Jordyn's Army, page 15
Since life doesn’t make sense to me anymore, and I’m done living by the rules, I press up on my toes, loop my arms around Colton’s neck and crash my lips into his. I have no options left but to let life take me on its ride. I’m not ready to throw my cards onto the table, but I’m all in.
Colton wraps his arms around me so tightly, it should scare me. Instead, I find an immense amount of relief from being within his embrace. His chest is against mine, and his heart is pounding so hard I can feel it inside of my chest. Rain continues to wash over us, and I don’t know if the universe is trying to send us a message, but when our lips part, so do the clouds, wrapping us with the sun’s rays, warming us from the rain.
“Sometimes, life will make us jump through hoops to end up where we’re meant to be,” I tell Colton.
“If that’s the case, I’m meant to be here with you.”
I trace the tip of my thumb along his cheek, dabbing up a raindrop. “Then be here with me, and we’ll see where life takes us next.”
Epilogue
A Year Later
“One cappuccino for you, and one Americano for me,” Colton says, placing my coffee down on the bistro table, where we met one year ago today.
“I love our Saturday morning dates,” I tell him.
“I love them more.”
Colton threw everything up into the air and played a little roulette like I did. He’s gotten himself a construction job and moved into my little house that Suzette left vacant three months ago to move in with her boyfriend. Colton was renting a flat for the first nine months so we could leave our first kiss to be the only thing we rushed. It turns out, we both rushed our first marriages and decided we needed time to date and fall in love, and take things one amazing day at a time.
“Are we having dinner with Suzette’s family tomorrow night?” Colton asks. He’s become a sucker for Mary’s cooking and Harry’s war stories that led him to become an artist. Everything just fits. It fits so well, I sometimes thank the Universe for breaking me so hard that I would know what’s real when it comes around.
“Of course. I heard Mary is making duck just for you.”
Colton places his hands on his chest and throws his head back. “Life is good. I’ll tell you, you are one smart woman for running away two years ago.”
“It was the best move I’ve ever made.”
Colton taps his coffee cup against mine. “Cheers to that.”
“Oh, I almost forgot.” I pull a small note out of my back pocket and hand it to Colton.
“I didn’t forget. I was not-so-patiently waiting,” he says, opening the note as fast as his fingers can move.
Colton said he fell in love with my words, but I wanted him to see how good the words can be, rather than the hateful ones he first saw.
I write him a note every week and hand it to him over coffee. The smile that percolates on his face each Saturday never lessens, so I look forward to these small moments.
“I’m reading it out loud, just to make you blush,” he says.
Dear Colton,
You came into my world a year ago when I needed you the most. I don’t know why life creates puzzles that we need to solve, but I’m grateful we could piece our messy lives together into one beautiful piece.
To the next year of our journey, and to the next fifty-two love letters, I will continue to fall for your handsome smile, charming personality, and love for life, just as I have for the last year. Thank you for making the leap across the pond to find a stranger who needed to be found.
Love,
Rose
About the Author
About the Author Shari J. Ryan is an International Bestselling Author of Contemporary Romance and Women’s Fiction. She lives in Massachusetts with her husband and two young sons. Shari started her career as a graphic artist and freelance writer, then found her passion for writing books back in 2011. She has been slaying words ever since and creating imaginary friends ever since.
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Reunion
Julie A. Richman
Prologue
Rose
“Ugh, seriously? You seriously want to go to our 10-year reunion? Please tell me this is just your whacked-out prego hormones talking.” I’d rather be crammed in a packed subway, stuck in a tunnel, on a hot, summer afternoon with some creeper rubbing up against me. That is how badly I’d like to avoid the people from my high school.
“That is exactly why I neeeeeed you there with me, Rose. Mike has told me there’s no way he’s coming with me. He said he hated the people at his own high school, why the heck would he subject himself to mine. You can’t let me go five months pregnant without a husband there. C’mon, you were always my wing-girl. People will expect to see us together.”
“Mikey doesn’t even want to see me?” I try to change the subject.
“You, he loves. But, it ends there. Please come. I really don’t want to see Josh when I’m six months pregnant.”
Ah, and there it is, you always want to look your best when you come face-to-face with your past. And Des’s past was now a hot-shot tech CEO with an even hotter size zero wife who enters every room in tow of her very perky boob job.
“He probably won’t even be there.” I blow it off, while checking an email status on my laptop.
“I checked with Gina on the reunion committee and he’s coming. Plus one.” The strife in her voice is evident.
“It’s plus two in his case.” I laugh, thinking about his wife’s ridiculous store-bought rack. “So, you want me to be your plus one?”
“Yes. I never get to see you now that you live three thousand miles away.” Pausing, she adds, “C’mon, you know we’ll have the best time.”
“I’m with Mikey. I didn’t like them all back then.”
“You are full of shit, Rosie. Tell me you’ll buy a plane ticket.”
