Page 3 of Love is Angry

My head turns slowly.

So slowly, in fact, that time seems to have stopped.

Her profile is an etching of the kind of sins that should never be committed. The small nose. The full lips. The bright eyes where ancient Irish forests grow.

The auditorium’s overhead LED lights cast a warm glow upon her face, not illuminating it completely, but giving enough to allow imagination to carve its own path. I breathe in. Somehow, it’s as though I can almost see the lilacs coming off of her in delicate wisps.

For a moment, I imagine her naked in the morning, spraying the fragrance onto her soft skin. But the beauty is short-lived when she looks at me, and the sparkle of instant recognition blows everything to hell.

It really is her.

Not someone drenched in the same odors.

Not a lookalike or a copycat, but…her.

“Oh, for fuck’s sake,” I hear myself mutter.

I sound defeated. For good reasons, too.

“Rhue?” I don’t even register the moment the tranquil beauty of her oval face shifts into this colorless mask of true horror. But I can’t say that I mind it.

I make her feel like this. Good! She should be fucking mortified.

Of all the places in the world, this is where our paths cross. It’s un-fucking-believable.

The universe must be fucking with me. I pause on that thought, knowing better than to think these kinds of coincidences are normal. This could very well be my father’s doing. This is the kind of bullshit he would do to punish me for choosing Cornell over Harvard. For carving my own path instead of walking the one he picked out for me.

I steady my gaze on Madison Willis, my former tutor. The woman that made my balls blue and my soul sing before she broke the shit out of my heart.

The woman I found in my parents’ bedroom with my father on top of her, pounding her like the ten-dollar whore that she is. The Madison who ruined my family.

Yet here the bitch sits.

Like she thinks I’ll give her a hand at destroying me, too.

Chapter 2

Madison

He’s here.

How on earth is he here?

How is this even possible?

I blink once and then twice. I’m close to pinching myself or begging a stranger to pinch me. Scare me all the way awake. There is no way this isn’t a bad dream. And if that’s not the case, then maybe the milk in my morning coffee was spoiled or laced with brain-eating bacteria.

“What in the ever-living fuck are you doing here?” Rhue asks.

I’m supposed to have an answer to that, right?

It’s been a while since we last saw each other, and that particular encounter left a sour taste in my mouth; a taste I will never be able to get rid of.

I destroyed his family and myself in the process. The last thing I need is for Rhue Echeveria, the ghost of my teen-hood past, to haunt me.

I’m getting queasy.

Nausea swirls in the back of my throat. I’m not sure what’s there for me to retch, though, since I skipped breakfast.

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