Page 54 of His Bittersweet Regret

My thoughts drifted to Jimmy’s buddy, the one who asked my Opal out on a date. Could I even bear the thought of another man stepping in and playing dad to my kid? No, not really. That was mostly because I think I’d rather die than ever have to see Opal in the arms of another man. That’s when the rest of what she’d admitted hit me.

“Someone showed you pictures of me out on dates?”

“That’s what you took from everything I had to say?” She sassed.

I shook my head. “No, I was hung up on the fact that you said you didn’t want me anymore, but I just realized you also said someone was sending you pictures. Who? Who would do that?”

She rolled her eyes. “As if you don’t already know.” She must have seen the question in my eyes, because my girl blew out a frustrated breath and reached over to where she’d set her phone down. “I never deleted any of them. I needed the images, just in case I ever forgot exactly how much I hate you now.”

She handed the phone to me, after pulling up a string of texts. The name of the person texting her was ‘The Biggest Asshole to Ever Breathe’. I looked and the first image was of me and Tandra, the little pixie girl that I met at the party before I left Opal. Jesus. She knew then. She knew that the woman from the party was part of the reason I’d left. My interest in her had been the thing that sealed my decision. If I could be that intrigued by another woman, then I was doomed to repeat my father’s mistakes.

“Nothing ever happened between us,” I explained as I stared at the picture. Opal scoffed again, something that seemed to be a new habit when we spoke these days. It was another one of the changes I had brought about in her. A change that I absolutely hated.

“Sure. You just left me because you felt something more for her at that party. Nothing happened between you two, though.” She rolled her eyes as her accusation settled in with its heavy weight, right on the middle of my chest.

“Nothing. Never even kissed her. When we went out on our date, it didn’t even last through the meal. She said some shitty things, and I replied in kind. That was the end of it.”

“Oh, so you left me for a chance to date her and it wasn’t worth it? Congrats!” Her sarcasm hit harder than it normally would because I could damn near taste the anguish hiding behind those words.

I continued to scroll and saw as at least one picture from every one of my dates showed up on Opal’s phone in this string of one-sided texts. The last one was of me with my hands on a woman’s breast as we made out in the apartment I shared with the twins. I had to look really hard to see where the picture might have been taken from, as there hadn’t been anyone home that night. It was the one time I made out with anyone else. Well, before I hate-fucked Monica.

“That was when I blocked his number,” she admitted.

“Who?”

Her eyes met mine, and I could see her trying to find some truth in mine that I didn’t really know.

“Cramer.”

“That son of a bitch,” I muttered. He was going to get what was coming to him, and soon.

“Why are you angry with him for showing me what you were up to?”

I snapped my attention back to Opal for a moment. “He caused you more pain than was necessary.”

“No, he didn’t. You did that. He wasn’t the one with those women. And if he had been, I wouldn’t have cared. It was you who was with them. All of them. He just showed me the truth of what was happening.”

“You just said you had to block him because it was too painful to see that truth, Opal.”

“Yeah, Marsh. It became a bit too painful when I saw you with your hand on another woman’s breast, your mouth on her skin.”

Anger boiled inside me. Not just at Cramer for making Opal have to witness my idiocy first hand, but at myself for being such a fucking fool.

“I’m sorry,” it was all I could say; even as I knew it would never be enough.

She didn’t respond, but I deleted the entire string of texts between her and Cramer so that she wouldn’t have those images to look at anymore. If she was able to look back and see them, she would have more reason to stay angry and there would be less chance she’d ever forgive me.

“I can never unsee those pictures or Monica delivering your underwear to you on the street in her robe.” She shrugged her shoulders. “You can delete the pictures, just like you did the ones of our relationship, but you can’t delete the memories that are already there.”

I knew that.

There was no denying I’d fucked up beyond repair. That didn’t mean I was going to give up. Not on her. Not on us one day being a family. Not on anything.

We sat in silence for a long time. Internally, I was going back over damn near every memory we shared together, trying to figure out how I had gotten to the point where I was able to accept a break away from her. Things had been kind of status quo with us for a while, but we were still content. Happy even. I allowed my fears of ending up like my father and the taunts from the people close to me to make me feel like there was something missing when truthfully, I had everything.

‘Had’ being the operative word. Opal would barely look at me these days and only tolerated my presence because we were having a baby. ‘Together’ should have been tacked on the end of that sentence, but it was more like we were having a baby that would tie us in some way, but we would be raising him separately. There was no ‘together’ involved in her future plans anymore. That was entirely my fault.

“How are you feeling?” I finally asked. It was high time I started thinking about her and our child, rather than what I wanted or needed. They had to come first because nothing about what I’d already put us through had been about her or them. It had all been about me and what I thought I needed in order to prove that I’d never become my dad. The crazy thing is, looking back, what I did was far worse than what my father put Mom through.

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