Page 63 of Love's a Glitch
I stood so forcefully the chair knocked the table and rattled the silverware and glasses. My head continued to shake, the words pouring from my mouth with reckless abandon. “Looks like your friends were right. I can’t give you what you want—not with you moving the damn line all the time.”
“All the time? Try once. But that’s not the issue here, and we both know it.” Ellie’s chin quivered, and her legs trembled as she pushed to her feet. Resolve crept into her posture, leaving her as rigid and unyielding as I’d failed to see she would be in the end. “You don’t think I’m worth the effort to try—just say it.”
My teeth snapped together, the line of my jaw so rigid it ached. I wasn’t going to be her puppet any more than I was going to let my parents pull my strings. “I’m not surewhyI even tried, that’s for damn sure. Guess we don’t need to have a big discussion after all—it’s a relief, honestly. Day after tomorrow, I’ll be leaving on a plane, and I sure as hell won’t be in any rush to come back.”
“Just like that?” she asked.
“Just like that.”
32
Ellie
Over the past week, I’d been sad, mad, filled with grief, resentment, and regret. Why wasn’t I enough? Why did I always choose the wrong men to pour my love into? Men who so easily walked away without ever looking back?
I’d thought I’d been heartbroken before, but it’d never been to the point that every beat of my mangled heart churned oxidized misery through my veins instead of life-giving blood. Dottie had cuddled up in bed with me and licked the tears off my cheeks, thrilled to have me sharing her same sleep schedule where we alternated between the bed and the couch to snooze the day away.
I’d spent Sunday night scraping bottom—both the bottom of a carton of rocky road ice cream and the bottom of a bottle of tequila. While buzzed on sugar and booze, eerily similar to when I’d texted Dillon those pictures and desperate texts, I’d picked up my phone, tapped out a lengthy message to Luke about how much he’d hurt me, and how I wished I could say I didn’t miss him, but unlike his emotionally stunted ass, I could express my feelings.
But I’d learned my lesson and deleted the entire thing before my cat or I could hit send—no more sending messages that’d later regret.
From there, I dabbled in pessimism. I redefined “hope” as the thing that lulled you into a false security that what you most wished for would come true, and declared “love” a bullshit emotion that caused you to experience profound and intense affection toward a person, even if they didn’t return those feelings, which was also bullshit.
Monday I’d called in sick, ignoring my boss’s blatant skepticism, along with the email she’d sent about my next project that I could work on from home.
Truth was, it didn’t matter what she thought of my condition. Iwassick. Sick that I’d made the same mistake with Luke as I always did. At the tiniest bit of shown interest, I’d abandoned my redating efforts to focus on a guy who fell even shorter on the commitment scale than most of my exes. Sick over repeating the same pattern again and again and wondering if I was destined to continue doing so.
That night, Penny and Cat had shown up to threaten bodily harm to Luke and attempt to cheer me up.
“I’d told him that people needed to hear that you cared about them,” I’d sobbed as I mainlined a tube of cookie dough—yeah, I’d abandoned silly things like cooking stuff or plates, along with changing out of my pajamas. “And in the end, it didn’t matter. I guess because he didn’t care.”
“I’m sure that’s not true,” Penny said, taking the tube of cookie dough, not to eat some as I’d assumed, but to place out of my reach, and how dare she? “He cared. It was written across every line of his face.”
“He just didn’t have the balls to say it or do anything about it, and that makeshimthe loser,” Cat added. She snagged the dessert that threatened to give us all salmonella and helped herself. “Make that double loser, because he lost you.”
I’d nodded, wishing insulting Luke had made me feel better.
It hadn’t.
How I could feel so numb and experience so much agony at the same time was one of those crappy mysteries of the universe.
On Tuesday, I opened the email from my boss and saw that it was for a toilet paper company. Like Charles L. Davis, they requested plain and simple—“nothing like those creepy Charmin bears”—and my creative soul literally withered into a clump of brown crunchy leaves.
By Wednesday, my boss threatened to fire me if I didn’t bring in a doctor’s note.
Thursday, I called Marge and quit. Not because I’d lost my will to design and needed the time to mope, but because I needed a change. While it’d crushed me that Luke hadn’t included me in his dreams, his resolve to make his come true was admirable—the stupid jerk. I supposed I should call him and thank him for forcing me to ponder what I truly wanted out of life. Not that I would, and I idly wondered if he’d kept the same number.
Through the sting, I even felt a spark of goodwill that the job he’d left me behind for would turn out to be everything he hoped it’d be. Like, I wouldn’t mind if he fell and broke his legafterthe photoshoot, so he’d experience an ounce of the pain he’d caused me. But one day in the distant future, I’d like to open up aNational Geographic, study the beautiful pictures, and see Luke’s name attached.
Because damn it, I was a person full of love. I loved big and hard, and while it’d meant getting hurt over and over—and, like, over and fucking over again—it was who I was. For years I’d been searching for a man to love me for me, when I’d fallen short in doing the same.
Over the following week, after brewing enough coffee to fuel a tiny country, I bet everything I had on myself and leapt. Safety nets were great for physical bodies, but souls didn’t require anything as insignificant as netting. They were made to soar, and so I stopped holding back and let mine fly.
I updated my personal website and portfolio, and began advertising my services. Technology had steamrolled me in the past, so I didn’t feel the least bit bad about making it my bitch.
By the end of my first official week of being self-employed, I had two new clients and a world of possibility stretched out in front of me.
And only in the quietest of hours did I miss the man with the scruffy face, blue eyes, and the kind of laugh that felt like home.
