Total pages in book: 129
Estimated words: 131459 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 657(@200wpm)___ 526(@250wpm)___ 438(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 131459 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 657(@200wpm)___ 526(@250wpm)___ 438(@300wpm)
He pulled the lid off a pot, steam rose, the air filled with a tomatoey, garlicky, herbed scent of heaven, he picked up a spoon, stirred and kept talking.
“It’s beginning to feel like mine and like a home.”
I slid onto one of his white-leather-covered stools at the island.
“You thought you’d win her back?” I asked carefully.
He returned the lid to the pot and moved to another one that was steaming.
And without hesitation, answered, “Yes. Though, I didn’t factor in Corey.”
“Corey?”
He picked up a box of spaghetti that was sitting on the counter and turned to me.
“Corey. Thanks to Sam telling everyone, but I can confirm it’s true, you probably know he broke Bowie and Genny up back in the day. And he put them back together after he killed himself.”
The first part I knew.
The last part, I was astonished.
“How did he do that?”
“Forced them in a room together and admitted what he did via a letter from beyond the grave.”
I was no less astonished.
“That was…that was all it took?” I stammered.
“First love,” he murmured, shifting his attention to the spaghetti. “And more. History. Longing. All that shit. They were official maybe three days after they reconnected.”
Ouch.
That had to have hurt.
“Tom,” I said softly.
He twisted his neck to look at me.
“We don’t have to talk about this,” I told him.
“I cheated on her, Mika,” he said, painfully direct, but I wasn’t sure the arrow hit my heart, rather than it being embedded in his. “You guessed right. We lied to the press because it wasn’t their business. She and I are good now, we’ve shifted to friends. I admire and respect Bowie, and it’s odd, but good, that we’ve also become friends. It works. Am I happy with the way it turned out? In a way, no. In a way, yes. Now that I’ve learned to be honest with myself about it, I realize that it probably would be some form of this either way.”
Some form of this?
“I don’t follow,” I told him.
“Our marriage was over,” he shared, this news not astonishing me. No, it was downright shocking. “I was pissed why it was over, and I love her. You do horrible things to people you love. The more you love them, the more horrible it is, what you do to them when they hurt you. She left me but didn’t leave the marriage. Just shut me out. Of her heart. Her thoughts. Our bed. It hurt like fuck. When nothing I did had any impact, instead of walking out on her, ending things, I struck back. It took me time, and quite a bit of uncomfortable reflection, but I recognize it for what it was.”
He took a deep breath and laid it out.
“I did not stray. I did not wander onto the wrong path. I would like to think of it that way, but I’m a grown man. Anyone who does that kind of thing knows better, and they don’t get those excuses. It was toxic and immature and fucked right the hell up. I’m not proud of it. But the truth of the matter was, with how impossible she found it to forgive me, and she found it completely impossible, and how quickly she reengaged with Duncan, it had been over long before it was over. That said, I fell out of love first.”
As I sat there, stunned silent and processing all he said, he turned back and poured the entire box of spaghetti into the water.
He dropped the spent box on the counter, gave the pasta a whirl with a wooden spoon, stepped to the side of the range, turned again to me, and leaned back into his hips, crossing his arms on his chest.
“I love her still,” he said. “That isn’t it. It was that I stopped being in love with her. It was the Genny Show from the beginning. Even talking to her about how that was rubbing me wrong, she did not see my perspective, and it remained the Genny Show. She took me for granted. My part in that, I let her without much of a fight. And I’m not downplaying my part. I should have spoken up more, and I should have made certain she understood where I was at when it started to negatively affect me. But then she thought I’d simply hang around while she cut me out and worked through shit and didn’t let me in on it. She took a break from me but did it keeping me on a string.”
He shrugged.
I waited.
He continued.
“Maybe I’m too prideful. Maybe I should have tried harder to break through. But I think I was just done with my world revolving around Imogen, and because of that, because I’d given her that for so long, the wound of her finding it so easy to disconnect from me festered. In the end, we weren’t meant to be. What we had, it was mostly good, a lot of the time amazing. For a long time, I was so happy it was almost unreal. There was a great deal of love and support and joy. We were meant to make Chloe and Matt and Sasha. The love we shared when it was there was beautiful, and I cherish it. But then, it was gone.”