Page 24 of Chosen Road

I thought about her continuing to work closely with Gus every day. Heard the click of her high heels as she wiggled in and out of his office in her tight pencil skirts. Pictured her painted nails wrapped around his thick biceps, scratching down his broad back, holding his head to her breast, tugging his mouth to hers, and I began to shake.

I imagined him looking at her the way he used to look at me, the way he’d been looking at me for the past several weeks.

My marriage was destroyed. And worse, I participated fully in its demolition.

Everybody leaves, and if they don’t want to, I push them.

My hand came up to cover my throat, swallowing my tears, choking back the sounds of my grief as Gus paced frantically in front of me. The animal-like sounds revealed the pain I’d tried to bury. They shamed me, exposing the depth of the wound he delivered. Desperately, I tried to rein in my control.

Tears streamed down his face, his eyes wide with horror as I slowly lost my shit.

Desolated. Isolated. Rejected. Abandoned.

Disposed.

Gus’s confession exhumed those feelings I believed to be buried, and their stench was worse than I remembered.

He took a single step toward me, his hands reaching. My throat convulsed as my heart broke.

He was supposed to be mine.

I looked down at the floor where fingers of sunlight lingered out of reach and out of place.

Just like me and Gus. Out of reach. Out of place.

The hope I nursed on the driveway, sliced away by the razor-sharp blade of loss.

Reality hit my chest and buckled my knees. I covered my face with my hands and curled into myself, my mouth opening in a silent scream as my knees hit the floor. Even now, no sound would pass my lips, and I well knew, screaming changed nothing.

I’d no sooner hit the floor when he grasped me under my arms and yanked me through the air into his big body. His arms wrapped tight around me, crushing me to his deep chest that shook with the force of his sobs. The chest I slept on, the chest that housed the heart whose beat I knew better than my own.

“Amber, Amber, please baby…” He beseeched, his voice thick and ragged.

I grasped him tightly around his back and keened. Grappling to wrap my arms around his neck, I pulled myself up and tucked my face into his throat. I could not hold back my tears and they mingled with his.

I looked over his shoulder in disbelief, my world blurred. Could this really be happening? Or was this another one of my bitter daydreams?

For a minute or an hour, I clung to him, until my pulse beat painfully in my skull, until my strength left me, and I hung in his arms like a skinny ragdoll. I’d lost so much weight since the accident, waiting for this exact moment, hoping against hope it might never come.

He rocked back and forth, cradling me against his chest. His breath shuddered in and out, his throat worked to gulp down the last of his tears.

I pressed my cheek against his chest and pressed my nose against his throat, even as I struggled to regain my legs, my body of two minds. I worked my palms between us and pushed off him, hard, rage temporarily relieving me of my grief.

He paced around me in a half circle, his hands on his hips, his face ravaged, eyes reflecting his angst and remorse as he watched me warily.

I swiped my hands across my face to little avail. I pulled up the end of my shirt revealing the outline of thin ribs under dry skin. I rubbed the tears and snot and saliva off my face and pulled myself together as best I could, and then I spoke, though my voice shook.

“I put you back together when you were broken, hoping I was wrong. I need to put myself back together now.” I pulled in a shuddering breath, making my decision, and with it, accepting another slice from the blade. “I’m leaving.”

The blood drained from his face and his blue-grey eyes blew wide with panic. “Amber, please. Reconsider. I have no right but things between us were improving…”

I turned to face him fully and hissed, “You feel that? That fear? That loss? That chokehold of grief squeezing life and hope,” I hiccoughed out a sob, “and joy from your heart? I’ve been living that for months knowing this was coming! So, I can tell you from experience,” I slammed my palm over my skinny chest, the physical pain a transient reprieve, “after a few weeks the shock will begin to dissipate, and the numbness will set in. And it’ll be a relief, Gus! It’ll be a relief to not have to wait for the inevitable,” I stammered brokenly.

I drew in another shuddering breath, this one deeper, almost cleansing.

I’d held it in for so long, going on three months now since the accident, much longer since I had my first inklings that something more was going on between Gus and Jacqueline.

Not even Ruby knew.

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