Total pages in book: 70
Estimated words: 67905 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 340(@200wpm)___ 272(@250wpm)___ 226(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 67905 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 340(@200wpm)___ 272(@250wpm)___ 226(@300wpm)
“It’s not as good as yours.” He brought his plate to the table and sat across from me. “I miss your cooking…among other things.”
I kept my eyes down and dismissed the compliment. My fork moved through the tender meat and the sauce before I placed it in my mouth. It had a delicious taste, but it only inspired a small spark in my appetite.
Bolton ate his food in silence, watching me across the table from time to time, not forcing conversation.
I had been low when my father died, but I wasn’t sure if I’d ever been this low.
“Astrid?”
My eyes shifted to him.
“I want you to come home.”
“I am home.” In this little apartment, all by myself, disappointed by every man I’d ever trusted.
“This isn’t a home,” he said. “Just a room with four walls.”
“It’s exactly how it felt when you would be gone—doing god knows what.”
He stopped eating altogether. “Ever since you’ve been gone, I’ve been home, thinking about you, desperate to repair what I destroyed. Despite how much I fucked up, you know how much I love you.”
I looked away.
“You do, Astrid. I wouldn’t fight for you if that weren’t true. I wouldn’t be heartbroken if that weren’t true.”
“But yet, you can fuck—”
“Sex means something else to men than it does to women,” he said with forced calm. “I told you this. I never should have asked and I’ll never ask again, but you did agree to it. If you’d said no, we wouldn’t be here right now.”
“Yes, it’s my fault—”
“I’m not blaming you. I just wish you’d been honest, is all I’m saying.”
I looked down at my food.
“Astrid, come on,” he said with a sigh. “You’re killing me.”
“Now you know how I felt when I saw that lipstick mark on your neck.”
He was quiet for a while, his anger palpable. “And how do you think I feel knowing one of my adversaries fucked my wife for sport?” He cocked his head. “That my wife was used and too blind to see it? That kills me, Astrid.”
The mention of Theo made me feel like shit all over again. I had been too stupid to see the deception right in front of me. Like an alchemist, I’d turned his lies into truth.
“Please come home…and give me a chance.”
“You mean another chance.”
He stared at me through the silence. “Please.”
His eyes were so blue I had to look away. They could be beautiful but sometimes deadly.
“Astrid, please.”
“I—I don’t think so.”
He gave a loud sigh as he sat back. “You act like I cheated on you.”
“That’s how it feels.”
“Then you cheated on me.”
“In retaliation,” I snapped. “It took a long time for me to be able to imagine someone else in my bed.”
“You were emotionally involved with Theo. I was never emotionally involved with anyone. If you really want to compare infidelities, yours is worse than mine. How do you think it makes me feel, knowing you actually felt something for him? I could never feel anything for anyone except you, Astrid.”
And just like that, he made me feel like shit.
“Come home. And let’s start over.” He pleaded with his eyes. “Please.”
I broke eye contact and stared at my food, his request hanging in the air between us. The silence was deafening. It seemed to last a lifetime. The desperation was like smoke in the room, burning in my lungs. “No.”
A storm hit that night.
The rain was loud against the windows. The trees bent in the wind, and the branches scratched the glass.
It was hard to sleep with all the noise. But it was even harder to sleep with the depression that acted as a noose around my neck. I’d thought Bolton was the man I could trust to take care of me after life had been unkind to me, but now I was alone…in a shitty apartment. And I would probably always be alone.
And after Theo…I would be forever scarred.
I lay there and stared at the ceiling, cycling the memories over and over in my head, drowning in the pool of depression, when I heard a noise.
The sound of something hitting the front door downstairs.
I sat upright in bed, my heart immediately pounding in a split second. It wasn’t a gust of wind against the door. It wasn’t a fallen tree.
It was something else.
I reached for my phone on the nightstand then stepped into the hallway at the top of the stairs.
The center of the door had been smashed in, and a tattooed arm reached through the wood to grab the door handle.
“Holy shit.” I unlocked my phone and returned to my bedroom. There was a dresser in there, and I had a sudden burst of strength that came out of nowhere and allowed me to move it against the door to act as a barricade.
Without thinking twice, I called Theo.
It rang and rang and rang…