Yours Truly (Part of Your World, #2)(12)

I thought about it for a moment.

What was the harm in seeing? I might not be a match in the end, and I could always say no.

I shrugged. “Okay. Sure.”





Chapter 5

Briana



I’d had a total breakdown last night when I got home.

I’d started to realize I would never really be happy again. Not the way I had been. I wasn’t ever getting my life back, and it wasn’t just the thing with Nick. Benny’s condition had broken me. It was the final straw.

Benny was like my child. I was eight years older and had practically raised him while Mom worked and went to nursing school.

I could be the strong-ass woman Mom taught me to be. I could put myself through med school and support myself and live through my horrendous divorce. But I could not watch Benny deteriorate like this and hold the line. I just couldn’t.

When I’d gone to his apartment yesterday after work to get his cat, there had been a three-day notice to vacate on his door. He wasn’t paying his rent. Then I got inside, and it went from bad to worse.

His place had been trashed. He hadn’t cleaned the litter box in weeks, the dishes in the sink had mold on them, the treadmill that he used to use religiously was covered in unwashed laundry. The cat practically dove into my arms when he saw me, like I was part of a long-awaited rescue mission and he was relieved I was finally there to save him.

Benny was clinically depressed. He’d been depressed since all this started last year, but it had gone from a functional depression, where he could still shower and take meds, to this. He just gave up when his kidneys did.

I think I needed to move him in with me. Either that or call Mom. He needed an adult-ier adult to take care of him right now. He was going to have to decide which overbearing woman he wanted in his life, because one was about to be assigned to him whether he liked it or not.

I’d gotten home last night and collapsed into bed and machine-gun sobbed into my pillow until I fell asleep—which didn’t last long because Benny’s cat woke me up. It took me a solid ten seconds of pure terror before I realized I had a cat in my bedroom and not a murderer. I couldn’t go back to sleep after that.

I needed to not be at work today. I needed to sit around my house without a bra, my hair in a weird bun, watching reruns of Schitt’s Creek. My eyes were still puffy, and I was a soft breeze away from losing it again—and I got my period. I get to bleed for a week without the sweet release of death.

I guess for the moment it was sort of good that I wasn’t training for a new job—not that I was thrilled with how that whole thing went down and why. But at least I didn’t have to be at the hospital eighty hours a week when I could barely handle the forty-eight I was currently scheduled.

It was six-thirty a.m. I was having coffee with Jessica before work today.

I didn’t used to like her very much. She was good friends with Alexis at one point. They were neighbors before Alexis moved. I always found Jessica a little too bitter, but now that I was bitter too, I appreciated her burn-the-patriarchy energy.

I got to the hospital cafeteria and grabbed a triple cappuccino. I wished there was vodka in it.

I spotted Jessica at the table she’d picked in the corner and headed over, dressed in the baggy black zip-up hoodie I wore over my scrubs. The hood was on. That coupled with the sunglasses I was wearing over my puffy, bloodshot eyes made me look like I was about to drop the hottest hip-hop album of the year.

Jessica, on the other hand, looked great. Perfect hair and bright red lipstick at six-thirty in the damn morning. She was an OB-GYN. She was forty-six, perfectly put together at all times, and I’d never seen her smile. Like, ever. She was married to some big lawyer or something, but she hated him, which didn’t surprise me because she hated everyone. It was currently my favorite thing about her.

When I dropped into the chair across from her like a human beanbag, she was looking at her phone. “And what happened to you?” she said without looking up, her tone bored.

“Why would you think something happened to me.”

She set her phone down and looked at me like a parent talking to a petulant teenager. “You’re wearing sunglasses indoors.”

“Maybe I have pinkeye.”

She waited.

I tossed my bag on the floor next to me with a thunk. “Benny’s not doing great. And my divorce is final in two weeks.”

“Good,” she said dryly. “Free at last.”

I rolled my eyes. “Free to do what? Date? Have loads of sex with hot singles? Have you seen it out there?” I leaned forward. “And believe me when I tell you that my standards are low. The bar has come waaaaay down. At this point I’d settle for a guy simply because he has a penis, more than one towel, and no flags hanging on his walls. I mean, do they actually expect us to have sex with them on a futon in their mom’s basement? Like, actually?”

“Yes,” she said flatly. “That is exactly what they expect.”

I sat back heavily in my seat. “I’m beginning to think men are not sending us their best people.”

She scoffed, which was Jessica’s version of laughing. “All they do is lie and throw off your PH balance. They are a constant reminder that we don’t choose our sexuality, because who in their right mind would choose to be attracted to men. They are completely worthless as partners. Did you know that when a wife becomes seriously ill, she is six times more likely to be abandoned by her spouse than a husband is?”