Page 50 of Chosen Road

“Has he pushed for anything you didn’t want?” I asked. Gus could be forceful, but he never pushed for anything I didn’t want. In fact, I often thought he knew what I wanted before I did.

“No. No, he hasn’t.”

“And the good?” Minty asked.

“He’s fun, makes me laugh, holds me when I’m scared, sat through a panic attack and carried on like nothing unusual happened. He’s affectionate and attentive. Tells me how much he loves me. Took the heat when I let him have it about our past. Apologized for leaving. Both times. Was honest about his past.” Ruby shuddered and I sympathized. I only had Jacqueline to imagine.

“Let that shit go, Ruby,” Minty admonished firmly, surprising me. I thought she would have taken a harder line. “Everybody has a past. Everybody makes mistakes. If he committed himself to you and then took another woman, okay, you have the right to hold it against him.”

Oh, God, that hurt. It was this, really, that was the deciding factor. Could I get past Gus taking another woman after me? My stomach rolled. Should I even consider it?

“It makes me sick. He moved on, I didn’t,” Ruby answered.

“Whose choice was that?” Minty asked softly. “You could have gone to him as well.”

“You were there, Minty,” Ruby snapped. “You saw how I was.”

“I did.” She nodded slowly. “I also saw the decisions you made. Not all of them were forced. I’m not trying to challenge you.” She stopped then laughed her tinkling laugh. “Well, I guess I am trying to challenge you a bit. You’re not the victim. You made just as many mistakes, just as many bad decisions back then, and this is good.”

Ruby snorted.

I was frozen, unable to react given my brain was working furiously to sift through what Minty was saying so cavalierly. Finally, the bit she said about making mistakes prodded me to ask, “How is that good?”

Minty answered, “Because if you made decisions that contributed to the problem, you’re not a victim. You’re powerful and you can make different decisions this time around.”

Could I make different decisions this time around? I knew if I ever wanted things to work between us, I’d have to.

Ruby turned to me. “You okay, Amber?”

“No?” I hesitated. “I’ve been pushing Gus away for the past year in hopes that I’ll fall out of love with him, and leave him for real, but it’s not working.” I looked at her meaningfully. “You saw Alex Sunday at dinner. This is hurting him. I need to make a decision either way.”

Minty lay a cool hand on my knee. “I don’t know all the details but let me ask you one question. You don’t have to answer it out loud. Are there decisions you made that make you less of a helpless bystander, too?”

“The short answer is yes. I just don’t know what to do about it.”

Ruby filled a plate, mostly with olives, and passed it to me, while asking, “In a perfect world, what would you want? I mean, if you weren’t worried about what people might think, if you could make yourself forgive the past, if you could change decisions you made, decisions he made, but couldn’t change anything about who he is, what would you want?”

“Him,” I answered immediately, possibly accepting that fact for the first time. “But I don’t know if I can get past what he did, even if I understand it. More than that, I don’t know if I’m capable of making a different decision.”

Minty slapped her hand down on my leg. “That, my friend, is a question for another day. Today’s answer is a start. Admitting what you want is one step closer to getting what you need.”

At two o’clock in the morning, I finally stumbled into my room. Minty and Ruby took the couches instead of the pull-out in the games room.

What seemed like only five minutes later, Minty chirped, “Good morning, beautiful!”

I groaned and curled up on my side. “Go away. You’re annoying.”

She was quiet and I thought for a moment, hoped, she was actually going to leave and let me go back to sleep. Then I heard Ruby’s pounding footsteps from the other room.

She leaped onto my bed. “Get up, lazybones. Today is the start of a new era. An era where we are not victims, where we captain our own ships, lay down our own road, charter our own voyage, and plough our own row!”

I held out my palm, keeping my eyes firmly closed. “You’re too much this early in the morning.”

I could hear the smile in Minty’s voice as she said, “I, for one, am not in favor of a lifetime of ploughing my own row.”

I lay back with a groan and covered my eyes with my forearm. Ruby chortled, her crazy laugh making me laugh, too.

“Who’s ploughing your row? Do I know about this?” Ruby demanded.

---