Page 87 of Lovesick
“Can you fill a black hole?”
My nostrils flared with my effort to suppress my annoyance. His bitterness had only grown more concentrated over the past five years.
“Okay,” I drawled. “That’s fair, I guess. I just realized lately that I think I’ve been a little ... naive about romance. About love. I’m afraid that I’m too much like Mama, and I’m trying to not go down the path she did.”
“So what if you are?”
The question stopped me in my tracks.Then I have to halt my life, reevaluate my plans, and change absolutely everything about myself,I thought.I have to make sure I never do to JJ what Mama did to you. Or me.
I didn’t answer his question.
He tilted his head back, as if in thought, for a long stretch. Eventually, he said, “She was always in love with love. It seemed like she wanted an out whenever she realized it wasn’t easy.”
I ran my memories of Mama through that filter, and it fit.
“Okay.”
“That was Kat. Easy, fun, and spontaneous. That’s what she wanted. Whirlwind romance. To be swept off her feet. Prince Charming. That load of bull. She didn’t like responsibility, either,” he added, “which is why we lost electricity so much. You’d think romance would dictate she pay the bills on time.”
A fault the two of them had shared.
“Did she love you when you first met?”
“I don’t know.”
“Did you love her?”
“Sure.”
A bitter edge colored his flippant response. He didn’t like this conversation at all. Could I trust his responses? Was he telling me the truth?
“Why did you marry her?”
For a moment, I thought he’d end the call. His brow grew so heavy it nearly covered his eyes. Eventually, he said, “Because I think I did love her. I thought we could do anything together. At the time, it felt good.”
“And then?”
He scowled. “And then you’d have to ask Trevor how things ended between me and Kat.”
I blinked. “You knew about Trevor?”
“Of course I knew what was happening with Trevor,” he growled. “Didn’t take an idiot to figure it out. I let it go for a while because I assumed she’d get bored with him the same as she did with me. Since we had a child together, I thought she’d stay.”
“She did.”
“If you could call it that. The night she died? She told me she was going to leave me for him. That’s what we fought about.”
“I didn’t know that,” I murmured.
“Lovely, hopeless romantic, wasn’t she? More like a tornado. Kat destroyed everyone she touched. Not even you can deny that.”
More silence. Mama practically sang the ugly parts of love out of the shadows with her driving need to experience it. Tofindlove. She’d escaped from reality with romance, just like me. Then she broke all our hearts. Who might Dad have been without Mama? What if she hadn’t been so in love with love?
The lesson here was clear: Mama had destroyed all her relationships with her undying belief in romance.
And I would never be like her.
Cracks in my heart fractured what little strength I had left. What if I did the same thing to JJ? Would I turn him into a convict? A mess of a man who felt only bitterness? No, I’d never let that happen. Not to him. Not to me.
