AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Meat fixed a lot of things, but it wasn’t going to fix this fucking mess.
“We’ll see,” he replied, taking a drink of his Knob Creek.
For the first time, she seemed to notice that Jacob wasn’t there. “Where’s Jacob?”
“He’s staying at my mom’s for the weekend.”
If she thought that was strange or ominous in any way, she didn’t show it as she rested her hands in front of her on the table, picking at her black painted fingernails. “How was your meeting with Paige?” she asked, her features carefully schooled without any sign of anxiety, as if she had nothing to hide.
David was a little surprised that she’d brought it up first and thought about everything she’d been doing behind the scenes, almost from the beginning. And then he thought about all the secrets she had to keep and wondered if that was exhausting; it seemed like it would be.
He leaned back in his chair. “Remember how pissed I was when I found out you’d dicked with my phone?” he asked quietly, waiting until she nodded. “Well, I found out something today that makes how pissed I was over that look like a good mood.”
Ashley blinked at him, her expression now guarded as he turned over the printed emails and slid them over to her. She looked at the top page, her face freezing when she saw what they were.
“These are emails I never saw, because you kept them from me, right? And these replies to Paige were written by you, weren’t they? Because they weren’t written by me.”
“Yes, I wrote them,” she admitted.
“Why? What were you thinking?”
She pursed her lips. “I was thinking a lot of things, David. I was thinking that because I’d gotten into your phone, I had to keep going. When I saw the first email, I knew that if you had any contact with her, you might find out I’d blocked her and I couldn’t let that happen. So, I responded to her email, hoping that would be the last of her.”
“But it wasn’t.”
“Fuck, no. She wouldn’t go away. She kept emailing, so I had to keep responding. I started worrying she’d just show up at the studio one day to see you and ruin everything, so after she emailed, literally asking to see you—”
“To talk about her Uncle Carter.”
“It didn’t matter what she wanted to talk to you about. It only mattered that she wanted to see you, so I decided to send her a very clear message, one that would keep her away.”
“The message being that I basically didn’t want anything to do with her ever again, and that I’d ‘moved on’?”
“Yes.”
“You didn’t think that was … overkill?”
“No, I didn’t think it was overkill. I wanted her to know there was no room for reconciliation, okay?”
“Did it sound like she was trying to reconcile?”
“No, but meeting to talk about her uncle could’ve led to future meetings to talk about other things, and I still wasn’t taking any chances on her becoming a part of your life again, in any capacity. Especially since I had a baby to think about.”
David almost rolled his eyes at that. The amount of thought she’d given to her baby was minimal.
“I thought that would really keep her away,” she continued, almost as if to herself. “It would’ve kept a normal person away, but apparently she isn’t normal.”
He was already tired of hearing Ashley bitching about Paige, as if she was the problem here. “You didn’t have any reason to doubt me. You knew I was committed to Jacob—”
“I know. But you weren’t committed to me.”
“That’s bullshit. I changed my entire life for you. And I’ve been financially supporting and taking care of you—”
“I wanted more than that. Nothing was permanent between us, David. We were living together—yeah, thanks for that—but we weren’t engaged and we weren’t getting married. It was abundantly clear there was no ring in my future.”
“Correct me if I’m wrong, but didn’t you tell Paige you didn’t need a ring on your finger?”
She glared at him, breathing hard. “I lied. Of course I want a fucking ring on my finger! I’ve wanted one for four-and-a-half years! But what else was I going to say when your bitch ex-wife rubbed it in my face that I didn’t have one, and she got one after ten minutes? Obviously I wasn’t going to let her see how insecure I was in this relationship.”
