Page 51 of The Next Of Us
I spun away and paced in a tight circle like a wild, caged, beast.Trapped in a life I no longer wanted, I fisted my hands on my hips.For the first time in all our life together, I wanted to leave.
Storming down the hallway to the front door, I bent and crammed my feet into my boots.
Aaron’s heavy footsteps pounded behind me.
I turned and stared at him, daring him to say another word in defense of a decision he made without consulting me, a decision that had the power to tear him, us, and me, apart.
He clasped the back of his neck and closed his eyes for a moment before pinning me with his gaze.“Where are you going?”
It hit me then that I had no place to go.At this time of night, everything was closed.Frustration suffocated me.
There were times throughout the years I regretted moving back to Sage Ridge.Times when I felt all my decisions had to be run past a hundred other people before I could carry on.Times when I felt Aaron put his loyalty to his mom before his commitment to me.
This was one of those times.
I scowled at him, and snarled, “I don’t know!There’s nowhere I can go in this fucking town without every-fucking-body talking about it!
He answered immediately.“Go to Harley’s.”
I nodded sharply.
I’d go to Harley like I’d always gone to Harley.Harley was blunt.Non-judgmental.She was the person I was closest to in the whole world other than Aaron.And she had more compassion in her blunt, outspoken, sassy, heart than anyone else I knew.
And her husband, Daire, also the product of a single mom, had never failed to help me understand my husband and his extreme attachment to his mother.
I loved Wren, I did, but there were times Aaron’s drive to protect her feelings left me out in the cold.
Harley took one look at me standing on her doorstep and stood back, opening the door wide.“Trouble in paradise?”
I burst into tears.
“Shit.”Daire’s voice came to me over Harley’s shoulder.“Is this a hen party or do you want me here?”
“You can stay,” I blubbered.“I’d like your opinion, too.”
They ushered me to the couch and Harley, God bless her, pressed a wine cooler into my hand before settling across from me with Daire’s arm slung over the back of the loveseat behind her.
Without betraying Aaron’s confidence, I gave them what I could.
I gave them my lack of rudder and my fear of time running out.
I gave them my grief over the end of my child-bearing years and my uncertainty about what comes next.
I gave them my loneliness and my pain, the losses over the year that had compounded, with interest, with Aaron’s withdrawal.
I gave them my guilt that I had failed to support him when he had never, not once, let me down.
And I gave it all through a steady stream of silent tears.
Only when my words ran out, did they speak.
“When our children moved out,” Harley mused.“I was a bit of a bear.”
“Even more than usual,” Daire winked, winding his fingers in Harley’s hair.
She rolled her eyes at him before returning her attention to me.“If it’s a job at the resort he’s after, I can take him.I need to pull back, way back.”
I palmed the tears off my cheeks.“I’ll tell him.”
