AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“Sounds that way,” Leona said, still giving me worried eyes.
“We have history.” What a light, little sentence that was to hold such clenched, fathomless, unabated pain inside of it.
“I still can’t believe you slept with him,” Demi added.
I shrugged. It was hard to articulate sober, harder now. “Have you ever done something that hurts you just because you know it hurts the other person, too?”
They were all just staring at me. I shrugged again. “I hate his lying, conniving guts, but sex with him can be a religious experience. He remembers things about my body that even I forgot.”
“Ah.”
“Oh.”
“I see.”
That they seemed to get. The universal understanding of phenomenal sex. Go figure.
CHAPTER
FOURTEEN
“Love is a trap. When it appears, we see only its light, not its shadows.”
~Paulo Coelho
The morning of the funeral arrived too quickly. I packed light and went with dread to the airport, making it to my flight with mere minutes to spare.
Leona dropped me off, her best friend eyes worried on me as we said goodbye. Though she never voiced her concerns, she didn’t have to. She knew this was an unpleasant trip for me, unhealthy for my state of mind, but it was unavoidable.
“I’ll be fine,” I told her chidingly, avoiding eye contact.
That was the closest I’d get to voicing my trepidation of the ordeal to come: Acknowledging the fact that there was something I might not be fine with.
“I know you will,” she assured me.
We kissed cheeks and said goodbye.
And off I went. Heading back into hell for the sake of Gram.
Oh the irony. She’d been one of the few people in my life that’d actively tried to keep me out of it.
I wasn’t even mildly surprised when I found myself in a first class seat for the flight from LAX to Seattle. It was so Dante. The nonchalantly rich bastard.
I’d been conditioned to stay awake on airplanes, so I didn’t sleep a wink for that entire leg of the trip. I’d brought a book, and it was a good one, but I couldn’t focus on it for shit.
Instead, I stared out the window and drove myself crazy.
Why did I still feel so much for Dante? What would it take to make me numb?
I’d have paid a heavy price for numbness, felt I’d already paid it in the attempt to seek it out.
And for the price, nothing. All of my efforts had been futile. Every furious, vengeful, masochistic thing I’d ever done to get over him had left me at ground zero.
I still felt. Too much. With just the slightest provocation, I was wrapped up in him again, in the good and the bad. He got to me, was so deep under my skin that even now, years after the end of us, it was a fight with myself not to let the bitterness of it consume my waking hours.
At SeaTac I switched to a tiny commuter jet for the short flight to the small town I’d been raised in.
That flight was shorter but worse for my peace of mind. I hadn’t been back in years, and when I’d left, I’d been ecstatic to be done with the place.
