Page 11 of Keep Me In Your Heart

“God, I love you so much,” he adds. “I love you so fucking much.”

His voice is strained, groaning out the words as he thrusts into her. Suddenly I feel like I’m going to be sick. And I move without thinking.

I flip the plastic lid off of my coffee, watching the steam rise from the liquid. Then, I scream as I hurl it at his naked body. I watch with delight as it lands against his back, singeing his skin and making him squeal in pain.

“What the fuck!” he shouts, flailing onto the bed and rolling onto his back, his face twisted in fear.

Margot screams, quickly covering her body with a blanket and staring at me in horror.

“Sylvie?” she cries.

Aaron freezes and gapes at me as I stand in the doorway, glaring at them both with my jaw clenched tight in anger.

My eyes bore into Margot, my best friend, as she tries to catch her breath. For the first time today, my eyes brim with tears, but I don’t say a word. Not to either of them.

I just turn on my heel and barrel out of her apartment.

All I can think as I reach the door, rushing past Chuck and onto the street, is that I spent my last five dollars on that coffee. And while it was worth it, I have no fucking clue what I’m going to do now.

Chapter Four

Wallowing in self-pity doesn’t pay much. Or anything. Whenever you hit rock bottom, people love to say,There’s nowhere to go but up, but they don’t exactly specify when that will happen. Because I’ve been scraping the bottom of this barrel for two weeks now, and I’m not sure how much longer I’ll last.

Aaron moved out ten days ago. When he tried to come home that night with second-degree burns on his back and tears in his eyes, I threatened him with a kitchen knife. He called me a bitch, grabbed his phone charger, and left.

Margot tried to call me. She left me a seven-paragraph text message about how I’ve never been that great of a friend and somehow managed to pin this all on me, explaining how my never consoling her over her breakups led to her spreading her legs for my long-term boyfriend. I don’t know. I didn’t really read the whole thing, if I’m honest.

She did claim that they were in love and had been for a while. Maybesheshould have gone to Scotland with him. She could have chased around his ancestor’s bullshit for three weeks.

There’s been a red eviction notice on my door for the past three days, but I’ve been ignoring that too. I’m working on atheory that if I just ignore literally everything in my life, then the universe will just work itself out.

I mean, what are they going to do? Carry me out?

I’ve sold enough of Aaron’s shit to feed myself over the last two weeks but not enough to pay the rent. He took the really good stuff.

Lying on my couch, bored and depressed, I scroll through the pictures on my phone, deleting every single one of me and Aaron. They just feel like lies now. Why did he ever bother to look happy with me?

There’s a knock at the door that I ignore.

Ignore everything.

Nothing matters anyway.

I turn my attention back to my phone, discovering a dirty video Aaron and I made over a year ago on Halloween when he filmed me sucking his dick in my Alice in Wonderland costume. He was the Mad Hatter.

I won’t delete this one just yet…

“Ms. Devereaux,” a woman calls through the door, and I wrinkle my brow as I stare at it. There’s something familiar about the way she said my name. Melodic and enticing.

It reminds me of…

“My name is Anna Barclay. Are you home?”

Barclay?

“What the…?”

My voice trails as I climb off my sofa and walk silently toward the door. Without a sound, I squint through the peephole and see a well-dressed woman holding a manila envelope standing on my welcome mat.

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