Page 2 of Shattered Veil

Shawn grabbed his meal from the microwave, walked over, and sat on the stool beside me. He shot me an uncharacteristically serious glance.

“Don’t make me say it,” he murmured.

“Say what?”

He sighed. “Fine, I’ll say it. I mean this with all the love in the world, but you’ve been…bleh since you finalized the divorce with your wife.”

“Dammit, Brooks.”

I didn’t think of her much—swear to God, I didn’t, but his mention of my failed marriage did make my thoughts swing back to Allison.

I thought it would hit me like a punch to the gut at the time. Mutually ending a relationship with a woman whom I thought was the love of my life should have hit me like a punch to the gut, but the sparks had fizzled out long before we inevitably called it quits. The main issue was obvious—cliché, almost—we got married too soon. I mean, so soon that my parents assumed that her father was walking me down the aisle with a shotgun due to an unexpected pregnancy kind of soon.

I wasn’t.

I was just filled with such an infatuation that I couldn’t stop myself from diving headfirst into everything Alli. Into her long, blonde hair—her bright blue eyes—her tan legs—the way she’d moan my name and bite my ear when I was deep inside of her. It was a toxic high that I had once related to finding God.

I have since realized that that God has quite the morbid sense of humor, but that was beside the point.

Happiness with Alli was so long ago that even thinking of it felt like a fever dream. That was before we came to realize all of our irreconcilable differences. She liked going out to clubs; I hated dancing and loud spaces. She liked the great indoors; I tried to go camping as often as possible. She wanted to immediately start having children; I thought that was a terrible fucking idea considering her penchant for clubbing. The woman loved to shop; I was trying to save for the down payment on a house. She loved attention; I was jealous by nature. She bought a cat on a whim; I was allergic. Okay, that last one wasn’t entirely irreconcilable, but I really wanted a dog, and she put her foot down—anyway.

We just didn’t fit together, and we could only try for so long to force our respective puzzle pieces together. It was two years before the fire that once burned between us no longer had so much as embers, let alone any trace of heat at all, and we respectably went our separate ways.

Or, that was what I fucking thought was going to happen.

The divorce—the legality of it all was what really smacked me in the face. Her lawyer—the lawyer that I didn’t even realize she had hired until it was too damn late to get a respectable one for myself—believed that, amongst many other valuables, she was entitled to our home. The whole. Goddamn. Thing. Not a dime to me. Now, I didn’t give a shit about the money. I had money. I wasn’t rolling in it by any means, but I wasn’t about to put up a fight for who won the television that we previously had in our living room.

She did, by the way—she won the rights to that, too.

It didn’t matter. It was in the past—truly in the past. It wasn’t the divorce that had put me in such a shitty headspace. I didn’t blame Shawn for assuming that—I also didn’t correct him because I didn’t care to speak of it.

“I am not bleh,” I argued.

“Then come out and have a beer,” he spoke through bites of spaghetti.

“At the strip club?”

Shawn swallowed and then nodded. “Yeah.”

“Why do I need to go with you to a strip club? We can go get a beer literally anywhere else.”

“Tommy suggested it,” he noted.

“Tommy?” I said the name with an upward inflection, attempting to place him.

“He’s in sales.”

“How’ve I not met Tommy from sales?” I questioned. “That doesn’t sound familiar at all.”

“He’s new,” Shawn stated. “Started on Monday.”

My eyebrows unintentionally raised. “And he’s so bold to recommend that we all go to a strip club together for an after-hours event? I feel like I should talk to human resources.”

Shawn laughed. “I thought it’d be good for you, so I said—”

“Don’t say it,” I muttered.

“That you’d tag along,” he finished his sentence with an admission, smiling wide with not a single trace of guilt.

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