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“Stop it,” I told her. “He can hardly stand being in the same room as me.”
Rosa arched that eyebrow again.
Naturally, it made me nervous enough that I kept babbling. “Besides, Liam has been single for as long as I’ve known him. And I’ve been divorced from Charles forwellover two years now. Almost three.”
I used to keep track of the days, because every single one by myself felt like freedom. But now I simply enjoyed living my life, because I didn’t have a pretentious douchebag living under the same roof.
Every single day that passed meant healing. Discovering the parts of myself that I’d lost or ignored during that marriage because it was easier to try to keep the peace.
But that’s the insidious thing about “keeping the peace.” It sounds like such a simple phrase, with such good intentions, but it hides the slow erosion that eats away at your soul when you do it for too long.
And, sure, now I had a rude, grumpy one living next door, but as much as I couldn’t explain it, none of the things Liam had ever said to me had actually left a wound.
There was no peace when that man was around, and there never had been.
Definitely no erosion of the soul, because half the time when we were in the same room, he pissed me off so much that I felt like my eyeballs could shoot fire.
If I dared give that feeling a word, which I wouldn’t, it was almost ...exhilarating.
But Ididn’tlabel the feeling, because it didn’t make sense, and I hated things that didn’t make sense.
For a while after I left Charles, a part of me wondered if Liam would treat me differently. If he’d be nicer. If our bickering would take a dissimilar tone.
It never did.
And that, to my mind, was my answer. We’d carry on through infinity in the same way we always had—with eye-rolling, last names being tossed around like grenades, and his annoying little humming noise that made me want to inflict bodily damage.
That being said, I still had perfectly functioning eyesight. There was no escaping how the pieces of him unfortunately came together in one really attractive package.
Unfortunate because the moment he opened his stupid mouth, he ruined it.
“Your point?” Rosa asked.
“My point is that this situation doesn’t change anything between us. It simply changes the amount we see each other. Liam has never once shown any interest in me, and I like my men ... nicer.”
“No, you don’t.”
I made an affronted sound. “Yes, I do.”
“Charles wasn’t all that nice. The only reason Chris and Amie were so kind to him was because they loved you and they thought you saw something in him they hadn’t yet.”
There was no arguing that point because I already knew it to be true. By the time I met Chris and Amie, I was already a package deal with Charles. Amie didn’t tell me what she really thought about him until the first few years of our marriage had passed and she could see the unhappiness written across my face as if tattooed there.
“He was nice at first,” I corrected quietly. “He was charming and funny and gregarious. And so handsome. He’d walk the halls of that hospital in his three-piece suits when he’d come for board meetings, and everyone wanted to be noticed by him.”
Rosa’s eyes were sad.
I toyed with the edge of the towel. “I was the quiet girl in accounting, Rosa. It’s not like I minded, but I was never the woman who attracted the guys like him. Not in high school or college. And it didn’t break my heart or anything. I didn’t like myself less because of it. Dating the sweet, quiet men suited me just fine.” I shook my head. “I don’t know why I’m talking about Charles now.”
“Our past dictates how we move through our future, honey,” she said.
Didn’t I know it?
The sigh that escaped my lips was heavy, laden with all the complications that currently dictated my future.
“I still like nice guys, though,” I told her. “No matter what Charles turned out to be.”
“Liam’s getting alittlebit nicer,” Rosa added.
