Page 11 of Curvalicious

The almighty Rick Steele could wait for a while. I'd done the same thing when he walked out of the door and left me, like a scared mouse. He ran away without having the decency to say goodbye. The woman whose heart he’d broken had to remain in this building and not let him know that after all this time I was still hurting after the way he treated me. He didn’t deserve to know that even after all he did, seeing him right now made me weak at the knees. No. I would do the same to him as he’d done to me. I’ll make him wait and suffer, not knowing if I was going to turn up, or if he would ever see my face again. I would give him a taste of his own medicine.

All the hurt and pain of the past rushed through me and I decided I wouldn’t just stay here for another twenty, but I would stretch it to thirty minutes. I kept dismissing it, thinking I could leave, I could face him. As soon as I stood up, I found the tears I’d held back so I needed to calm down and focus on the twins. I couldn’t break down in front of him, I wouldn’t give him the satisfaction of seeing me cry. He didn’t deserve anything but pain from me. He was my only ticket to getting them back. My babies were the only thing worth living for, I had nothing else, and going back home to Mexico wasn't an option if I wanted to live. My Uncle would kill me in a heartbeat if I showed up back there.

I had to compose myself and make sure that I put everything in perspective. There was too much to lose by blowing Rick off and not showing my face. Something I couldn’t afford to do, even if the stubborn part of me wanted nothing more.

* * *

My heart was beating rapidly and I was uncontrollably sweating. I’d decided to wait thirty minutes, but ended up staying a lot longer than that. I was kidding myself. This was all bullshit. I wasn’t over Rick. We’d been together for three years. Then one day he just up and left with no explanation. He left some cash on the bedside table, and took his things from our one-bedroom apartment.

Now my ex and kids were living with his fiancée, Katie. Rick had moved on, and not only did he have kids with me, but her too.

Every cloud has a silver lining and that saying fell true when I was six months pregnant and I couldn’t work as a stripper anymore, let alone have any other job in the club. Even being a cleaner wasn’t an option at that point. A girl in the strip club I used to work in was obsessed with social media, so she was able to figure out where they lived. She claimed everyone who posted about their lives left a window for stalkers. They wanted all details to be known about them. I didn't know if it was to gloat or for others to know their every movement.

Rick was a triplet and considered himself to be the eldest. He had two brothers, Stan and Pete. I’d met them a few times, but I wouldn’t say that all three of us were friends, exactly. They may have been triplets, but they were completely different personality wise.

Rick was the strict one out of the three. It was probably the reason why they looked up to him. Pete was the carefree one, the one Rick claimed would never settle down, and Stan was the nerd who spent way too much time on the computer. Rick prided himself on being the one that held them together, but behind closed doors he was a wounded SEAL. I turned a blind eye to his drinking and mood swings. When I was pregnant, I spent more time thinking about why he left, and the fact that as much as I painted this picture of us being so happy, realistically we weren’t. We were two people together trying to get over their painful pasts.

After I found out I was pregnant and needed to find Rick, I discovered that Pete loved to post on social media nearly every single day. Sometimes two or three times a day. It was strange, because the little time we spent together, I never thought of him as that type of guy, but then I remembered the girl telling me that you don’t really know someone until you've seen them on social media.

Pete gave me an opportunity to turn into a stalker, and it didn't take long to figure out where they lived, because I had nothing better to do.

I couldn’t strip and I took on odd jobs because I needed the money seeing as I was about to have an extra mouth to feed, or so I thought at the time. I never knew I was carrying twins. I had no idea how I was going to do it. I began to panic, because I knew the odd cleaning job wouldn’t be an option and I had no idea how I was going to feed myself, let alone my baby.

I was growing bigger, with no medical insurance. I knew the only trip I would be making to the doctor was when I was ready to give birth.

The girls had got together to help with the Silver health insurance plan. It meant that the only thing I would be seeing a doc for was to give birth. I avoided any visit because I didn’t want the cost to go up. I promised to pay them back, but they knew as well as I did that there was no way I was going to be able to do that. I didn't have the money, but they felt like crap knowing what Rick had done to me., even though it was never their fault. Once a guy was rough in one way or another, we all went out of our way to help each other. We knew girls like us didn’t get much in life, we’d all come from rough backgrounds, so we made ourselves a family of misfits. It was rare that one of us was lucky and we got out of the lifestyle. I thought, for just a moment, that I was one of those girls. After he left and I could no longer work, I remembered his angry mood swings, the drinking binges we would go on together. There was nothing romantic or pretty about our relationship, but at the time it felt as if it was everything. As if someone really saw me, and wanted to be with me. When you have nothing and someone pays you some attention, it feels like everything. Rick did back then, and he knew it. That was the part that hurt the most.

I tried to put those feelings aside as I reached the Starbucks and saw him sitting and waiting for me.

Forty-five minutes late.

Some part of me hoped he would leave and I wouldn’t have to face him. I’d sat in the boardroom thinking I was ready to face him, but who was I kidding? There were too many mixed feelings to dismiss in a few years, let alone minutes.

“You’re late,” Rick said to the table, without facing me. The moment I walked in he turned his head away from me, his eyes on the table, as if he was more nervous than I.

“You’re lucky I came. I so-o-o didn’t want to, Rick. I so…” I stuttered trying to get the words out as all my emotions flushed out of me.

He put his hand on mine as he stood up, this time removing his sunglasses and looking directly at me. I could have sunk into his arms as all the old feelings, the good ones, the ones I’d tried to keep under lock and key, came to the surface. I didn’t know who I hated more, him or myself, for making me feel this way. I should hate him. No, I did hate him. I was getting confused, thinking I felt something for this man. No nothing. I had to remember how he abandoned me. It had to be in the forefront of my mind, otherwise I would regret coming, I would think of myself as weak and if I was weak then there was no way that I was going to get my kids back.

Never.

I should want to stay as far away from him as possible, but I couldn’t and I had to remember that. I had to focus on only them. Nothing more. Definitely not him. He wasn’t worth it.

“I know. I deserve to wait for an eternity, but we have to do this. Otherwise, I wouldn’t have bothered sending you the message.”

He said it so casually that it annoyed me, so I slapped him as hard as I could, but it probably just grazed his face. He was so big, whereas I was so small, and my hand hurt a lot more by giving him the slap than the pain I intended to inflict on him.

He rubbed his cheek to confirm what I’d already suspected. The slap had done nothing to him.

“I deserved that.”

So I did it again, hoping this time to make an impact on him. Just a little of the pain and fear of having to go back home to Mexico I’d been carrying around with me since he left.

Did it make me feel better? Not really, because everyone was looking at us. I was waiting for him to react to it, but he only looked at me, a tear welling up in his eye. Seeing it brought back the memories of us being together. The times he would be crying in my arms as he talked about the death of both his parents.

I sucked in a breath then slumped down. He shifted to the side, out of my field of vision. I didn’t know where he was going, but he returned a few minutes later, after I’d caught my breath and tried to calm down, and he was holding a hot chocolate with marshmallows on top. The same gift he used to offer, which always made me smile, as we talked about our painful pasts. This time I would drink it, but I wouldn't smile. I wanted to keep hitting him. I’d never slapped anyone in my life, but I didn’t hesitate to do it one more time, before he sat.

“You left me. You didn’t even say goodbye. You were gone. Just like that.” The words were rushing out of my mouth like hot air as he pushed the hot chocolate closer to me.

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