Page 84 of Then You Happened
“We did.”
THE HOUSE IS SILENT, and my mind is preoccupied thinking of Jack.
Cleaning the kitchen table makes me think of him and what we did here last night.
Walking by the window and looking toward the stable has me wondering what he’s doing.
But there’s only so much picking up of the house I can do to avoid acknowledging the fact that I’m thinking way too much about a man who I shouldn’t be.
It was just sex.
Incredible sex, but just sex all the same.
I blame my turbulent emotions on the fact that I hadn’t had sex in over a year. Maybe a small part of it is because the only other person I’d slept with was Fletcher and that has me thinking about it—about him—more than I should be.
Now that I’m telling myself not to think about him, I open my laptop and enter Jack Sutton in the search engine to find out more information on him. The same things that I found when I originally searched for him after he submitted the resume come up, but I’m looking for information about him through a different set of eyes.
I want to know more about him, not just what skills he can bring to the table.
A LinkedIn profile that seems to have gone dormant since it says nothing about the real estate work he told me he did. There is no social media besides a private Facebook account that shows nothing other than his profile picture—an old one, at that.
There seems to be a million Jack Suttons in the world, but I can’t find a single thing useful about the one I want.
“Well, shit,” I mutter before navigating over to my old photography website. One that has about as many cobwebs on it as Jack’s LinkedIn page. I flick through the old images of my portfolio, critiquing them even though years have passed.
“How you view the world through a lens should be shared.”
I shove away the nagging thought and close my laptop to reinforce how much I don’t need to think about it and pick up my book. But after reading the same page ten times and having no clue what it says, I close the book and stare out the window, allowing my preoccupied mind to wander.
Thoughts of the past and the future merge together. Worries about this new Steely prospect Jack has worked on when I had no clue he was even doing it. If I sell the foals I have when they are born, can I stretch those funds out long enough to last the next eleven to twelve months until the new batch of foals Steely wants are born?
How is that even possible when I already have collectors breathing down my neck? When I have Jack’s ridiculous salary, which he’s more than earning, to pay.
Ruby.
She has to be that bridge for me.
The thought pains me considering she brought me so much hope, but now hope is coming in other forms.
I press my fingers to my eyes and just hold them there for a few minutes and know that nothing is definite. Of all people, I know that.
How am I going to hold on long enough to make this work?
“Next time you won’t give up everything you love for someone else.”
The immediate anger I usually feel when I remember what Fletcher had written isn’t as strong this time. The emotions don’t feel as raw.
“How you view the world through a lens should be shared.”
Jack’s comment rings so loudly that it’s screaming at me.
Click.
On reflex, I head to my studio and push the door open without giving myself a chance to think this through.
The disaster is still there—the shredded photos of a life I don’t even remember living but have the emotional scars to show that I did are strewn everywhere, but there is so much more under it.
