Page 58 of Mostly My Girlfriend
I looked at the older woman sitting calmly in her chair as if what had just happened had not fazed her, even a little. The epic twelve-year-long saga of Ethan and Julia had just come to a crashing end in front of her face.
And she wanted to know if I wanted water?
“I suspected this might happen,” she said quietly.
That I would be destroyed. That we would destroy each other in the telling of thetruth.
He made up the business trip to Paris so he could take me. I’d almost cheated on CJ with Ethan, so I agreed to marry a man I didn’t love just to prove to Ethan that I could live without him.
There was no getting around any of that. Lying to him about the night he took my virginity, why he was so cold to me the day after the wedding. Because I’d retreated first.
All these missing pieces were now suddenly out there for both of us to see. But instead of smoothing the way between us, we’d used the truth like knives, slashing at each other until we bled.
I looked at the stack of letters. Unopened.
What was in them? What had he said?
“What? What did you think would happen?” I asked.
“Ethan’s looking for proof. You left yesterday and he was able to bring you back. We don’t need to go into the details of how. Now he needs to see that you’re invested in this, too. That’s it not him pulling you along, but you choosing to go. So the question is…are you?”
I tried to logic my way through what I was feeling. The reasons I’d come to my decisions. “I’d decided that Ethan was an addiction and not very good for my emotional health. I chose to leave because of that. Him, walking away from me…that could be a good thing. I’ll be less likely to relapse, right?”
Carol sighed and smiled a little sadly. “Julia, Ethan isn’t an addiction. He’s a man you’re in love with and sometimes love…is painful. You’re a grown-up now. You know that. He made mistakes. You also made mistakes. The question is, what do you want to do about it? You have two options. Yes, you can walk away from him. Or you can fight.”
FIGHT!
It was strange how quickly my thoughts answered that question. As if I had been a general in a past life and someone was calling me to battle.
Fight for Ethan. Fight for us.
We’d never done that before. We’d only ever fought against us being…us.
“Well?” she asked me, her eyebrows raised.
I looked at the clock above her head. “We still have thirty minutes left. Donotgo anywhere.”
Standing then, I ran out of the office, through the lobby until I reached the elevators. I kept hitting the down button as if, somehow, that action controlled the speed of the elevator.
After an interminable amount of time, the elevator dinged. Thankfully it was empty so when I hit the L for the lobby, I could jump up and down sayinghurry, hurry, hurryover and over again.
When it reached the lobby, I took off my heels and ran over the slick marble tile of the executive office space as fast as I could. I pushed open the doors to the street and saw that it was raining.
Awesome. A woman running down Union Street with a pair of shoes in her hand would look even better if I was drenched. It wasn’t a question of which direction to go. Because this was Ethan and I knew him better than anyone on the planet. He would want to walk, and he would want to be near the water. Which meant toward the piers.
Not three minutes into my sprint, I saw him, also drenched because he’d left his coat behind at the office.
He was wearing the same clothes from yesterday because he’d spent the night at my place. Had Carol already known what happened between us last night?
“Ethan! Stop!” I freaked out a few of the people casually walking under their umbrellas in front of me, but when I skirted around them, I saw he had stopped at the end of the street.
He turned and the look on his face…it was like that time in college after his parents had taken him home. When he’d come back to tell me he was leaving. When I saw him for the first time, and he was looking at me.
Not that he was happy. More like he was whole again.
I stopped a few feet in front of him. “We’re not done our hour,” I panted.
“I’m trying to do the right thing by you, Jules,” he said. “What if that means leaving?”
