Page 68 of The Attraction File

“What?”

“Never mind, just a theory I have about time travel. I get it, it’s not easy to tell people how you feel. You fear they won’t care. Or they’ll tell you to move on and get over it.” Like my brother. Every time I bring up Damien, he shuts me down. I guess nothing ever affects Mr. Perfect.

I shook my head before I continued. “But you don’t have to worry about that with me. It’s not so easy to pretend like nothing happened.”

I knew what had happened to Evaleen when she was young and lived with her mom, but I never realized how men had treated her after that. How could I have been so naïve? Here I was unhappy that women only saw me as one thing because of my looks, yet I assumed because of Evaleen’s beauty that she had it easy with men. I was a hypocrite.

“Thank you, Edgar. For being so nice to me last night. Letting me experience something I thought I would never get to feel.” She placed her hand on mine. “I have read and written enough books to realize that the happily ever after isn’t always real. I get that. My mom never got her happily ever after, and I think that may be my future too.”

I shook my head about to correct her. To explain that not all men are selfish. That there are some men out there who would climb to the moon and back for someone like her. But Evaleen didn’t give me the chance.

“I know what you’re going to say, Edgar, and you can save it. This is me. That’s it. I don’t secretly save kittens riddled with cancer. I’m not fun and quirky like Drake over there.” She pointed across the aisle at a snoring Morgana who was drooling on Henrik’s shoulder.

“I fire people. I’m the person people contact when the bad stuff needs to happen, when others are too scared to rip the bandage away. And you know what?”

“What?”

She sighed. “That’s okay. I don’t mind doing that stuff because it needs to be done. I don’t like hurting people, firing them, but it doesn’t keep me awake at night. People complain about the hardships in life but do they expect it to be full of rainbows? Life is hard, and unless you toughen up and keep moving it will beat you down. I refuse to let anyone beat me down.”

I wanted to give her every rainbow I could find.

Evaleen gave out a bitter laugh. “I’m not the fun one, the pretty one, the sweet one, and even with being a romance writer, I’m not even the sexy one. So, yeah, I get that there will probably be no happily ever after for me. I’ve got issues with men, with sex, and they don’t seem to be going away just like that.” Evaleen snapped her fingers.

I closed my eyes and sat back in my seat. Everything I knew about Evaleen. Every detail written down about her all those years ago from Mr. Marks. What I had witnessed these past five years at Mimir. All of that was horseshit.

Everything Evaleen said made sense. That’s who she was. Not some wounded girl struggling to get by in life. She was broken.

Henrik called her bitter once, a few years ago, and I told him he was wrong. But maybe Henrik was right in a way.

Opening my eyes again, I turned my head to face Evaleen. “When you kicked me out of your place a few weeks ago, you said I didn’t know anything about you. You were right, I don’t.”

---