Page 33 of Wicked Destiny

I knew it in a coffee shop in week one and, though I’ve fought it, it’s grown deeper every day since. There’s no other her coming. Not for me.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s confusing.

Yolanda was my first love. The one woman who tamed my wounded soul. She provided me with mental stability. Steered the ship. Saw my potential and made me want to be a better man. I’d like to think I became the partner she deserved. I wouldn’t trade one day with her, that’s the truth.

If she were still alive, I’d happily grow old with her.

My love for Elodie is like a tornado. Arriving all at once, sideways, at the worst possible hour, daring me to be brave enough to burn my life down for it.

I’m not and I won’t.

Even if it’s going to kill me. I won’t snuff out her flame to warm mine.

Her delivery might have been harsh but Billie’s right. I’m on the back nine. Elodie hasn’t teed off.

I’ve been so fucking selfish. If I keep her she won’t experience the whole enormous life she’s owed. At thirty-five, she’ll find herself chained to a man in his seventies.

Yolanda grew sick and weak and perished in front of me. Elodie lost her mom in the same way. We both know the toll it takes on the one left behind.

I can’t sign her up for it at twenty-two.

It’s up to me to do the hardest, most necessary, cowardly looking brave thing I’ve ever done. I’m going to end it before it goes any deeper, breaking the one promise I meant the most. The one where I swore I wouldn’t hurt her.

Better to do it at once rather than give her little paper cuts every day for the rest of my life.

She’ll be able to move on.

Hopefully, I’ll be a fond memory.

fifteen

Five Weeks Later

Paris is as dreamy as everyone promised.

Three weeks into my grand European adventure and I’m doing the whole thing right.

Hostels and cheap pensions, a backpack quietly destroying my spine, day-old baguettes on the steps of buildings older than Jesus. I’ve collected a handful of other vagabond twenty-somethings. An Australian, Germans, and a Canadian named Lev, who’s in love with me in a sweet, doomed way I don’t have the heart to correct.

We explore cathedrals together. Barter for souvenirs. Plan out our next Eurail stop. Stay up too late after splitting bottles of three-euro wine.

By every measure a person could see from outside, I’m having the trip of a lifetime.

Underneath it all, I’m heartbroken in a way I didn’t know a body could survive.

Beau broke it off definitively the same afternoon I walked out of his house. I’d barely got home and was sitting on the floor of my childhood bedroom seething my when my phone lit up with his name.

Even though I’d essentially come to the same conclusion, I knew what was coming. He was gentle. Broken. So, so sorry.

Thankfully, I had enough self-respect not to cry. Or beg. I didn’t make him grind through the whole speech. I told him it’s okay, Beau, it’s for the best, our lives were never going to line up anyway. Then I hung up, opened my laptop and paid an obscene amount of money for a one-way ticket to London and was wheels-up one week later.

I’m on the second half of eight weeks in Europe. Part of me is proud of myself. I may have lost the man I love, but I didn’t sit around in Seattle and marinate in anguish. I’m living the enormous, full life everyone kept promising me I was owed when Mom died.

Priya’s been a rock. She texts me links to hostels crawling with photogenic backpackers, because her cure for one man is another man, preferably French. This morning, she demanded I find a hot twenty-five-year-old to get the “geriatric cock” out of my system.

She’s wrong. I love her, but she’s wrong.

I’m not feeling up to romance.