Total pages in book: 129
Estimated words: 121764 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 609(@200wpm)___ 487(@250wpm)___ 406(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 121764 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 609(@200wpm)___ 487(@250wpm)___ 406(@300wpm)
I instantly felt more grounded as I closed my eyes and inhaled deeply.
But that didn’t change the fact that my life was a fucking mess.
I wanted to laugh at how pathetic I was, torn up over a guy who told me from the first time we met that he wasn’t looking for anything serious. Except the laugh wouldn’t come, not when my heart reminded me that his actions had completely combatted those words.
Trent had spent nearly every day with me, texting me nonstop when we weren’t together. Any time we were together felt very much like we were in a relationship. He didn’t just call me at two in the morning when he wanted to fuck. He took me to concerts. He talked to me all night until the sun came up. We cuddled on nights we could have spent having sex. We did cooking classes together, for God’s sake.
The motherfucker even had the audacity to learn my favorite song on guitar and play it by the fire on a starry night when we were camping by the lake.
All those wonderful things made me want to fall for him, and perhaps that was what upset me most. In theory, the things we’d done, the time we’d spent together… it all should have led to me being madly in love with him. It should have me gutted here on this beach at the fact that I’d lost him.
But when he’d dropped me — cutting off all ties as if I’d never existed, as if I’d died and he’d wiped his hands clean — I’d almost felt like I was pretending to be hurt by it.
The truth was I’d actually expected it.
And that was what hurt most — not that I’d lost Trent the Camping Guy, but because I was tossed aside so easily. It was a move that had burrowed down deep into the recesses of my long-buried insecurities.
It reminded me that I’m forgettable, and never anyone’s first choice.
The whininess of it made me dig the heels of my palms into my eyes, and I shook my head, letting out a frustrated groan before I blew out another long, steady breath.
I breathed in.
I breathed out.
Inhale.
Exhale.
And then, I dropped my hands from my eyes and looked around at the beauty before me.
I noted the cotton candy sky, pink and orange from the sun rising over the other coast of Florida. I noted the sand beneath my toes, the breeze wafting through my hair, the seagulls croaking out their good mornings as they swept the sky. I pressed a hand to my chest and felt where my lungs still worked, where my heart was still beating, my blood still warm.
And I smiled.
I was here.
I was alive.
I had a beautiful life ahead of me, just waiting for me to get started.
I didn’t have time to mourn the loss of a man who clearly wasn’t thinking twice about me, one who I wasn’t even sure I missed, anyway.
And I didn’t want to waste another second doing so.
A fierce, rolling ache in my chest protested, as if my body was telling me I needed to take a moment to feel sad.
But I fucking hated being sad. Life was too damn short to be sad.
Once, at a yoga training I took shortly after college, a kind woman named Marta, with silver hair and a belly button piercing, warned me that all those emotions I didn’t take the time to feel had to go somewhere. She also said that they usually coiled themselves tight in areas like my hips.
So, I stood, moving into a gentle yoga flow as I shoved every emotion even remotely resembling melancholy into whatever crevice I could find.
We all had a choice. Every day we woke up, we could think of all the things we didn’t have, and everything we’d lost, and every area we felt our lives were lacking. We could focus on where we fell short, where we could do more or be more.
Or, we could choose gratitude.
We could choose to focus on everything we did have, on all we were fortunate to experience, on everything around us that was beautiful and good.
We could choose new chapters and new beginnings.
We could choose to be happy.
And that’s exactly what I did.
I’d no sooner flopped back down in the sand before my phone buzzed, and I frowned at the unknown number on my screen before reading the text.
Unknown: I’ve secured the getaway car.
I frowned, but then recognition had my stomach flipping.
Jaxson Brittain.
I just knew it was him, and I sat back enough to lift my feet and kick them in the air like a little girl being told she was going to Disney World.
I didn’t take him too seriously when he offered a road trip last night, especially when he came back to the house after playing golf with the guys and saw how Vince fawned over me being upset.