Thick & Thin (Thin Love, #3)(14)

I didn’t answer, felt a little flustered, a lot turned on, then annoyed with myself when that small, cruel voice in the back of my mind told me how hurt Ransom would be if he knew what I was up to. For once, I didn’t care what he thought. Ransom wasn’t mine anymore.

Ethan was.





There is nothing sadder

Than love left untended.



Mine

Yours

Theirs.

It cripples.

It shakes.



My past

Your pain

Our memories.



It destroys.

The whole

f*cking

world.





Three





For four years, we existed in text messages. Greetings, check ins, questions about how we were doing, sometimes even the occasional late night confession that we’d missed each other—Aly and I swam in the circles built by zeroes and ones, wifi and distance.

I’d hated every second of it. Especially when the last year we were together I’d seen her texts more than her. That hadn’t changed, but the frequency had. Then two years ago, someone else replied to a text that Aly had sent to me. One quick shower trying to wash a stranger from my skin, a missed text from Aly, and it all fell apart. For good. “Who the hell is this?” was the reply Aly had gotten from someone who wasn’t me, and it changed everything.

I couldn’t stop it in time.

There was nothing for me to feel guilty about. At least, that’s what Aly had sworn when I finally got her to speak to me. But I heard the hurt behind her words. We weren’t together, technically, but we’d still been sleeping with each other on and off, had been for two years after she walked out. There was still a connection, so of course my f*ck up hurt her.

“I knew it would happen eventually.” That reply had been short, brutal and the sound of it made my stomach drop until I thought there would be nothing left inside me.

“That’s not the point,” I’d told her. It had been damn hard to reign in my anger at myself and at her for brushing off the fact that I had been with someone else. “It didn’t mean…”

“If you tell me giving that part of yourself to someone else meant nothing to you at all, then my opinion is going to change.”

“Aly…”

“If my opinion changes, then I won’t be able to find time to speak to you anymore.” When I’d spent the next handful of seconds listening to her breathe, to the crackle of emotion she tried to repress, and mixing in a few prayers between my own ragged breaths, Aly continued. “Did it mean anything?”

“Yeah,” I’d told her, unable to keep the quake out of my voice. “It meant you were really gone.”

I’d never been lower than that night, alone in a Dallas luxury hotel room with some stranger over me, saying things that meant nothing. Things meant to fill the air with energy, to take the edge off, words that were a balm for emotion. I’d felt no real pleasure, no emotion at all, nothing that would take away the bone-scraping loneliness that Aly had left behind.

There had been nothing to hold onto at night. No sweet scent taking up space in my head. No soft, pliable body to keep me grounded. Nothing in my heart but the memory of her lips and the sound of her laughter. Even with a girl whose name I hadn’t bothered to remember moving over me, I’d still felt Aly’s vacancy. No one could fill it. Not then. Not now.

It hadn’t been Aly’s fault. I’d made sure she knew that. At my most basic level, I was weak. I was a pathetic * who’d let my woman leave. I didn’t chase after her, only took what she offered whenever we were together. I’d never acknowledged that our lives had been about me, my career, what I needed and when. I hadn’t even considered how she felt, how much she worried.

Ridiculous as it sounds, I’d texted her. An hour ago, on the night she got engaged. Not surprisingly, she still hadn’t answered. It was late, and she’d had a big day with the recital and the proposal and all. Still, I kept my phone where I could see it. Next to me on the patio table my phone flashed with an email alert I ignored and the light from the screen brightened against the darkness, illuminated the pavers at my feet and shot out toward the deck beyond my parent’s backyard and the lake that ran behind it. The water was still, black like a magpie’s head with a sliver of purple waving along the shoreline, reflecting the low light from the moon.

This place was home. Where my family lived, where the sweetest memories of Louisiana came from—my life here had been about loss for so long as I kid I wondered if I could come here, sit out on this patio watching the waves and the distant activity from across the lake, without feeling all that loss.

Then Aly had come along.

She replaced every shred of pain with her laughter and love.

Now I could sit out here and not think about losing my first love, Emily, at sixteen, right out on that lake. I could relax, stare out toward the dock lined with a string of soft yellow lights that danced off the water and not be reminded of anything but the taste of Aly’s mouth and the number of times we’d disappeared for hours on end into the pool house across the patio.

My parents had transformed the lake house over the years, from the place my mother spent her adolescence wanting to escape, to the comfortable upscale home that didn’t seem too ornate or too formal, like it had been when Mom was a kid. The fancy marble floors and lavish columns from her youth were gone, replaced with cedar posts and hardwood floors. It was more farmhouse than luxury mansion now and my parents took great pains to keep it that way. There was a pool off to the side of the patio, for when the lake was too high or the water too choppy, and a stone fire pit in the center of the patio where we’d spent years roasting marshmallows and having impromptu sing-alongs.