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Chapter One
I’mnotdrinkingagain,I swear to God.
At least, that’s what I think as I throw up at eight in the morning in our apartment’s bathroom. With how forceful my gag reflex was, I could throw up a lung.
Finally, I fall on my buttocks, hungover, tired, and teary-eyed.
Of course, drinking shots of tequila one after another gets you to this point—sitting pathetically on the bathroom floor with the taste of bile in your mouth. But so does finding out you’ve been cheated on by your fiancé.
Ex-fiancé,I remind myself, despite my desire to deny it.
I let out a shuddering breath as I remember everything all over again. For the last five days, I wake up to this same depressing thought: Larson Day, the love of my life, has been cheating on me for god-knows how long, and I only found out about it two weeks beforeourwedding.
How naïve have I been?
Even my five-day-old hangover couldn’t keep me distracted from my sad reality.
Biting my lower lip, I try to hold in another extreme episode of crying and self-hatred.
As if my roommate/best friend/former maid of honor, Clara Woodworth, can sense it, she walks into the bathroom, hugging herself with her fuzzy bathrobe. In her hand is another one of her classic morning fruit shakes. She hands it to me before joining me on the floor, our backs against the wall.
We sit in silence for the next minute.
Even without me saying it out loud, she knows I appreciate her just sitting next to me on our disgusting bathroom floor.
Finally, she says, “It’s going to be all right.”
She’s said it a hundred times, but I still don’t believe it. I will never recover from it all—the shame and the pain.
It takes all of my willpower to keep holding back the tears.
I hate myself; I hate that I left my job to prepare for moving to North Carolina with Larson, just as he wanted.
I hate that I spent the last eight months preparing for our wedding—booked everything, got the wedding dress, sent out the invites—only to find out he’s been cheating on me.
With whom, you ask?
With his fucking coworker, who else.
Not exactly original. But just because it’s cliché doesn’t mean it hurts any less.
As I think about it again, I let out a heart-wrenching wail. I can’t contain it any longer. Immediately, Clara offers her shoulder for me to cry on. I hear myself say: “I’m never recovering from this.”
Clara lets me cry. By now, she’s seen me cry more in the last five days than she has in the last decade we’ve known each other. I couldn’t even bring myself to be embarrassed in front of her.
“You’re going to be fine,” she tells me, her voice squeaking a little in an attempt not to cry, as well. “You deserve better than him. You know that.”
No, I don’t.I want to argue.
I didn’t date Larson for four years just so we could break up like this. I’m supposed to have a life with him. I wasaboutto have a life with him. But instead of ecstatic wedding blues, I’m left with a hangover.
Pulling myself together half-heartedly, I lean away from Clara. “I’m sorry. I’m such a mess.”
As I awake from my second nap of the day, I stare at the ceiling for a few minutes until I induce enough anxiety to make me get out of bed.
With Clara being out for the rest of the day at work, and I, being unemployed, there’s only so much to do inside our apartment until I try to suffocate myself with a pillow. Having no energy to cook food, nor the appetite to eat, I’ve spent the last six days starving, drinking, and doing strictly unproductive things.
Right now, I’m flipping through the cable channels in a non-committal manner. I’m just hoping the consistent changing of the TV screen would be enough to distract me from locking myself up in my mind.
