Page 94 of Shifting Gears

I could never have prepared myself for what happened next.

My phone blew up.

Message after message flooded through.

Missed call.

Rosalie

AJ, answer your phone!

Don’t go!

Missed call.

Missed call.

Rosalie

You can’t do this! Not after everything we’ve been through! Please, just answer the phone, babe!

Please, please come back. We can talk about everything. I promise if I did something wrong, I can fix it. I love you.

The ones right after I had left were as I expected. She’d been devastated, confused, angry. She didn’t know why I’d left, continuously saying how I could just tell her the truth about what happened and she would understand. To please respond to her. Fuck, the ones where she pleaded with me to reply hit even harder.

I was hesitant to keep scrolling past those first messages.

What if she got over me and messaged me about how happy she was that I’d left her? How much better off she was without me? How she wishes I’d done it sooner? I’m not ready to hear shit like that from her.

“This was a mistake,” I said as I locked my phone and shoved it into my hoodie pocket.

Sydney reached out and grabbed my arm.

“What did she say?” she asked, her voice soft.

“It’s not what she said; it’s what she might say,” I said. I had just admitted one of my biggest fears out loud. Not being loved by the woman I loved anymore.

Sydney gently squeezed my hand. She gave me a look that showed that she understood, but she glanced down at my pocket and back.

“You’ll never know if you don’t look. And not knowing, so far, hasn’t really been working out for you. I know it might be hard, but do it for you, AJ,” she said with a small smile.

I know she’s right. It’s just … she can’t still be into me. She’s got a new guy, and she has been with him for a long time now. I bet she hasn’t even messaged me for months.

But it was eating away at me. I couldn’t stop thinking about her being with another man.

Is he treating her the way she deserves? Does he know that she loves the color blue? Does she moan with him the same way she did with me as he rubs his hands down her body? Do his lips cut her off when she gets louder as she gets closer to an orgasm? Does she wake up every day in his arms, in our bed?

“God dammit!” I growled as I yanked my phone from my pocket again.

Sydney let her hand drop, and she stood up, walking over to the edge of the koi pond as I unlocked my phone once more.

I scrolled down to the next message. More begging me to come home and to answer her. That was when there was the first gap between messages.

Months had passed, and the one that flashed on my screen broke something in me to read. I read it in chunks. Each time I had to look away, I felt like breaking something or breaking down.

Rosalie

AJ, tell me why! Tell me why you really left. Please? Because you need to tell me how I’m supposed to move on with my life without you, AJ, when you are the one who highlighted so much of what I loved in life.

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