Page 121 of The Truth About Love

His chest heaves. I can hear his heavy breaths resonating around the room, the intensity, the force of them. They’re so very different to mine.

I don’t feel like I can breathe at all.

I don’t think I’ll ever breathe again.

And then something bizarre happens. I start laughing. This high-pitched hysterical laugh that sounds almost like a scream goes on and on until tears are streaming down my cheeks.

“I should have known.”

Auden watches me with wide eyes, hesitant, almost wary. As if I’m a wild animal whose actions he can’t predict. He’s right to look at me that way. I don’t know what I’ll do either.

“What?” He blinks.

“Me and you,” I say through the hysteria. “We were always a pipedream, weren’t we? Guys like you don’t end up with girls like me, the fucked-up ones with more baggage than you can carry. No, it’s women like Cara you all go for in the end. Joke’s on me for ever thinking it could be any different.”

“Don’t do that,” he growls, storming over to me and crouching down to my level. “Don’t say shit like that. It’s not true, you know it’s not true.”

“Isn’t it?” I shake my head. “So, you’re not here to tell me that you’re staying with her?”

He immediately looks away.

I scoff. “That’s what I thought.”

He says nothing and the silence gives me a chance to calm down. I take in long breaths until my heartbeat slows and my blood stops thrumming in my ears.

And then, once my body is finally quiet, I resign myself to what needs to happen now.

“We can’t see each other anymore,” I whisper into the dead air between us.

“What?” His voice is cold and rough. It’s nothing like the caramel-smooth lilt that I’m used to hearing from him.

“When you walk out that door, it’s for the last time,” I say, staring straight into his eyes so he can see just how serious I am. “I mean it, Auden. This is it now. There’ll be no contact, no calls to my sister to check up on me, no showing up to be my hero when I’m in a bad way. When you walk out that door,” I take a breath, preparing myself, “it’s the last time I’ll say goodbye to you.”

He stands up abruptly, rearing back. The look in his eyes is a deadly combination of menacing and wild.

“That’s what you want?” he asks in disbelief.

“What I want?” I yell, standing to glare up at him. “You think this is what I want?It’s not even close to what I want. What I want is to be with the man I love. For the guy who told me two years ago that he’d wait for me to have been telling the goddamn truth. To not have come home, ready to finally give you the love I always thought you deserved, to find you married to another fucking woman.”

He shakes his head, refusing to hear the truth in my words. “And what, we can’t be in each other’s lives at all? We can’t even be friends?”

“No, Auden.” My voice is quiet now, almost calm. I can feel myself disassociating, drifting outside of my body to watch the scene like a ghost in the corner of the room. “I can’t watch from the side lines as another woman lives the life I want with the man who was supposed to be mine. It would destroy me more than you already have. And I’ve made too much progress to put myself through that.”

“Baby, please,” he cries, reaching out and gripping my face between his strong hands. I allow myself a moment of weakness to close my eyes and feel the warmth of them. This is the last time he’ll ever be able to touch me. “I can’t be without you in my life. Not again.”

Inhaling strongly, I close my fingers around his wrists and tug his hands away from my face.

“That’s the decision you made, Auden. No one’s holding a gun to your head. We don’t live in a world where parents have to be married anymore. It’s not me forcing you to stay married to a woman you don’t love. You made the choice.”

“I don’t have a choice!” he roars.

“We all have a choice.”

“So, what? You’re giving me an ultimatum?”

“No,” I say as gently as I can manage. “You’ve already made your decision, you know that as well as I do. Now, I’m just making mine. I’m doing what I have to do to protect myself.”

“And that means never seeing me again?”

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