Page 96 of When We Were Us
I’m debating whether or not to ask to see the messages when she scrolls to the top and holds the phone out to me.
“You sure?”
She pushes the phone at me with a nod, her shoulders rolled in on themselves. She pulls her legs up to sit crisscross and raises a hand to pull at her bottom lip. I sit forward and take the phone from her, bracing my elbows on my knees. My stomach in knots, I start scrolling. She’s trusting me with this, and that says a lot, but I’m still nervous about what I’ll see. Evidence that she was with someone else. Engaged to someone else.
Message after message from this guy fills the screen, going back more than a month. All black bubbles, and no replies from her. I smirk internally that she’s ghosting him. Serves him right.
The messages start out harmless enough: simply asking to talk, when will she be at the condo to get her things, etc. They start getting more and more heated as I scroll. First, this prick starts using all caps, demanding she call him, then he escalates by calling her a bitch and accusing her of being immature and selfish. The nerve of this guy.
But the last messages—the ones that just came in—are the ones that make my stomach turn.
Derek
Will you please answer your phone?
You can’t avoid me forever.
Wren, please. I need to talk to you.
Things are a mess.
Please call me.
I miss you.
Fuuuck.
I click off the phone with my thumb and set it on the table, running a hand through my hair as I sit back.
“Do you want me to go so you can call him?” It kills me to say the words, but I need to know where her head is with this. I don’t want to add to her stress. And as much as I hate to admit it, my brain is screaming at me to leave. It’s like I can feel my walls going back up. I hate it, but it’s almost automatic.
She doesn’t hesitate. “No. I donotwant you to go.” Her eyes are as decisive as her words. “That’s the exact opposite of what I want to happen.”
I nod and lift my chin toward the phone. “You said this was recent. How long were you together?”
“Three years.”
My stomach plummets.Three fucking years. That’s twice as long as any relationship I’ve ever been in. Even then, it was nothing beyond me coming home from the ranch to shower, then maybe meeting for a quick dinner at some out of the way place before heading back to her apartment for sex. She’d never even been to my place in those almost eighteen months. I rarely stayed at her place, preferring the solitude of my cabin to sharing my bed with her. That was my refuge.
“Don’t,” she says, laying a hand on my back, and that’s all it takes. I couldn’t leave if I tried.
“Don’t what?”
“Don’t…do this.” She flings a hand back and forth between us. “Don’t close off and stop talking to me, Hank.”
I take a deep steadying breath and nod. “Ok, Wren. Let’s talk.”
CHAPTER FORTY-THREE
wrenley
I can feelhim pulling away the second I tell him how long Derek and I were together. But that doesn’t matter. All that matters is that I make Hank see— No, make himbelievethat it is absolutely over with Derek, and that the only thing I want right now is for him to stay. I want that more than anything.
“What are you thinking?” I ask.
He huffs out a breath through his nose that may or may not be a laugh and sits back, scrubbing his hands down his face. “I’m trying really hard not to pick up that phone and call this asshole to give him a piece of my mind, for starters.”
I relax a little when I see that he’s not going to bolt. Yet.
