Page 86 of Wait for Him

I walked away to give him a life, and he has one. A really good one. He's happy. I love that he's happy. Seeing that with my own eyes is the entire reason I've been putting myself through those dinners every six months for four years.

It just hit differently when he was standing right in front of me.

I suddenly felt so fucking alone. Insignificant. Useless in the whole life game. Michael doesn't need me to raise him anymore. James never needed me to raise him at all. My parents are gone. Jackson has a wife. Even David found somebody he'd rather bend over my brand-new sheets.

Add an entire bottle of Prosecco and three mini bottles of tequila that I chugged on the way back, and some pretty heavy fucking darkness took the wheel.

Not my finest hour.

What I do know, bone-deep and without needing any memory to prove it, is that I was safe with Jackson.

My body remembers that much.

I remember his office. Crying. Kissing him, which is getting filed under its own subsection of Things Rosalie Bennett Will Never Be Discussing Again. I remember the shower in pieces, mostly warmth and Jackson's hands in my hair, then his lips on my face and him telling me he loves me.

I've always loved you, Rosalie.

Fuck.

And what do I even do with that particular piece of information? What do I do with the fact that I was naked and wrapped up in his arms when he said it, while his wife was at home waiting for him?

Nothing.

That's what I do with it.

Which is exactly why I need to get out of his arms.

I tell myself this several times while doing absolutely nothing about it, my cheek tucked against his chest while I listen to the steady thrum of his heart beneath my ear. He's warm, annoyingly solid and built specifically to make poor decisions feel reasonable.

He's married.

There.

Useful fact.

I line it up in front of me like a barricade and keep repeating it because repetition is how cults and toddlers make things true.

He's married.

He belongs to someone whose name sits beside his on a legal document, and no amount of history between us changes that. Not the hotel room. Not the rooftop pool. Not even him telling me he loves me, no matter how many years I've spent wanting to hear those exact words from his mouth so badly that sometimes I physically ached with it.

The universe was just waiting until he was legally unavailable and I was having a mental fucking breakdown to really nail the timing.

Still, underneath every rational argument, the same treacherous question keeps surfacing.

Why does he feel like mine?

I close my eyes.

Absolutely not.

That question is getting boxed too.

I need to move before this turns into one of those mornings where I lie here pretending friendship explains why I'm wrapped around another woman's husband like a koala with attachment issues. It gets harder every time we fall into each other like this to climb back out again, and the guilt afterward always lands in the same place.

I feel like the other woman.

I hate that feeling almost as much as I hate myself for repeatedly volunteering for it.