Page 10 of Twisted Promise

Chapter Three

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Anya

What was she doing?

That question echoed in her mind long after she came back from the store with Alessio. Dinner passed in a blur. When she met the rest of the participants, the polyamorous trio’s dynamic stuck in her mind.

Despite their frequent bickering, the three of them seemed content with one another. They argued every two minutes, from grievances over one partner receiving too much attention to complaints about an unwiped sink. Yet, stubbornly, they held hands through their quarrels and ate with their non-dominant hands.

When she watched them, Alessio watched her. His gaze stalked her with the stealth of an evolving panther. He hadn’t tried to hide his unnerving staring and was not ashamed of it, even after Meryl called him out. He gave her the shortest span of his attention with a simple blink of his eyes, and even Anya felt the boredom that emitted from his indifferent composure.

Meryl said she had never felt so offended in her life despite receiving thousands of hate messages on her socials.

The only woman in the trio partnership asked Anya about her deal with Alessio.

Rebuttal never left her mouth as quickly as that one did. The temperature seemed to have dropped several degrees when she said that, and she saw the tightened scowl on his face,knowing he was not pleased with her hastiness to deny whatever happened between them.

Her mind and heart admitted they would never let go of Alessio. She had come to terms with it a long time ago, but the irrational part of her soul encouraged the temptation to give in and fall into his arms.

If she had gone to Meryl for advice, she would’ve told her to toss that man into the gutter and dragged her on a shopping spree to clear her mind. Her friend never liked Alessio even before they started dating; she said he looked like a volatile egoist. But Meryl was cordial for the sake of Anya, so she thought nothing of it until now.

Everyone finished dinner with small talk, a requirement from the director to force them to mingle in a salad bowl. There was no dramatic reveal of anyone’s secret or instant attraction toward someone easy on the eye.

The trio was a solid triangle, Meryl dreaded her estranged husband’s impending arrival, and Alessio and Anya were their own mess of misaligned stances on where they stood with each other.

This clearly wasn’t what the director had hoped for.

He likely wanted drama, cheating, fistfights, and vicious fights.

Or he was going for heart-wrenching confessions, raw emotions, and enough tears to open backup tissues.

Either way, Anya planned to lie low and be a piece of wallpaper. If she could make it through the show, she’d take a much-needed vacation to ease her mind from Alessio.

It nearly broke her the first time she saw him, and it certainly would need more to rip him from her heart again. He lingered like a phantom in her heart, never truly gone.

He was an addiction, compulsively reminiscing what she could’ve and should’ve owned. He was hers, and he could still be hers. Alessio didn’t hide it, and they both knew from the moment he saw her in the hall.

Anya smacked her forehead several times and shook her head, hurling the idea of reconciliation out the window.

She went to her last resort, an advice forum, and signed in to her account. She had been using it for years, and it was practically a map of her life.

Thankfully, everything was anonymous. Commenters had no usernames, only posters were assigned a set of characters as their account ID, and photos of people and identifiable places were heavily regulated.

Anya loved the privacy and anonymity it gave her to spill her thoughts into the void with no fear of judgment.

Oddly enough, she had a lot of lurkers follow her account. She never thought her life was that interesting.

She opened a new thread, typed her concern into the title, and then submitted the post. Comments flooded in instantly, as though everyone had been waiting for her to share the latest minor inconvenience of her life.

THREAD: I think my ex-boyfriend still likes me. How do I get him not to?

1: OP

A good ex is as if he never existed. We work together now, and I try to keep it professional. But he has a marvelousandmenacing face, so it’s hard to act like an average Doe.

2

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