What the fucking fuck was wrong with me?
Her gaze lifted my way, and I almost trampled Cassidy in my frenzy to duck behind the column.
“What are you doing?” Cassidy hissed.
“Damn it, I don’t know,” I groaned, sinking to my ass. A tsunami of agony washed over me, but fucking hell, how many times had I sworn to her the exact words, “I would take this all away from you if I could, babe”? And now, at the first chance to make that impossibility a reality, I was fighting with her friends and family to give all the misery back to her.
Fuck. That.
She’d been through enough.
She’d been through enough ten times over.
It would kill me. It would be the hardest thing I ever had to do. But I loved that woman so damn much that somehow, someway, I was going to have to figure out how to let her go.
I could hear her talking to Mark and Aaron. Jealousy blistered my skin as the three of them laughed. Cassidy sat down on the ground beside me as I buried my face in my hands and wished I could block out the sounds of happiness on the other side of the column as much as I wished I could absorb them.
Both were impossible. Just like moving on with my life without her would be.
After what felt like a lifetime, I heard a car door shut, slicing their voices into silence.
And then she was gone.
Again.
Pain seared through me, as if every single bone in my body had been crushed, because I was certain, this time, Sally—Remi, my soulmate—was never coming back.
Bowen
“Bowen?” Remi called, not bothering to knock and pleasing me to no end that we’d reached that level of casual comfort.
My head snapped up from the red pepper I was slicing, my brows drawn as I looked at my watch. She was fifteen minutes early, which for Remi was actually half an hour ahead of schedule, which also meant there was a good chance the Earth had fallen off its axis.
Regardless, I called out, “In here, babe. Dogs are outside.”
I smiled as she walked through the living room, her blond hair adorably disheveled and her teal fitted dress wrinkled in the front.
“Rough day? What happened?” I asked.
“Half a bottle of wine, an orgasm, and a credit card.”
She’d been there three seconds and my eyebrows were getting a full workout as they shot up my forehead. “I’m sorry. What?”
“Less talking and more helping me hide the evidence.”
I dropped the knife onto the cutting board and made my way around the counter to her. “You do know the whole bank heist thing before our first date was a joke, right?”
“Of course. Nerds never fare well in prison.”
I gave her my best scowl, but it held no heat. Fuck, I loved that woman.
“I need to borrow your garage for a few days.” Pausing, she slanted her head to one side. “Okay, maybe a few weeks. Just until things settle down.” She walked through the dining room and opened the garage door, slapping her hand against the wall until she found the button. With a low hum, the motor slid the exterior door open, the late afternoon sun driving out the darkness.
Abandoning dinner prep, I followed her out. With the exception of my truck, I didn’t keep much out there, so I had more than enough space for whatever she needed. Though I was still curious about the whole wine, orgasm, and credit card thing.
She’d correctly predicted my answer, something I liked a hell of a lot too, by already having backed her car up to the edge of the garage and opened the tailgate. Two long rectangular boxes almost as big as she was filled the back of her SUV.
“What are those?” I asked.
“Well, assuming I didn’t break anything while wrestling them into my car before Mark and Aaron came home and saw them sitting on the front porch”—she patted the top of the boxes—“this is the finest garden table you can buy off an Instagram ad from the comfort of your Sirfriend’s bed at one in the morning.”
There were so many parts of her statement requiring elaboration, but there was only one that made my stomach sink.
With Sally, insomnia had always been how it started. After a suicide attempt, they’d tweak her meds and add more intensive therapy. For a few weeks, she’d seem better. Hope would flood my veins that maybe we’d finally found the right combination to ease her pain. She’d kiss me like she meant it again. Make love to me like she couldn’t get enough. And then at night, she’d lie beside me wide awake while I slept—sated and spent—a vortex of agony devouring her even as I held her in my arms.
She’d go days without sleeping, her mind ravaging her from the inside out. Not long after that, she’d quit eating. Her only calories became whatever alcohol she could get her hands on. She’d never been an alcoholic, at least not in the traditional sense, but it was the only drug she could find to numb the pain. If experience told me anything, I had three weeks after the insomnia started before the darkness swallowed her all over again.
