Page 58 of P.S. I Dare You

Meeting her tonight for the first time was surreal.

She wasn’t at all what I expected, at least not based on the things Hunter had told me. He said Love was materialistic, money-hungry, and stone cold. He said I wouldn’t like her at first, that I’d be put off the instant our eyes met. Hunter also described her as spoiled, entitled, and selfish.

But she was wearing faded Levis, throwing money into a fountain just ‘cause, and she actually introduced herself and welcomed me to the building.

The only thing that seems to match up so far is the fact that she’s a complete knockout even though the photos Hunter gave me hardly do her justice. In person, Love’s got this understated elegance about her, from her soft blonde hair to her hooded hazel eyes, to her pointed nose and high cheekbones. She could be a princess or the girl next door and it would suit her all the same.

And that runner’s body… God, I could eat my fist just thinking about it right now. Consummating this relationship will be a piece of fucking cake.

Leaning against the back of my chair, I cross my legs wide and finish my beer, accepting myself for the self-serving piece of shit that I’ve become, and when I’m done, I force myself to call it a night.

The sooner I go to bed, the sooner I can wake up and get this shit show started.

“THIS REMINDS ME OF our WVU days,” Tierney says as she takes a seat on my bed and scans my new bedroom. “Just hanging out, doing girl stuff.”

My best friend smirks, reaching for the newest edition of Elle on my nightstand and aimlessly paging through it.

“Yeah, it does.” Seated in a gray velvet chair by the window, I drag my legs in and wrap my arms around them. Tierney sitting on my bed reading one of my magazines does feel like a college flashback, but only until her phone rings and I’m reminded that we’re both pushing thirty, she’s running her own company while expecting her first baby with her new husband, and we’re up to our eyeballs in the “real world.”

“I miss those days,” she says with a soft sigh. “Life was so damn easy then, wasn’t it? I mean, we just woke up, literally rolled out of bed, and did our thing. Biggest concern was where we were going to grab drinks that night.”

I miss those days too.

I miss the days when Hunter was nothing but a broke college kid, like myself. I miss the days when he never left my side, when he looked at me with this stupid, goofy grin on his face without even realizing it half the time and my body would fire on all cylinders every time he walked in the room. I miss the five-dollar carnation bouquets and the frozen pizza candlelight dinners. The aimless drives and the dollar-theater movie matinees on free popcorn days.

But money ruins things.

And in the end, it ruined us.

We weren’t married but a year when Hunter pitched some cyber security software he’d been coding to some big corporation in Silicon Valley. It was a stretch—him landing a deal on a type of product no one had ever so much as attempted before—but he had my support and nothing to lose, so he went for it.

The day they called with an offer is a day I couldn’t forget if I tried. And believe me—I’ve tried. Many times. It’s the day that changed the entire trajectory of our marriage. It’s the day the universe took that sweet, beautiful, perfect little thing that we had, doused it in gasoline, and struck an entire book of matches.

I watched us go up in flames, only it wasn’t a quick process.

It was a slow burn that played out through harsh words, hurt feelings, through tears and sleepless nights.

Through a text message that was never intended for me …

To go from having nothing but the clothes on your back, your young wife, and a shoebox campus town apartment in Morgantown, West Virginia to having tens of millions of dollars dumped in your lap overnight was something Hunter couldn’t handle, only neither of us would know it until it was too late.

By the end of that first week, he’d signed a lease on an apartment in some trendy Manhattan neighborhood, sold my vintage Subaru and his used Honda, and rented a moving van—all of this without so much as consulting me.

By the end of the first year, he’d invested in half a dozen startups, the majority of which were profitable and one of which he ended up buying outright: a little company called Blue Stream Records.

And as if we weren’t already set for life, the universe decided to make it rain once again a couple of years after Hunter signed a handful of major artists and developed a state-of-the-art streaming service which grew by thousands of users every time we blinked.

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