“When will she be back?” he asked.
“When she’s back,” she answered with a cold blink.
“Wrong day,” he growled. “Wrong damn day to fuck with me.”
Before Bernice could answer or stop him, he barged through the door between the reception area and the clinic’s main part.
Olivia had told him not to do anything crazy, but he had to see her.
“Olivia!” he called, storming into her office. But instead of the woman who’d promised to become his wife a week ago, he found a short Latina woman with glasses.
“Where’s Olivia?” he asked.
She shook her head. “Who are you? Are you supposed to be back here?”
“Where’s Olivia?” he demanded again, this time roaring the question.
“Phantom! Phantom, stop!” a voice he recognized said behind him.
He whipped around to see the doctor he and Olivia had consoled earlier in the month. The best friend who’d called them #couple goals.
“Why don’t you come into my office,” Eric suggested. “It’s here right across the hall.”
Phantom followed him, but only to demand, “Where’s Olivia?” again as soon as Eric closed the door behind them.
“Not here,” Eric answered. His voice was careful, as if he could hear the bomb ticking inside of Phantom. “She decided to take a sabbatical in Uganda. She won’t be back until next year. That was why we brought on the new doctor.”
“That was why…?” Phantom’s voice gave out before he could finish the question. “No, we were trying to have a baby. She wanted to cut back her hours. That’s why she brought on the new doctor.”
Eric regarded him with a pitying look. “Um…that’s not what she told me. In fact, I shouldn’t be sharing this with you, but….”
He looked both ways and lowered his voice to tell Phantom, “She asked me for a prescription for birth control right after the Lunar New Year. She said you’d told her some story about your grandmother that made her fear you might be mentally unstable and her not wanting to take any chances. I don’t personally think you’d ever do anything to hurt her or any of us, but she told me to call the police if you came here and refused to leave.”
Phantom was as strong and steady as a mountain. He always had been. But his legs nearly gave out as Eric’s words plunged into him like daggers.
She was afraid of him? She’d been on birth control this whole time? She’d sold her brownstone and bounced back to Uganda just to get away from him?
Everything he’d assumed over the last few months started to rewrite itself in his head. He’d thought they were fulfilling his grandma’s prophecy, but their whole arrangement had been an illusion from the start.
But…
“Why?” he asked out loud. “Why would she fight to get back together with me, say she’d marry me, then dump me like this?”
Eric shrugged helplessly. “I can’t say for sure. But I’m going to assume your ah…bedroom skills…had something to do with it. You know, BDE isn’t something you can buy in stores—believe me, I’ve searched all the shelves.”
More rewrites. All that time they’d spent together, fucking like animals, lounging around his penthouse in utterly satisfied silence or working in separate rooms.
He’d liked that they simply enjoyed being together without the pressure to entertain each other with small talk and witty repartee. He’d thought it meant that they were comfortable in the other’s company from the start.
But Olivia hadn’t seen it that way. He thought about how she’d playfully adopted his New York accent to say “alright” and had even cursed at his parent’s house. Like this was a game—like he was her game.
Eric gave him a pitying look and dipped his chin to say, “Listen, I went through an old money phase before the bad boy one myself. They love to play with people who didn’t grow up like them. They’ll party with us and sleep with us, but when it’s time to settle down, they marry each other—almost no exceptions. They’re all sort of living embodiments of that song, ‘Common People,’ by Pulp. Olivia doesn’t look or necessarily act like them, but at the end of the day—well, there’s a reason we’re all assigned The Great Gatsby in high school, right? It’s a warning.”
Yeah…yeah, Phantom had been assigned that novel in Junior English Lit. He’d gotten an A+ on the paper. And he didn’t know that song, but instead of trying to hunt Olivia down, he went home in a daze and asked his home device to play it.
And as he listened to some English guy wail about the rich girl who’d treated him like a joke, he fully understood.
He’d loved her. He’d loved her with all his fucking heart. But he’d been nothing but a joyride to her—one she hadn’t felt like getting off back in February—not until she got sick of him.
He’d always thought he wasn’t good enough for her, and she agreed. That was why she never called him out on his foul language. That was why she never tried to change him. Because she’d never planned to stay.
