Total pages in book: 127
Estimated words: 122219 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 611(@200wpm)___ 489(@250wpm)___ 407(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 122219 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 611(@200wpm)___ 489(@250wpm)___ 407(@300wpm)
“I…we…it…” Guilt filled me as I swallowed hard. “What are you doing here?”
His shoulders dropped, and he waved the flowers around. “I thought I was coming to win you back, but clearly, that isn’t a possibility.”
“Win me back?” I asked, confused. “I thought you were supposed to be off getting prepared for your new…life.”
He cleared his throat and sniffled. “It turns out the position wasn’t locked in as much as I’d thought. Drew miscalculated the situation. The position went to another.”
“Oh…gosh.” I almost told him I was sorry, but I didn’t like to lie to jerks who left me on my wedding day.
“As if you care,” he huffed, his coldness stinging my system.
“Why do you have an attitude with me? You’re the one who left me on our wedding day, not the other way around,” I expressed.
A part of me was still stunned that he was standing in front of me. A part of me thought I might’ve got hit in the head with a ball at the game, and I was suffering from a terrible concussion. Over the past few weeks, I assumed Wesley didn’t want anything to do with me. I figured he rode off into the sunset of his happily ever after. I made peace with that. Not all stories received decent endings. Some ended abruptly in the middle of a chapter.
Wesley’s shoulders dropped. “I know…I know. Sorry it’s just...” He took a deep inhalation and released it. “You already moved on with that freaking guy who you swore you hated! I didn’t imagine I’d find you sucking face with him as I came to talk things out.” He paused. “Is it true you moved in with him?” he asked with a tinge of disgust.
I shook my head slightly, thrown off by the question. “That’s nothing that we need to talk about right now.”
He huffed. “It’s just funny…you gave me such a hard time about Drew, but then you end up playing house with your ex.”
“Stop it, Wesley,” I whispered, feeling chills race up and down my body. “That’s not fair.”
“At least it makes it clear why you were so okay with calling off the wedding. Who knows how long the two of you had been hooking up behind my back? I knew I got a weird feeling from him when I went into the butcher shop. I bet you told him to take the coaching gig, too, so you’d have more time together.”
“That’s not true.”
“It is true,” he argued. “It’s clear as day how true it’s been.”
What in the gaslighting was going on right now?
I did nothing with Nathan up until about five minutes ago, and if Wesley could’ve seen how I’d reacted to Nathan getting the coaching gig, he would realize how ridiculous his comment had been.
“Why couldn’t you live with your sisters?” he asked. “Or your father? You all are glued to each other’s hips. I don’t understand how Nathan Pierce was your first option.”
“He wasn’t,” I told him. “But I don’t have to explain all this. It doesn’t matter.”
“Have you been sleeping with him?”
A wave of annoyance hit me. How dare he ask me that? He was the one who left me, not the other way around. “It’s actually none of your business.”
“That sounds like a yes to me.”
“Then maybe you should fix your hearing.”
“So him snapping at me at the butcher shop weeks ago, threatening to slam my head into the glass display, was just out of the good nature of his heart? You can’t convince me that you two weren’t screwing around.”
Nathan snapped at Wesley? That was news to me.
“Wesley, I never once cheated on you.”
“You’re telling me that the two of you haven’t even kissed until just now, huh? You want me to believe that?”
My chest tightened, thinking about what happened between Nathan and me not that long ago in my office. It was such a flurry of events that I hadn’t even processed yet.
“When I was with you, Wesley, I was with you. I never stepped out on our relationship.”
“Right,” he huffed. “You just didn’t waste any time getting into your ex’s pants. Noted. After all the years we spent together, I was wrong about you. If I knew you were a cheater, I would’ve never wasted my time on you.”
“I didn’t cheat on you!” I barked, feeling my rage building from the idea that he was painting me as a cheater when he was the one who left me. Still, somehow his words affected me. Somehow, I’d felt guilt filling my chest, and I wasn’t the one who chose a career over a relationship.
But still, you weren’t emotionally available for him, Avery.
Maybe if you weren’t so damaged, he would’ve been able to love you right.
There they were again. Those intrusive thoughts that loved to poison my brain. Luckily, enough sanity floated through my mind as I thought about our past relationship.