Total pages in book: 106
Estimated words: 98226 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 491(@200wpm)___ 393(@250wpm)___ 327(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 98226 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 491(@200wpm)___ 393(@250wpm)___ 327(@300wpm)
“Work through what, Aspen?!” Joel screamed — and I lurched back like he’d hit me, because I’d never heard him raise his voice like that. Not at me. Not ever. “This is about you being jealous and uptight when it’s me who has to make excuses for you every time you don’t come hang out with the crew. It’s me who defends you any time they make jokes that you’re lame or stuck up. It’s me trying to convince them how great you are. And to be honest?” His chest puffed with each breath, and he shook his head, stepping away from me and toward the door. “I’m starting to forget myself.”
“Joel,” I choked, frowning as I reached for him again, but he pulled away.
Then, he was out the door with a mumble of something under his breath, and I collapsed into the sheets on a sob that ripped through my chest like a rusty knife.
The next two days passed in a numb blur.
It was rainy and gray, which so perfectly matched how I felt inside that I almost laughed at the coincidence of it all. I convinced myself getting back into a routine would help me, that I was out of whack because I didn’t have any semblance of normalcy.
So, I worked out in the mornings, and I washed my face at night. I wrote in my planner and I got back into reading the mystery I had bookmarked in the middle. The days were spent on shore with my camera, the nights in bed with my laptop. I edited photos until my eyes were too dry to stay open. I wrote captions for each photo before uploading them to the staging site for my web portfolio. I answered all of my sister’s texts with lies telling her everything was fine.
I stayed away from Theo.
Joel stayed away from me.
It was like living in a nightmare, in an unending swirl of color and light that had no purpose. I wandered through those days like a lost soul, and the only proof I had that I was still living at all were the photos that slowly filled my memory card.
On the afternoon we anchored off the coast of Capri, I was sitting in bed editing photos when out of nowhere, I had the urge to put on the sapphire earrings Theo bought for me.
If anyone would have been there to ask me why, I never could have found the right words to explain it. It was like a sudden jolt of electricity, a force so strong that I slapped my laptop close and popped up out of bed like I just remembered I was late for a meeting. I walked straight over to the dresser, and then I frowned, because I’d set the earrings between the cords of my headphones the night I’d first come home with them and I hadn’t touched them since.
But they were gone.
Panic niggled inside me, and I turned everything on that dresser upside down, checking ridiculous places like the cap of my lip balm and the inside of Joel’s shoe. I emptied my backpack completely with my heart racing faster and faster with each minute that passed and the earrings didn’t show up.
Oh my God.
I lost them.
The panic I’d held at bay took over completely, and I dropped to my knees, searching the ground around the dresser as I chanted no, no, no over and over and over. I convinced myself it was because those earrings were expensive, and that they were pretty, and that I liked them so much that losing them would be devastating.
It was not because Theo bought them for me.
It was not because I wanted to hold them in my palms and feel a connection to the last good day I’d had.
I crawled from the dresser over to the bed, yanking on the compartment underneath. It was locked.
Cursing, I started picking up Joel’s pants off the floor, checking the pockets one by one until I found the key I was looking for. I unlocked the bottom compartment, and just as I did, the door to our cabin opened.
“What are you doing?!”
Joel’s voice boomed before he ripped me back from my search under the bed, slamming the compartment shut as the key went flying from my hand. I fell back on my butt, spine against the dresser, and when I looked up at Joel, his eyes were like a dark forest.
“I told you not to look in there!”
“I… I’m sorry,” I said, shocked and quiet at first before I realized I didn’t need to be sorry for anything. I frowned. “I was looking for my earrings.”
“Earrings? What earrings? You don’t ever wear any.”
“I do, too,” I said.
“What do they look like then?”
I opened my mouth to respond, but then remembered that Joel didn’t know Theo bought me earrings in Positano. He didn’t know about the dress or the swimsuit, either.