Page 78 of Ruined Vows

I thumb in:

ME: Of course I forgive you.

And then,

ME: I hope your dad didn’t take it too hard on you.

DREW: At least I’m still in one piece.

DREW: Mostly.

I stare down at the screen, not knowing what to text in return. There’s a script we usually play out.

My gut still clenches like it always does when I know his father has hurt him. Back in high school, I’d reach across the gear shift and grab his hand.We’ll run away from here. As soon as we’re old enough, we’ll run away from here, and you’ll never have to see that man again.

But then we got older and neither of us ran.

Well, I ran as far as the other side of Dallas, but I still came home at night to the apartment my mommy was paying for. Drew lived in the dorms, sure, but after he graduated, he went right back to work with his father. The house he bought after graduation is only a five-minute drive from his father’s Dallas district office.

I know the pressure he was under the entire time. I know he felt like he had no choice. I know because I felt the same way.

But just when I felt like I was going to buckle under the pressure, Ididmake a choice. Or I tried to, anyway.

And now it feels like there’s this vacuum pressure trying to suck me back in to that old suffocating life.

The phone in my hand buzzes.

DREW: Hey U still there

ME: I’m here

DREW: I never asked where you’re living now

DREW: Can I come by

DREW: I wanna talk

DREW: Like we used 2

I breathe out hard. My whole life, all I wanted was Drew Underwood to pay attention to me. The day he proposed, I told myself it was a dream come true. Even when he immediately followed it up by making sure I understood it wouldn’t be a monogamous arrangement.

That’s just so nineteenth-century, he said at the time.It’s just not realistic. I think it’s better if we don’t lie to each other or have to sneak around. You know, like high school. I always loved being able to come home to you at the end of the night.

I hadn’t thought he was capable of breaking my heart anymore after graduation, but there it was. He wanted it to go back to how it was in high school. When I was a shell of a person. When he was my world, and I was… barely alive.

Then he slid the ring on my finger, gave me a perfunctory kiss on the lips, and ran off to whatever or whoever was next in his packed, exciting life.

ME: Sorry. Not at home

DREW: Oh. Where is now?

DREW: Maybe I can come by tomorrow?

I take several short breaths, feeling trapped. I don’t want him coming by the hotel with Isaak around. What am I going to do? Tell my lover I need to go down to the lobby to chat with my fiancé?

Good god, how is this my life? I’m supposed to be boring. I’m supposed to be the professor who was old before she was ever young.

“Hey. Everything okay?” Anna asks.

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