“I’ll buy a plane ticket.” I pull the phone from ear as she squeals.
“You are the best friend in the entire universe. Now I just need to find something to wear that doesn’t make me look like a frump.”
“You’ll be gorgeous and glowing,” I assure her. “I need to head to a meeting now. Give Mikey a hug for me.”
“I will. Go buy your plane ticket.” The demanding tone in her voice tells me she’s not kidding.
Hanging up, I just shake my head. How the hell did I get roped into that? That girl has gotten me into more trouble in my life than I can even remember.
But going home again. I’m not quite sure how I feel about that.
1
Des
Picking up the phone again as soon as Rose and I hang up. “She’s coming.”
“Seriously? You are a master, Des. How’d you convince her?”
“I told her I couldn’t see Josh alone looking like a preggo whale.”
His chuckle is warm. “Is the Tech-Meister gracing us with his presence?”
“I have no clue, but I knew she wouldn’t let me down at being my wing-girl.” I am definitely feeling quite proud of myself. But if you don’t know how to manipulate the heck out of your oldest friend, then don’t bother calling yourself a BFF.
“Good job, lady.”
“Let me know if you need anything else,” I offer.
“I should be able to take it from here. You’re the best, Des.”
“You owe me,” I kid.
“I’ll think of something.”
The Reunion
Rose
The sea air smells different on the east coast than it does on the west coast. I think the humidity traps it and makes it heavier, more intense, fishier smelling. It’s kind of gross, but yet familiar and comforting. And with that acrid odor comes memories. But those don’t feel quite as soothing.
“When you get back from Thailand, we should take some time and travel.” I was trying my damnedest to stay upbeat, even though Connor would be gone for a year and I’d be bogged down in studies in my first year of graduate school.
“Not too much time,” he countered.
“Why is that”
“Because we don’t want to be old parents.” He was dead serious.
“Oh, so we’re having babies together?” I sputter my wine, starting to laugh.
“At least three.” He takes a sip from his wine before delivering his driving thought. “And we want to be young, hot parents.”
The next day I said goodbye to the guy I’d dated from senior year in high school all through college, when together we attended the same school in Michigan.
His sporadic emails that year he was in Thailand kept me alive, regaling me with tales of adventures up-country to Chiang Mai and into Laos to write about the L-Pop music scene for the media site where he was doing his internship.
I’m heading off on assignment, he wrote in an email when he’d been gone for over eleven long, lonely months. But I’ll be home soon and finally we’ll be in the same place. It’ll be really fun to start a life together in New York. We really haven’t been in the northeast together since high school. This is going to be amazing.
And then all went silent, but that in itself was not odd based on his travels.
It was an email a little over a month later from my old roommate, Maddie, saying it must be so great having Connor back home again, that caught me off guard. I’d replied telling her that he wasn’t back yet. Her response was even odder when she said she’d heard he was back. But when pressed, she would never tell me from whom she’d heard that story.
At first, I thought it was a mistake. I’d certainly know if Connor was back. Heck, I’d be the person picking him up at the airport, or at the very least, there with his parents.
When are you coming home? I’ll come get you at the airport. I’d emailed several hours after first hearing from Maddie. There was no response, but also no reason to panic, knowing Connor’s travels might have taken him to a place with limited accessibility to communications, and most certainly, no wi-fi signal.
I checked my phone and my email incessantly. And obsessively. Over the next few days, I sent several more messages telling him that I missed him and couldn’t wait for him to get home.
But, still, there was no response.
When a week had passed, I called his parents and got his mom on the phone. There was dead silence on the other end when I asked when Connor was coming home.
His mother finally responded, “He’s been home for some time, dear.”
Again, there was silence, but this time it was because I’d had the wind knocked out of me, and the pain that was making my chest feel like it had collapsed, had slapped my voice clear out of my vocal cords. Her words had been beyond a stinging blow.
“Is he there?” I struggled to keep the emotion out of my voice.
Again, she paused before answering. “No. He’s gone away for the weekend. He went to Biloxi.”
Biloxi? Biloxi, Mississippi? Not exactly your normal weekend getaway spot.
Piper lived in Biloxi.
Piper, who had been all over him our senior year in college. Everywhere I turned Piper Raines was there. She switched classes the first week of both fall and spring semesters to make sure she could be in classes with Connor. She begged him to tutor her. She touched him constantly. The girl was barely civil to me and often spoke as if were not even in the room with them.
Piper Raines was a woman who had no female friends. If you asked another woman about Piper, the invariable description would always be either ‘nasty bitch’ or ‘black heart’.
And yes, Piper lived in Biloxi, Mississippi.
As if that wasn’t enough of a shock, his mother’s next sentence was the killing blow. “I know he’s in the process of getting a new cell phone, but the apartment he’s living in actually has a landline. Let me give you the number.”
