden of his estate. He would tell me all about his plans for the future, and I guess the girl in me felt important and desired.
I gaze dully at the cars as they whizz past the bus, recalling the small things about him that would catch my eyes and make my heart beat faster. The way his beautiful blue eyes would laugh at me, or the tender exasperation when I would insist that I could walk home alone.
/> Nobody had ever treated me like that before and I had handed my heart over to him without a second thought. In hindsight, my eighteen-year-old self was desperate to be loved and that was the only reason I had slipped up.
Ten years, and I could still remember the way he backed me against the wall, pressed his hot lips against my mouth. That rush of emotions foreign to me and yet so exciting.
My body had trembled as he let me feel every muscled plane of his form while he kissed me, first wild and passionate, and then gentle and loving.
That should have been my clue that he had viewed me as nothing more than one of the girls who hung around him. That all our years of knowing each other, the friendship we had struck up, it all meant nothing to him.
Hours later, when I had received a text from him, I went to his room, excited. I thought maybe he wanted to talk. That may be, he wanted to discuss whatever we had together.
I was floating on cloud nine at the time; a young girl, her head full of romantic notions for the first time in her life.
But I was shattered to find him wrapped around that blonde-haired girl, her bare legs wrapped around his waist as he made out with her, his hands molding her form to his.
Is it still supposed to hurt like this?
He’d met my eyes and then pulled away, only to gesture with his hand and say, “Close the door, Charlotte. I’m busy.”
And I’d done just that.
That was the last time I saw Philip. That faint smirk in his eyes, when he told me my worth in so many words. He took an ice pick to my heart and broke it into tiny pieces that I was never able to put back together.
