Page 29 of Come Fly with Me

I made my own bed, and now I have to lie in it, but that doesn’t mean I don’t get to advocate for change.

This is not how I thought my evening was going to play out. I headed down to the bar to psych myself up to knock on Jake’s door and finally do what we’ve both wanted since the day we met. But after my encounter with Theo, things have gone to shit.

There’s no way I’m in any mood to get back to the way I used to be, and with the way I’m feeling right now, it would be meaningless sex just to make me numb.

I shove my keycard into the door and tromp over to the bed, falling back onto it and wondering if I’ll even be able to sleep. My mistrust in the past is making it hard to see the future, but I can’t seem to let go.

I pick up the phone and get the front desk, a woman’s friendly but tired voice greeting me.

“Can I have Jake Campbell’s room, please?” I ask, and the woman connects me, the phone ringing.

I look at the clock on the nightstand, and while it’s not late, we have been back in our rooms for a while now. On the fourth ring, and just as I’m about to hang up, Jake’s voice comes on the line.

“Hello.”

As soon as I hear it, a strange calmness comes over me, my chest growing lighter, his voice like warm bathwater, soothing and comforting.

“Promise me you’re not just interested in me because of my past.”

He doesn’t ask who it is, just responds with, “We aren’t defined by our past.”

“I feel like I am,” I respond, being more open with him than I have been with anyone in years.

“You focus on it. You’re allowing it and the regret you feel to control you, but if you just look at it as something that happened in your life, which is all it really is, you’ll get over it.”

“You make it sound so simple.”

His words hold weight. I’ve let everyone else define who I am by what I’ve done; the girl who takes the path less traveled, who owns her sexuality and stands out in a career crowded with men. People are scared by what is different. They judge and shame and assume.

“It is simple. Do you think I thought about the number of men you’ve been with as we climbed that bridge together? Do you think I questioned how many men have pressed their lips to your neck when I did the same outside your hotel room?”

“Did you?” I ask, my words quiet, but still somehow screaming from inside my head, loud and startling.

“All I thought about was being the last. The last guy to touch your body, to be inside your head, to heal your heart, to foster what is amazing about you; all the things you can’t see.”

I fall instantly silent, again stunned by Jake’s words and his ability to make me view my life as something more than a string of one-night stands.

“I got hit on at the bar tonight,” I admit, my words coming out in a rush as if telling someone makes them more real.

“You went to the bar?” I hear him suck in a hard breath, a sharp intake of air that pushes his jealousy to the forefront.

“I was…I was trying to find the courage to knock on your door, but it went south really fast.”

He laughs a little and I can picture his perfect jawline and his striking green eyes that wrinkle up at the corners when he laughs.

“You really don’t have any idea, do you?”

“What do you mean?”

“It’s me who needs the courage because when you finally say yes, you’re going to break me.”

I struggle with what to say because with every word he says, I feel like he could break me too.

“Tell me something no one knows about you,” he prompts, the silence now broken, but his words forever etched into my brain. I love the way he can take something serious, something so defining and then change the subject to something that will take us down a different path.

“Um…I don’t have a ton of secrets,” I reply, stalling for time as I’m hit with the realization that even my ex-husband Trent never knew much about me. Sharing my life means people know my weaknesses. I avoid it at all costs.

“You’re a liar.” But his words aren’t meant cruelly, just said definitively like he knows I’ve buried things. There’s an ease in talking to him and I suddenly want to admit all my deepest secrets.

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