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I’m not proud of it, but I just couldn’t help it.
Everything felt so right with Flynn. Until it was just so wrong.
“Please, Stella, listen to me.”
I shudder back to reality and push Flynn back by his shoulders. “You have to leave.”
His face splits with desperation. “Stella –” Flynn reaches for me.
“Go, just go. Just please go. I don’t want to talk to you. I don’t even want to look at you. I don’t know why I let you…” I pull down the skirt of my dress and draw my legs up under me. He felt so amazing.
Yet I feel so much regret.
Flynn stands for what feels like a very long time just looking at me. Waiting for me to change my mind. But when I don’t, he simply nods. “Okay,” he says in the smallest, most heartbreaking voice. “Okay, I’ll… I’ll go.”
I am too focused on holding back my tears to watch him go. It is not until I hear the front door shut, sealing me back inside from the rest of the world, that I let myself cry.
I’ve told myself so many times that I have to stop crying. That Flynn is not a man worth crying over.
It doesn’t matter. The tears keep coming as if my body knows something that my mind doesn’t.
Chapter 19
Flynn
I’vequitworkingfromthe office for the past two weeks. I’m done being questioned, done having my suits ripped, done nearly giving my dog an aneurysm.
In fact, I didn’t even show up for our presentation. Colin objected, but I thought I’d just get in the way. “Let them look at the tech. Then they can call me with the questions.” From everything I’ve heard, Colin and Rickie did amazing. Colin hasn’t said it was better without me there, but it was.
I’m just… a laughingstock.
To be fair, I haven’t actually done anything. It’s just what the media has purported I’ve done. I haven’t given one singular interview, and haven’t so much as spoken to anyone outside the company. And yet I’m constantly being “quoted” or spoken for in magazine articles.
All because Adelaide won’t shut up.
We spoke on the phone actually just last week. I finally had the balls to tell her I’d be building a case against her for libel if she didn’t shut up. She burst into her usual crocodile tears. “Flynn, we are perfect together, don’t you see?!”
The longer I’ve thought about it, the more I think she’s come to understand that Theo is only going to get dumber the longer he plays football. And once he retires, it’s all downhill from there. I have always been a long-term investment (as crude as that may be). Now she’s just mature enough to see it.
Too bad she pulled out her funds two years ago. I wish I had never laid eyes on her.
Today is a day like any other when I’m working from home. Wake up, take Freckles for a walk through Central Park with sunglasses and a hat so no one recognizes me (hopefully), make a pot of coffee, log on, work the rest of the day, and then…
Dissociate about how badly I fucked up with Stella.
I had no intentions of having sex with her when I went to talk to her. But when she shoots her mouth off like that and makes me so angry, it’s impossible to resist her.
I promised Colin. I wouldn’t force it. She gave me her answer. She wanted me to leave.
So here I am, carrying around this wound like my life depends on it. As if I let it heal, then that part of me, the part of me that loved Stella, never existed.
In the midst of numbing out and clicking around on my computer as if I’m actually doing anything, I hear the front door click open. Freckles hears it and runs out of the office toward the front door. The only person who has an extra key is Colin, and the only person that could walk in without Freckles freaking out would also be Colin. “Yeah?” I call out from my office.
Colin pokes his head in. “Brought bagels.”
“Not hungry, but thanks.” Heartbreak has made my appetite nearly non-existent.
He drops a paper bag of bagels on my desk and sighs. “Thought you’d say that.”
