“So, you went off with a total stranger, married him, and had my child with him?” Disgust—mostly at myself for my cowardice and stupidity of six years ago--and pain mingle in my words producing an animal-like growl like the words were being ripped from me, leaving me bloody.
“I didn’t know until—”
“Yeah, I got that. Until after you weremarriedto him. How could you—” I stop myself. She looks so pale all of a sudden, as if she’s been the one bleeding and is empty and about to collapse.
“Logan…”
“I would have married you, June,” I whisper the words, knowing they’re true. I’m an asshole for not telling her this six years ago when it would have mattered.
Technically I could have married her, could have at least gotten engaged, but we were young. And after the kiss, I was hurt, wasn’t sure she would even say yes. But I went out to buy a diamond anyway to prove that I was serious about her and wanted no one else. A week after our blow-up, I brought the ring with me to the bakery with grand plans. But I never asked her.
Instead of going inside and getting down on one knee like a cheesy cliché that I knew she’d tease me about forever because she was all about mocking cheesy clichés, I didn’t go inside. I stood on the sidewalk outside because what I saw in the window rifled through me like an arctic wind, freezing me solid.
She was flirting with some guy—who I now know was David—smiling at him and laughing, putting her hand on his arm.She’d touched that bastard. As soon as I saw that, blood lust shook me, and I wanted to bust inside and lay the guy flat.
But then I remembered.She ditched me. I almost puked on the sidewalk. She wasn’t mine anymore. Maybe we didn’t have the relationship I thought we had after all. Because I damn well believed we had the kind of relationship where she’d never in a million years flirt with some guy—not unless he was over seventy or under ten the way she did with the mailman and the kid next door, Smitty.
So, in another one of those cheezy cliché moves, I walked away like a wooden yet prideful shell, my emotions frozen. The empty crate on the sidewalk that I nearly tripped over had more life in it than I had. My efforts to kill the crippling hurt tearing at my soul ended up killing everything else in me with numbness, but at least I avoided feeling the loss, right?
The agony of betrayal didn’t stand a chance against the prideful, self-righteous anger I threw at it. In the end, all the life-sapping emotions canceled each other out in a storm that took me on a bender lasting several days and a dozen bottles of JD. My stubborn refusal to talk about it or deal with it in any way except to bury the tortured loneliness under as much anger and then indifference as I could find carried me right up to the dorm door and my first day at Dartmouth.
Then my devotion to hockey and fulfilling that dream took over. Except that my dogged pursuit held a boatload of empty satisfaction. At first. But team friendships, winning championships, and reaping the fruits of hard work finally gave me back some of the life I’d lost.
The one thing I never got back, though, was the desire, maybe even the ability to fall for another woman. Those feelings would never get stirred up in me for the rest of eternity.
Or so I thought until now.