AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Still, I don’t correct her. I’m not sure why.
Yes you do.
I squeeze my eyes shut, trying to get over this…hurdle in my brain. Iknowshe wouldn’t care. Not about him being a guy. I do. But logic has nothing on my fear.
Fear this will somehow be that final straw that rips my daughter away from me once and for all.
“It’s interesting.”
“What is?” I mutter.
“Here I thought maybe it was just a…rebound. A summer fling.”
I arch her a dry look. “Yeah, a cute fling in rehab.”
There’s that cringe-smile again. “Right. Sorry.”
I study her for a moment, considering how to put this. “It was supposed to be just a fling. Something to pass the time.” Even just hearing it out loud has a flood of guilt rising to the surface.
He deserved so much better than that.
She nods. “But it turned into more.”
“I guess. Yeah. Yeah, it did.”
Flashes of our last night together storm through my head. Kissing him…finally kissing him…losing myself into his body, so deep, so powerfully, as if it was the first time all over again.
Because it was, in a sense.
While there was never really anything holding us back once we got going, it was almost as if whatever barrier we had pretended existed—keeping our feelings at bay—had shattered that night. All pretenses gone.
Skyler swept into my life like a hurricane.
I had plenty of warning.
Plenty of time to board up my walls and take shelter.
And yet when the storm finally hit, I realized how futile it was.
It was always coming for me.
He was always going to be my downfall.
And now I’m left with the wreckage, and a sky so blue, it makes me ache for storm clouds. For lightning and rain and bone-quaking winds.
I miss him.
I ache for him.
I’d do it all again. God smite me down, I’d do it all again.
“You got over me that fast,” Mel says, intercepting my thoughts with the force of a rusty axe.
Shaking my head, I peer over at the woman I once thought I loved so fiercely. “Mel, I’m so—”
“No, no, it’s…” She trails off, studying me more closely. Looking at me, really looking at me, like it’s the first time she’s really seeing me. “It was over a long time ago, wasn’t it? Years before…”
Before.
