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My eyes went to Rosie.
“You tased him!” she shouted. “I brought cake to celebrate.”
I looked to her empty hands.
Luke entered behind her.
She rolled her eyes. “Well, Luke is actually carrying it, because the pregnant woman cannot possibly hold something dangerous and heavy as cake. It’s akin to lugging a nuclear weapon up eight flights of stairs,” she said.
Luke didn’t say anything, instead he placed the cake on the counter, moving to yank her into his arms and rub her small belly.
Rosie’s body softened at the easy touch.
My throat burned with a jealousy so fierce it took me by surprise.
Rosie’s eyes went between the two of us. “Shit, we’re interrupting,” she said. “We can go—”
“You’re not interrupting anything,” Heath said. “I was just leaving.”
And then he did exactly that.
Without another word to me.
Without another glance at me or the mangled organ that he’d ripped out and laid at my feet.
The door slammed shut.
I stared at the empty air where he had been standing, blinking rapidly.
My face was wet.
I was crying.
“Fuck,” Rosie whispered.
“I’m okay,” I croaked to no one in particular.
Rosie snorted. “Yes, and Luke is an appropriately protective husband.”
Luke might’ve reacted to this.
But I was too busy bursting into tears.
Rosie caught me.
Because that was what she did.
That was what everyone did.
Apart from Heath.
* * *
“Why do I always fall in love with men that don’t treat me right?” I asked, spooning another sickening amount of ice cream into my mouth.
Yes, I was that freaking cliché.
Crying over the guy who you were in love with, who you lost your virginity to, lost him for half a decade, found him again, only to marry another guy and then have that guy beat you up so you divorce him and leave them all behind for a year and come home to a mess.
Okay, so maybe not exactly the cliché situation. Because I’m Polly. And I never do things the simple way.
Even heartbreak.
Especially heartbreak.
But maybe heartbreak was that simple for everyone, no matter how it’s brought about. The pain is the same.
Excruciating.
And we try and cope with all sorts of different things, but women usually start with sugar and wine. We didn’t have the latter out of respect for Rosie not being able to partake. But Luke had all but run out the door when I’d began crying and returned with a plethora of treats.
Rosie kissed him. “I knew there was a reason I married you and am now carrying your baby,” she murmured.
He smirked. “So it wasn’t just for my body?”
“Oh, yes, that’s the rest of it. As soon as you let yourself go, I’m onto my next husband.”
He shook his head, yanking her in for a rough kiss.
It was nice, seeing them like that, after years of seeing the mutual pain in their eyes. Agony. And somehow they’d made it to this.
It was enough to give a girl hope.
But for this girl, maybe I’d reached my quota on hope.
So instead I had ice cream.
Rosie squinted at my question as if trying to see the answer in the faded yellow wallpaper. “I don’t know, I think it’s nothing to do with them, but all about how we don’t love ourselves enough to see we deserve better. To demand better. If we loved ourselves more, we wouldn’t let assholes break our hearts because we would hold them too precious to give away to someone not worthy of them,” she said.
I gaped at her as she sipped her soda.
She drained it and pushed up to refill her glass. She shrugged. “Also, because assholes seem to be prominently hot.”
I thought of Craig. He was hot. Definitely. Not so much tonight.
But Heath was more than pure hotness.
And if their hotness was directly conclusive to their ability to break my heart, then it made sense.
But it didn’t help.
Ice cream didn’t help.
Words and support from one of my favorite people in the world didn’t help.
Nothing did.
Maybe time.
But that was another cliché.
Chapter Ten
I stopped short at the entrance to the homeless shelter. Literally stopped in my tracks like I’d walked into a wall. And I had hit a wall. Just not one you could see. Or not one that other people would feel.
Not unless there were other people who were madly and horribly in love with the man in the black leather jacket with the perfect beard and hair tied into a bun at the nape of his neck.
He had to do a man bun, didn’t he? It was like he was trying to torture me. And his expression underneath his glasses told me that he wasn’t trying to do it in the good way. No, he was glaring at me like he didn’t want to be near enough me in order to torture me.
I struggled not to drop my bags of groceries.
He didn’t move.
He just continued to glare.
Another thing that gave me pause.
