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Chapter 21 - Eleanor
Eleanor packed light. Most of the stuff she’d left Deepwood with remained in boxes. She didn’t think she’d ever want to wear any of it again.
Tears ran down her cheeks as she packed a few personal belongings. She’d long stopped trying to hold back the tears. She had no idea what hurt her the most—the way Blake had run away, or the fact that he’d told Xander they were just friends with benefits.
None of it mattered anymore, in any case. She was going to stop in Silver Springs for a few weeks and then make up her mind on what to do afterward.
Right now, she just wanted to get as far away from here as she could. She glanced around the room, and a fresh bout of pain lanced up her chest. This place had become her home. She’d learned to love the town and was becoming a part of it.
Just last night, she and Blake had shared this bed for the first time. It seemed cruel that only a few hours later everything had gone so terribly wrong. She wondered at what point they could have saved the day, and she realized that she had no clue.
The way she saw it, too much had already happened that she could see no going back from. Xander had attacked his best friend. She had gotten pregnant. Blake had abandoned her when she needed him the most. The bubble had burst, and now they were all confronted with the reality of their individual decisions.
Eleanor considered her own journey. She was going to be a mother. She just hadn’t thought that raising her child alone would have been a possibility. Now, it looked like a certainty.
She shut the bedroom door, took a deep breath, and picked up her bag. She wanted to disappear from the world. She hated that she couldn’t get as drunk as she felt she needed to be to deal with how she was feeling.I have a baby to think of now.
The realization of that fact always left her feeling out of breath. It was a surreal thing to discover, and the circumstances around her pregnancy made it all the more painful.
She walked down the stairs and shut the front door quietly behind her. The dark blue Dodge Charger was Blake’s gift to her, and she wanted to leave it behind. But she had no other means of getting out of town.
She could order a cab, but it would take forever to get here. Swallowing whatever feelings she had, she tossed her bag into the backseat and got into the car.
Without looking back, she zoomed off into the road, wanting to put Rhinestone behind her for good, and hoping that she never had to return here again.
She made the decision to stop and see Xander on a whim. For all his faults, he did deserve some sort of explanation from her. She couldn’t imagine that things could ever go back to the way they used to be between Xander and Blake, but she hoped that she could at least make it better than it was at the moment.
She felt a strong sense of nostalgia as she pulled into the driveway of her old home. She hadn’t come back here since she got married. It hadn’t been an intentional decision, but the more time she spent with Blake, the less she wanted to be away from him.
They’d really created a beautiful and easy life together, and the last few weeks had been some of the best of her life. She wished that things had ended differently between them.No, she checked herself.I wish that they had never ended at all.
It took her a moment to realize that she had started crying again. She dabbed at her eyes with her handkerchief but there was no point. It was already completely soaked through with her tears.
She didn’t need to look into the mirror to know how miserable she looked. Her eyes were probably swollen and red, and her cheeks red from the dabbing. She didn’t care. She got out of the car and walked toward the front door.
She decided that if Xander wanted to fight or argue, she would leave without another word. She was only here because she felt she owed him an explanation. Nothing more.
She saw his truck parked haphazardly in the driveway and had a bad feeling. Blake wasn’t kidding when he’d said that Xander was normally so particular. It seemed like the sky had cracked today, and everyone in the world had lost their mind.
She found him in the living room, staring at the blank screen of the TV and sipping whiskey from a glass. She knew he’d heard the car pull into the driveway. She knew he’d sensed her the moment she got out, and that he knew she was standing behind him.
And yet he neither moved nor said a word. He just drank slowly from his glass. Eleanor watched him and felt her heart break. She and Blake had known what their intimacy would do to him. They had gone on to sleep together anyway, not minding what it would do to him.
She walked around and sat down on the couch beside him. He let out a deep sigh but remained quiet. He had no intentions of making this easy for her, she realized. “I’m sorry,” she finally said after a long pause. “I’m so sorry.”
He nodded and took a sip. “Funny. Blake said the exact thing.Sorry.”
He didn’t intend to cut her when he mentioned Blake, but he did so anyway. Eleanor blinked back tears and breathed from her mouth. She wasn’t going to cry here.
“I get that you’re angry,” she said. “But I need you to understand. I don’t care if you can’t stand the sight of me anymore, but youwilllisten to me. I really did fall in love with Blake. I really did. And until an hour or so ago, I was convinced he felt the same way. Looks like I was a fool to think so.”
Xander turned to look at her. One glance at her and his anger melted like mist on a sunny morning. She almost laughed at that. It took him seeing just how much of a mess she was for him to let go of his rage.How ironic.
“What happened?” Xander’s voice was rough and low, like he’d been shouting for hours.
Eleanor leaned back into the couch and laughed sarcastically. She couldn’t keep back the tears anymore. “What happened? Where do I even start?”
And so she told him everything. She told Xander how she’d felt when she saw Blake for the first time after so many years. She told him how she’d felt on the night of their wedding, after their run. She told him how they had struggled to ignore their feelings for each other, while pretending to be happily married in front of the entire pack.
