Page 6 of The Seven Month Itch
What do you say to the man who incinerated your heart when you see him for the first time in, I don’t know, seven months?
Nothing, that’s what.
I’ve had the you-were-the-biggest-mistake-of-my-lifespeech memorized since June, ready for the day our paths crossed. Well, today was that day, and I blew it. Terrence’s cameo threw me off balance, and said speech went out the window. The words that had been desperate to escape wouldn’t form, no matter how hard I willed myself to release them. Now I’m pacing around the hotel room like one of those cage fighters, ready to rip someone’s head clean off.
Should it upset me this much to see him?
No.
Does it piss me off?
Hell yes, it does.
Em and I only got here thirty minutes ago, and there’s “someone at the bar” for him? What’s next, a proposal by the end of the week?
When did he book this trip? After our split?Before? How many singles’ events does he go to? I guess the only people who care he’s still married are the Lord Our God and the State of Texas.
One of us wanted to come here, and it wasn’t me.
This reunion sent me to a place of rage. A ring of Hell that scorned wives vacation in, and I hate it.
Why? You left him, remember?
I traded our dream home for a top-floor studio on the other side of the city in the name of independence and self-respect. It adds twenty minutes to my work commute and faces a back alley, but there’s a rooftop pool.
What other option did I have? Crawl back to Virginia? Terrence is the son my parents never had. Our split broke their hearts as much as it did mine.
But when your husband isn’t there to love you through one of the darkest times of your life and makes you question his faithfulness, how can you stay?
The move to East Austin shielded me from any physical reminders of the man who triggers the tattered lockbox that’s become my heart. Iwantto forget him. God knows I’ve tried. Yet all it took was a second—a single glance—for every memory to crash through me.
His touch.
The hypnotic cocktail of citrus and bergamot he calls a scent.
The way my name leaves his lips in a whisper before he takes me over the edge.
No matter how much I craved that man, there’s no shaking the hurt that broke us. That broke me. And now, I’m back at square one.
Terrence Reyes doesn’t need the six feet three inches he is to suffocate rooms with his presence. Between his megawatt smile and down-to-earth vibe, you lose all sense of time with a single step into his orbit. And that Spanish smooth talk? Dead on arrival.
My body went from zero to hot and bothered at the sight of him. He switched up his look with a trimmed goatee, his curly black hair shaved down on the sides. But his signature style is still there. Denim jeans. A Henley shirt that rests over his sculpted chest. A thin gold chain.
Taming hungry hyenas is easier than taming my treacherous vagina. Whose side is it on, anyway?
The one that gets us laid.
Our separation severed our marriage, but there’s still a gravitational force that pulls us together—like at a singles’ retreat a thousand miles away from Austin, in the middle of nowhere. It took everything in me not to climb him like a flagpole. The mere smell of that man’s aftershave awakened a part of me that’s been hibernating.
Why the hell am I panting?
Stop it, Justice.
I collapse on the couch and put my head in my hands. This isn’t good. This is so not good.
“Still dickmatized by your ex?” Emma smiles over the crystal tumbler at her lips with a quirked brow. The kitchen chandelier casts a halo over her mop of mahogany hair, which is in a high ponytail she’ll soon transform into a fancy top knot.
How long has she been there?