Quickly, I scratched out the digits, my hands shaking, I wasn’t sure if that was from anger or pain.
He’s been home long enough to get an apartment and plan a weekend to go see Piper. Unfuckingbelievable.
I wondered how the hell Maddie knew he was back, and I didn’t. But more importantly, how could he come back to the States and not tell me, not let me know he was home? Anger eclipsed hurt that he wasn’t man enough to let me know, that he didn’t have the balls to properly break up with me because he was now involved with Piper.
The pain was too much to process. The betrayal and lack of closure became a disease that I let molest my self-worth and denigrate my self-confidence for way too long. He ghosted me, and yet somehow, I was the one that became less than. That was until one morning, when I woke up and sat up in bed, and, for the first time, it all seemed so clear.
It wasn’t me. I had not done a damn thing wrong. He was the asshole for the way he’d handled, or not handled, things.
And with that realization, I could finally let go of the hurt, self-doubt, and most of all, the anger. My balance was back, and the universe had actually already delivered karma —ahead of schedule. There was nothing worse I could have wished upon him than Piper Raine. He got exactly what he deserved.
Thank you, Universe.
A year later, I moved to Los Angeles and began a new life. Letting down my guard and finding the right one that I felt I could just be myself with, was another story. My dating luck had been spotty at best.
“You’re so pretty and smart, why don’t you have a boyfriend?” was the question I was asked way too often for my liking. It was also a question to which I did not have an answer.
And now, standing on the balcony of my hotel room, all dressed for my high school reunion, my spirit is drowning in the flood of emotion, as the scent on the breeze unveils itself as a haunting apparition. I can feel an unease and I’m not sure why. No one has heard from Connor in years. The last gossip I’d gotten was that he and Piper were living together somewhere down south.
And while Des sold me on the fact that she needed a wing-woman for when she ran into Josh for the first time, it hadn’t crossed my mind that I might need my own reinforcements if my ex made an appearance. I had not even considered Connor showing up for this and I’m pretty certain Des would have mentioned it when she checked with Gina and found out that Josh and his plus one were attending.
Yet, somehow the heavy scent lingering in the wake of the rushing tide brings back memories, and with them, both hurt and fear.
My last thought as I flip off the light switch and leave my hotel room to meet Des downstairs is, it really smells fishy tonight.
2
Des
“I’m hating you right now because you’re like a size two.” I feel like a freaking beached whale, and even head-to-toe black is not going to hide this totally fucked up place I am in my pregnancy. It kind of looks like I might or might not be pregnant, and I definitely look chubby.
“I’m a size six, not a two.” Rose rolls her eyes at me as we walk the long hall toward the ballroom.
“Rosie! Des!” Kathleen Donahue comes running down the long hall toward us, her bright red hair flailing behind her, making her look like a human torch.
She hugs me tight and then her hand goes right to my belly and I fear she is the first of a million times I will be palmed tonight. “Well, look at you.”
Yeah, look at me. I’m a whale dressed like I’m going to a funeral.
“Rose, I was so excited when I heard you were coming in for this.” Rose looks like she seriously needs alcohol and for one nanosecond I hate my BFF. She’s skinny and she can drink.
“Are Josh and Two-Tits here yet?” I feel my girth growing by the second. My penance for lying to Rose about him coming was that the very next day he sent in his RSVP.
Kathleen shakes her head. “No, but,” her voice drops to a whisper, “Connor Powell is here.”
“There’s a simultaneous scream of, “What?” from both me and Rose.
Rose’s fingers are digging into my forearm. “Did you know?”
“Do you think I’d keep that from you?”
“Apparently, he just contacted Gina on Thursday night and said he was in town and wondered if tickets were still available.” She’s still whispering.
“And he’s here?” Rose is on the border of hyperventilation.
Kathleen nods, her big blue eyes wide, not blinking.
“How does he look?” I ask, and turning to Rose before Kathleen answers, conjecture, “Maybe he’s bald.”
“He looks good.” Kathleen disappoints me. “Really good.”
“Can we leave now?” Rose is dead serious and the death grip she’s got on my arm is causing my fingers to go numb.
“You look really good, too. C’mon, get it over with. He had to know he might run into you here and that he’d definitely run into me. And I don’t think he wants to be running into me because he knows I’ll tell him exactly what I think of him and I’m nowhere as nice as you, Rose.”
“She’s right, Rose. You have a lot of back-up here. And she’s definitely not as nice as you.” Kathleen ribs me. “We have over two hundred people coming and we’ve got you covered.”
I can feel Rose pulling my arm, as if she’s trying to bolt in the opposite direction. “Rosie, stop!” She hates being called Rosie and glares at me. “You look great. You live in Los Angeles. You have a phenomenal job. You are doing really well. You’ve moved on. And that is the best revenge, letting him see you living your best life without him.”
