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“Me?” I hiss, my face only inches from hers as I push up on my toes. “You’re the one who showed up here unannounced and unwelcomed…”
I feel a hand grab the back of my arm and tug me away from her, but I pull away from it.
I whip around and this time shout, “And Nate, get the fuck out of here! I can’t say it again.”
This is my place of business, this is my relationship and I’m watching it all go down in flames with this embarrassing display of chaos.
I walk away from both of them, following in the direction that Jack went in hopes of finding him and salvaging this mess.
But after several hours of driving around looking for him, multiple text messages and non-stop calling, I come up short. A part of me even toyed with the idea of reporting the car Jack left in stolen just to get the police to track him down.
When I finally return to the vineyard Melissa is gone but Nate is sitting on the steps to my house.
I’m absolutely floored at his audacity and his ability to not read a situation for what it is.
“Nate, you need to go. This is over,” I say, making an attempt to step around him to get to my front door.
“At one point you were going to marry me, Lauren. It wasn’t that long ago,” he says, desperation dripping from his words.
“It was a long time ago. A year ago practically and there’s a reason it didn’t happen. It was never meant to happen, Nate.”
“I made a mistake,” he pleads.
“So did I. It was that I ever agreed to marry you in the first place.”
It’s with those words that I move past him and into my house, slamming the door behind me.
I can only hope that this is the last I see of Nate, because there’s no way Jack is going to stick around while I deal with my idiot of an ex-fiancé.
Hindsight is twenty-twenty; you hear it said all the time, but it’s so damn accurate. Even if Jack weren’t in the picture, I wouldn’t consider the idea of getting back together with Nate.
I see things for what they are now, and at the time, I think I knew Nate was cheating on me, that he would never be faithful. That he couldn’t understand my dedication to the vineyard or my relationship with Ellen or that above all, I just wanted to feel a completeness with someone else.
In the end it was all of those reasons why he didn’t show up to our wedding. And maybe he knew all along that I gave my heart away a long time ago. I was an easy target.
I walk into my bedroom, pulling the long white box from under my bed and staring at it as I wonder why I even kept it.
It’s the one thing I didn’t purge from my life.
But that’s about to change.
The bottom of the dress is still speckled with a pale shade of green from where the grass brushed along it. There was no point in getting it cleaned; I was never going to wear it again.
I step into it, sliding my arms in and taking a quick look in the mirror before the tears start.
It was stupid of me to even keep it, a strange attachment to the dress, but not to the event or the person, but the dress and only the dress.
And I’m sitting on the floor of my bedroom in my green stained wedding dress ugly crying when Jack walks in the door.
Chapter Thirty-One
Jack
Of all the ways I thought today could’ve gone down, this is not it. I’m not sure exactly what I expected when I woke up this morning, especially given my ex-girlfriend had decided to jump on a plane and inform me that she wanted another shot, despite the fact she was pregnant with another man’s child.
It was bad enough when Lu’s fuckhead ex had decided to make an appearance, dropping to one knee in what I’m assuming he thought would be some romantic display of his intentions. But to have Mel show up and once again fuck things up, well I thought that was going to be the icing on the fucking cake.
But as pissed off as I was with everything that had gone down today, when I’d disappeared this afternoon, it was so I could get my plans in order and finally prove to Lu that she was all I wanted and that here with her is exactly where I want to be.
