Page 40 of How to Say I Do
God, that had been myhoneymoon. I still had my wedding tux crumpled up in the gift shop bag I was using as luggage.
My throat squeezed. My lungs twisted like someone was wringing the air out of my body. My stomach lurched, and I spun and dropped to my knees as my bile rose. I hadn’t eaten since yesterday—since Liam and Savannah’s wedding—and there was nothing for my stomach to rage over. Still, I dry-heaved, and when I was done, I rested my cheek on the toilet seat, gasping stomach-acid fumes.
Ten days ago, I’d been engaged.
A week ago, I’d glared a cowboy down in a Dallas airport bar.
Yesterday, he’d made love to me so fiercely I’d felt the force of it split atoms in the center of my heart.
I’d met someone made of pure gold, so breathtakingly singular, so arrestingly distinctive, so absolutely,amazinglyunbelievable, and we’d had epic, transcendental sex.
I’ll come see you in New York.
For a moment, half of asecond, I’d thought,Yes, yes, this is—
No.No,what was I thinking? I couldn’t come back from my failed honeymoon with a new love of my life.
I’d pulled a classic—no,theclassic: run away after a public dumping, pour yourself into an airplane, and then melt into a sunshine oasis and a new pair of arms and legs. Thousands of people had the same story. Broken hearts and bedroom romps, horizontal heart-mending to speed up the healing process. I wasn’t special. I’d hooked up. So what?
There were literally one million reasons why I couldn’t be with Wyatt. Timing, location, distance. He lived in Texas, I lived in Manhattan. I worked one-hundred-hour workweeks. I barely saw Jenna, my former fiancée, who I hadlivedwith.
We were the textbook definition of a rebound. People would always look at us and say we were scandalous, everything about us. Not because we were men, but because we’d come together the way we had. If it hadn’t been shameful, then why didn’t Liam know the truth? Why hadn’t we told him I’d met Wyatt while brokenhearted over someone else?
Happy ever afters didn’t begin with exes and rebound sex, no matter how amazing the orgasms.
Cold seeped into my shins from the rubberized easy-mop floor. Disinfectant and cheap air freshener burned my nose. The world felt wrong. Colors and sounds rubbed me backward. I wanted to puke again.
My thoughts were as relentless as an undertow, clawing me out into dark waters, and I kept running aground on memories of Wyatt. Him and me dancing in dying candlelight after the wedding. Him and me hand in hand beneath the waves, eyeing coral and schools of fish, his arm wrapped around my waist. Him and me sharing a glass of wine. Him and me making love.
I still had his ring. I couldn’t take it off. I couldn’t even try to.
What now? What the fuck now? I’d carved a week out of time to press Pause on my pain, but how well hadthatturned out? After all this, had my heart broken once, or twice?
I closed my eyes and tried tostop. Juststop.
Don’t think. Don’t feel.
But…
There was another, bigger reason why I’d left Wyatt.
There was a truth about me that had settled into my soul like a splinter, dug in and swollen, and now infected. That truth ate away at me, tried to suffocate me, strangle me, and left me stranded and hollow and numb. I'd fled New York after my failed wedding trying to escape it, and for the past week, I'd done everything imaginable to try and outrun it. I'd even fallen for Wyatt, and I'd imagined, for a moment, that he could fall for me, too. But he couldn’t.
Because the truth was, no matter how much Iwanted—wanted to turn the plane around, wanted to parachute from the back, wanted to call Wyatt on a phone I didn’t have, to a number I didn’t know, because we had given each other everything except our phone numbers—there wasthis: everyone I’d ever loved had left me.
Everybody grew weary of me. My parents. My exes. My friends, who fell further and further out of touch.You’re just… a lot, one of my coworkers had told me one night, drunk off her ass and airing out her many complaints.You’re a lot, Noël.
I knew that. Everybody who ever met me knew that.
Didn’t Wyatt remember meeting me a week ago when I’d been dumped and thrown away? There was areasonfor that. Surely he had to understand he was scooping up someone else’s trash.
I’d thought, with Jenna—
But I’d been wrong, and history had been right.
So what was going to be different about Wyatt if he and I tried for something after this week? Nothing. Nothing would be different. We’d end up like everyone else, with him eventually worn thin by howmeI was. I’d be such an unimaginable disappointment to him in the end, and he’d wonder why on Earth he didn’t see, from the very beginning, how we would end so pathetically. He’d remember that, when we began, I was a useless wreck falling on him in the back row of an airplane on my failed honeymoon.
Leaving now would save Wyatt. Save his squandered time and his wasted efforts. Save him, too, from the pointlessness of us even being together.
