Page 162 of Ecstasy
What if things had worked out differently? What if I’d never grabbed that net? What if I’d never jumped in the water? What if I’d believed his bullshit, about needing me? About wanting me? About loving me?
Alex pulls back, cups my face in his big hands. I lock my own around his neck and smile up at him, forcing Eli from my mind.
What’s done is done and I can’t change it.
Maybe Eli Addison suited my temperament for a little while. My crazy. The old me. Maybe the sexual shit we did was good and maybe we had some strange sort of fun, fucking around with everyone around us. Including my now husband.
But I couldn’t have lived my life with him.
He would’ve left me when he graduated, or he would’ve killed me himself. Or I would’ve gone on to worse drugs. Worse things.
A worse life.
He would’ve moved on to someone else. Someone else to break.
“What’re you thinking about?” Alex asks me quietly.
I meet his gaze and wonder if he knows. When I think of Eli, I always have this strange sense that Alex can read my mind. Like the three of us are still somehow morbidly connected, even though Eli has been dead for three years.
The thought makes my heart flip in my chest. My stomach drop.
Still. After all this time.
He’s dead.
I knew him for half a year, and most of that time I was fucked all the way up. But even if it was for the bad, he changed my life.
And without him, I wouldn’t have the man in front of me.
I stand on my tiptoes and kiss Alex on the lips. He kisses me back, but then he picks me up, puts me on the counter at the desk behind me, and steps between my thighs.
“Princess,” he whispers, pressing his brow to mine. “You know you can talk to me about anything, right?”
I force a smile, slide my hands down his back. “I know, handsome.”
He softens, his shoulders relaxing as he sinks closer to me, gripping my hips. “I love you, Zara Rose.”
“I love you, too, Alex Christian.”
And I do.
I love him.
I just think a part of me died with Eli in that pool, too. A part of me that was wild and reckless and a little insane. A little off. That part of me died and I’m not so sure I don’t sometimes want her back.
Sometimes, I just want to go off the fucking rails again.
As happy as I am with my life, with my husband, with the community we’ve put together in the same town he grew up in, with his mom nearby, and mine coming every other weekend, and Kylie and Ian working as pharmacists at the clinic just up the street, as much as I love this life, sometimes I just want to go a little fucking wild.
And I think only Eli would understand that.
My heart aches a little, imagining it. Imagining if I had gotten clean, if Eli had gotten counseling. If we had put our crazy together for good instead of evil. Instead of a way to pass the time. To entertain ourselves.
What would we have been, then?
One single decision changed my fate. Picking up that net and jumping into that water, not letting him drown Alex.
That changed my whole life.
