Page 43 of Ghosted By Texas

Clea tried to make me feel better by telling me the story about her bad Thai food incident and shitting herself in front of Houston. It worked to take my mind off my own sorrow for a bit and the way she told her own story made me laugh so hard my stomach was in stitches but the time I got everything back under control.

“I’m sorry. At least Houston was understanding and also sick, so he really knew what you were going through.”

“Yeah, there is that.” She giggled and then pulled me into that hug I’d been dreading. “I’m sorry that you don’t have that, too. I know you had hoped…”

Her response was bad enough that I was glad I hadn’t told her the whole story. I couldn’t handle Clea crying with me over a man who only set out to hurt me time and again, thanks to his too-close ties to his best friend.

“Hope is a bitch that I wish I could meet one day, just so I could punch her in the face,” I admitted. Violent? Yes. I considered it a necessary form of therapy to give Hope a face that looked a lot like Jordan’s and then mentally punch it until it pancaked into a flat, blob of disgusting goo to match her personality.

“Remind me to screen new people for you from now on, just in case.”

“You know what I mean.” The breath I let out felt like it might be my last. My body actually ached with it as if everything might fall apart and fly away into nothing. I felt like me being happy with Austin looked like those sunflowers in the immersive display we saw the night before. Being without him was to look at a poster copy of the original painting. It was still okay to see but lacked the luster and inspiration of the other. How in the hell was I supposed to go back to the life I was living before he barged in and demanded another shot from me?

“Maybe it’s time to give up on him completely. I know you’ve dated, but there hasn’t been anyone serious since Austin.” She was talking about since the Austin incident of six years ago, not the most recent one. Obviously, since that only ended the night before. No, it was this morning. Same day. It hadn’t even been twenty-four hours.

“I don’t know, Clea. Maybe, I’m meant to be alone.”

“No one is meant to be alone for life, Becs. Just because one guy was a complete tool and didn’t know how to drop his childhood bestie, fuck buddy, or whatever the hell she is to him, that doesn’t mean the rest of them are like that.”

Not a single molecule in my body wanted to find out if there was a better man out there for me. Not because I was holding out hope that Austin would come through for me this time, but because I would never put myself through this potential heartache again. Never.

Go to Chapter 12 Bonus Scene

After my non-lunch, lunch date with Clea, I went back home to my apartment and sat there on the couch staring at the wall. It was the weekend. I’d planned to spend the bulk of it with Austin before everything imploded. Saying that we imploded sounded better than intimating we’d blown up, because there hadn’t been any explosive charge from either of us to end everything. Our relationship just quietly ripped itself apart from the inside out while I sat there in the dark literally and figuratively.

He hadn’t ever called or even texted me back to check in with me, give me a head’s up about what was going on in his mind, or with Jordan. There was nothing. The nothing made the ache grow by the minute. I always thought people who needed closure were stupid, but having been in a relationship, twice now, where closure was never granted, I understood. If someone died, at least you knew there was a reason for that finality. If they broke up with you, but didn’t give a reason, you at least had the fact that they told you it was over. The not knowing killed. The fact that Dallas had sent Clea to check on me was a bitter pill to swallow because he knew what happened, which meant that Austin spoke to someone about it. That someone just wasn’t me.

Whoever the asshole was who came up with the concept for the stages of grief was an idiot. I cycled through the stages at least twice before lunchtime and a few more times before the dinner that I never ate.

“How could you do this to me again?” I screamed at my walls when it all became too much to deal with. He wasn’t there for me to yell at, and as much as I wanted to go to his house and scream that in his face, I couldn’t handle seeing him cozying up to Jordan in the place they’d apparently built together.

And wasn’t that just a kick to the pants too? How could he take me there? How could he parade me around the house he’d made with her, the home they’d made together. He made love to me in the bed they’d probably shared hundreds of times, and that thought sent me running from the couch to the bathroom again. I really should have been smart and put a puke bucket by the couch.

The next morning started with my wearing Austin’s shirt. The same one I’d worn when I ran out of his house. It smelled like him, and I wasn’t ready to give that up just yet. In fact, his beautifully dark and spicy scent sent me spiraling and I fired off another text.

Becs: We promised we wouldn’t end up this way again. Please, talk to me. I don’t know what happened between you and Jordan after I left, but I at least deserve to hear it from you instead of sitting here with my imagination.

I hit send before I could chicken out. Then, regret hit, and I threw my phone as far from me as possible. Granted, that wasn’t very far considering the size of my apartment, and I was lucky that the damn thing hadn’t broken.

By lunchtime, the shirt came off and my old roommate’s sweats were put on instead. Fuck Austin. Fuck his shirt. His scent. Fuck everything about him!

I cried after that, for about an hour, before I finally gave in and went to eat something because even in my grief and rage driven depression, I knew that sustenance was necessary to survival. There was only a blip of a moment where survival wasn’t an option because it hurt too much, but that was quickly bashed away because no man was worth my life. Not even Austin. Especially not Austin.

My entire Sunday was more of the same back and forth between raging out at an imaginary Mr. Fucking Texas, because we were back to that, since he’d proven that the more grown-up version of Austin Mercer hadn’t been any better after all. Then, I would go back to crying jags that left my face swollen, eyes puffy, and my head pounding. The worst part was, I couldn’t even drown myself in a bottle of tequila because I’d been there and done that the last time we went through a breakup where I wasn’t even worth a conversation to end things.

No amount of convincing myself that he wasn’t worth all my emotional outbursts helped either. You can’t reason with a broken heart when it needs to cry, scream, and purge the love from its system.

My phone still sat across the room where I’d thrown it the day before. The battery died at some point but charging it hadn’t been an option because it meant obsessing over him calling or texting to put me out of my misery. Deep down inside, I knew that wasn’t going to happen, so I left the damn thing where I’d thrown it.

On Monday, I emailed in sick to work from my laptop. It was the first time in all the years I’d worked there that I did so. If anyone deserved a sick day, it was me. Guilt riddled me because I felt like me missing a day was a disappointment to the kids who enjoyed my class and saw it as their only escape from the boring classes that were always deemed more important. I knew how they felt, because I’d once been them and my art class was the one thing that got me through the rest of the day.

Still, this Becs was no good for them. They were better off missing me for a day than dealing with whatever version of me might show up to class. So, I continued to sulk right up until someone knocked on my door that evening.

My stupid little heart got herself worked up that Austin had finally come to his senses and came to beg my forgiveness. My head knew better and was proven correct when Clea’s voice called out through the door.

“Becs, open up, or I’m using my key and I’ll feel really bad if you’re in there boning some hot dude instead of just feeling sorry for yourself!”

I heard the muffled sound of a male speaking before Clea’s voice came through again. “I don’t know whether that’s chivalrous or gross,” she said. It must have been my neighbor who talked to her. He was a semi-decent looking pervert, but one who never took things too far, thankfully.

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