Page 20 of The Love Destroyers

You have lots of lines around your eyes. You could be forty-five. Easy.

Look at you, defending him.

Bite your tongue. I’d never.

The point is that he’s not scary. He’s a middle-aged asshole in an ugly suit. He looks like the father on the sitcom—one of those situations where you find out the sweet-looking actor was a secret perv all along.

Why would YOU be afraid of a guy like that?

It felt like he was poking around in my open wounds and throwing in handfuls of salt for fun.

As if sensing he was getting to me, he added:

You’re a wolf cos-playing a 1950s housewife for your mother. That’s not going to satisfy you for long. Tell me I’m wrong.

He’s not. But he doesn’t understand what it was like, being slapped with a restraining order. Being treated like a hysterical woman. Being tossed aside like a flower whose bloom had wilted.

I gave away the majority of the trust fund I inherited from my father. Although he’d made Anthony jump through hoops, there were no strings attached for me, because he’d figured the money was basically a present for my future husband.

I’m good with investments, and I have plenty of money to live on. If I wanted to, I could go on vacations to Malta and Italy and South Africa before settling back in and getting to work. But my work has always given me meaning. Jeffrey didn’t just attack my dignity and my sense of right and wrong, he took away the one thing I need to feel like myself.

You don’t get to tell me how to fight my battles. You barely know me.

I know what you taste like. I know what your thighs feel like under that dress—and the way your skin warmed under my hands. But we can get to know each other better if you insist. ;-)

You’re an asshole.

Agreed.

I sent him a photo of me drinking from the flask, and he responded:

Yeah, baby. Put your lips where mine have been. I’ll bet you like that, huh? Do you regret turning me down?

I sent him the middle finger emoji and an answer—

best decision of the new year

He sent a laughing emoji in response. After that, I’d tucked away my phone. Talking to him was as much of a waste oftime as moving my mother’s sofas in eight hundred different alignments, or hanging up the copper pots in the kitchen and then taking them down. He was funny and undeniably sexy, but he was also trouble. The kind of guy who’d need to get bailed out of scrapes and maybe even jail. The kind of guy who probably talked a good game with five different women at the same time without even flubbing their names.

I also didn’t like that he was speaking to something deep inside of me, waving life into a spark that was on the verge of guttering out.

After spending another two hours tossing and turning, I blocked Seamus’s number.

I haven’t slept through the night since.

Every time I lie down, I find myself sucked into some uncomfortable self-reflection. I spent the first eighteen years of my life trying to escape this house, only to find myself back and stuck in a holding pattern—all while the man who ruined my life is living his best life in Charlotte. I’ve seen him do it, on the screen of my phone, because Ellie Reed chronicles every minute of her life, which now includes him.

Jet-setting to Hawaii for the weekend. Eating fancy three-hour lunches. Sending perfect cheeseboards back to the kitchen. Riding bicycles on an unseasonably warm day. Kissing for the camera.

He probably never thinks about me. If he does, I’m guessing it’s with satisfaction at his complete and total victory. Yes, I’ll have my day in court, but he probably considers his win a done deal.

She thought she was different from the others, but I crushed her like an ant. She’s doing home decorating now. Home decorating! Can you imagine? She doesn't know the difference between a sette and an ottoman.

I made her, and I destroyed her. Don’t you want to see what I can do for you?

That thought sends me on long, punishing runs, because at least my own body is something I can control. Yesterday, it inspired me to move the new furniture around in this room in five different patterns that ended with me leaving it exactly as it had been in the beginning.

So I went out this morning and blew six hundred and twenty three dollars on an armchair my mother doesn’t need and no one will probably ever sit in.

---