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I rolled my eyes and sipped my own, more because I needed it with all the truth she was laying on me right now.
“I’m not going to sugarcoat what we were at the start,” Karen continued. “It wasn’t pretty. It wasn’t easy. We didn’t make each other happy. We made each other miserable. My family hated her, and not because she was a woman, which was why her family hated me. But because for the first year we were together, I was a mess. I’d call my mom crying, drunk, telling her about the latest fight, the latest breakup.” She winced, because Karen was not a woman who cried.
“Real love, with real people, it’s not pretty. We could’ve given up on each other. We tried, in fact. Because I convinced myself that love wasn’t meant to hurt that bad. That love wasn’t enough. But in the end, it was. I’m so happy that we fought for each other, that she opened up to me, that she trusted me enough to let me in. My family have almost forgiven her. Hers still haven’t forgiven me and won’t until I magically grow a penis.”
She grinned. “If I could go back through all that hurt, all that misery, all those tears, sleepless nights, screaming matches, breakups—I would. In a heartbeat. But that’s because I only had myself to worry about. I was luckily enough to have a relatively healthy history. A good family. An unscarred soul. So I could take all those hits.”
She shrugged. “But that’s a choice I would make for myself. But for someone I adore? For you? I’m not sure I want you to have to go through all of that agony, after everything you’ve already gone through. I want love for you. I want a man to adore you. Treasure you and Nathan. Make you smile. Lance might be that man. I have a feeling it won’t be easy or simple to get there with him. It might very well be worth it, just like Eliza is.”
He was. Some part of me knew that. Of course I didn’t say it out loud because he was insane.
“You deserve a man that’s simple,” Karen continued. “That doesn’t know the ugliness of life, that hasn’t been crippled by it. But that same man might not be deep enough for you. To nurture you. To understand your pain. That’s what love is. Someone who will understand your pain.”
I wiped the tears from my cheeks that I’d shed for my friends. I knew that it hadn’t been easy for them. We’d shared everything over the years. But I didn’t hear it with quite as much naked emotion.
“That doesn’t help me at all,” I hissed after I pulled myself together.
She smiled sadly. “I know. I wish I could help you. But I don’t think there’s anything I can do to help. I will tell you, whatever happens, whatever you decide. We’re here. We’ll be here no matter what. You have a family that will wipe away your tears and let you cry as much as you need. That will hold you up when you need to break down. To celebrate the wins with you. To smile with you. That’s going to be unchanging through all of this.”
That helped. A whole lot.
But her words followed me home.
To bed.
Into my dreams.
“I think he has the ability to hurt you more than Robert ever did.”
Chapter Fifteen
I hadn’t seen Lance.
Not since I did the very stupid thing. And then he did the other thing, that was not at all stupid.
Not since the kisses.
They were so much more than that. They were something that created a shift in my body. In my frickin’ mind. The way he kissed me showed me that I was not another job to him. That those cold, blank, even cruel stares were a façade for something deeper. Darker. And he let me in. For the length of that moment we had last night.
Until whatever it was that stopped him, mid-kiss, when I was sure a frickin’ tornado whipping through my living room wouldn’t detach us.
But something did stop him.
The same something that made him come back, kiss me, then disappear.
Probably the deep, dark parts of him that I had no idea about and wanted to know more than anything.
I’d wanted him to rip all of my clothes off and fuck me. Both times. It would have been that. Fucking. It wouldn’t be meaningful, tender lovemaking, the kind I’d been so sure I’d only ever want due to my history.
Lance proved me wrong on that score.
Proved me wrong with his absence, silence, with the lack of everything I’d come to expect.
It turned out that Greenstone Security hadn’t given up on me for lack of payment. Duke came knocking on my door not long after Nathan and I got home to make sure we were okay and we knew how to work the security system. He was easy to smile, joke with me. He was just easy to be around. And he was attractive. Unnaturally so, like the rest of them. But it didn’t make me uncomfortable like Lance’s ungodly looks had.
