Total pages in book: 131
Estimated words: 130255 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 651(@200wpm)___ 521(@250wpm)___ 434(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 130255 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 651(@200wpm)___ 521(@250wpm)___ 434(@300wpm)
KEVIN: Absolutely nothing I ever saw between the two of you said you were only friends.
ME: Will you drop it? I’ll be home in time for Mum and Dad’s visit, don’t worry.
KEVIN: Ok ok. If you’re sure.
ME: I’m sure. I’m so happy for you and Aaron!!
KEVIN: :) even if it took you a minute to be happy
ME: Oh, shut up.
KEVIN: :P it goes without saying but please don’t tell anyone. I don’t need Mum to beat my arse because she was the last to find out.
ME: I won’t tell anyone.
I finished that last text with the emoji with a zip across his lips and put my phone down. I couldn’t say I hadn’t wondered how their chat had gone, and I’d assumed it’d ended badly when he didn’t respond.
Like Max, Kev tended to bury his head in the sand when things went badly.
Maybe that was why I wasn’t too annoyed at Max’s silence. Sometimes you just needed to deal with things by yourself, and that was okay.
Huh.
Maybe I also wasn’t the best at communicating. As proven just now with Kev, when I was blanked, I tended to withdraw and not make an effort with the other person myself. I’d rather annoy someone than make them think I didn’t care at all.
Sigh.
I really had to work on that.
I pulled my laptop onto my legs and switched windows to my Word document. I really was close to the end—I just had a couple of chapters and a previous scene to write, and one of those chapters was already partially written.
A part of me just… didn’t want to finish.
Finishing meant going home.
It meant saying goodbye to Windermere and Max and Esme. It meant leaving behind this incredible place that I’d absolutely fallen in love with.
A place I knew I could never return to.
How could I possibly come back here one day? Even if I were to get married and have children, there would be a part of me that I wasn’t sure would ever let go of Max. He’d had such an unexpectedly profound impact on my life, and as much as I wanted him to find happiness, I didn’t know if I could stand to see him with anyone else.
I wasn’t sure I could stand to see him alone, either.
Maybe just seeing him was the issue at hand.
I’d asked him last night if we would remain friends, and I wished he’d said no. A friendship would make getting over him harder than it needed to be—and it was already going to be nigh on impossible—and the inevitable slow decline of such a long-term friendship would hurt more than a clean break.
Maybe it was my own fault for asking.
I’d opened the door.
Because there was a teeny, tiny, stupid, teen girl-ish part of me that had hoped he’d say that we wouldn’t be friends.
That we’d be more.
Hope was a silly thing, especially where matters of the heart were concerned. I wasn’t immune to that any more than anyone else, but there’d been a dull ache deep within me ever since we’d spoken last night.
It hadn’t mattered that we’d finished the night watching a movie and arguing over the storyline and how much sense it did or didn’t make to us. We’d ended on good terms, and he’d walked me back to Greygarth Lodge because it was dark, then he’d kissed me goodnight and left.
It was the kind of thing I swooned over.
Yet I didn’t want to write that kind of romance right now.
I ached a little too much for it.
I wanted to go in on my characters for one last emotional ripping, so that’s what I did. I cracked my knuckles and went in, then slowly and systematically ripped my heroine’s heart into a million little shreds.
I tore it up, bit by bit. Bit by endless bloody bit. I put her through the ringer for a reason I wasn’t sure I understood but somewhat made sense given the rest of the story. It didn’t seem out of place, almost as if this had been brewing in the background for the past forty thousand words.
Tears rolled down my cheeks as I started the next chapter, skipping the usual heading so I could get on with the story. I wasn’t even sure I knew what was going on—just that I was tearing apart everything I’d built until this point and dragging the story out longer than I’d intended.
Whatever.
It was working.
It was almost therapeutic, writing this scene. My heroine packed her bags and threw them in her car, gathered up her ornery cat that may or may not have been based on Winston, and got in her car to drive away.
It was a gut-wrenching scene to write, and I felt every emotion so acutely that there was no way I was leaving this building. I hoped like hell that nobody stopped by, because if they did, they were going to stumble upon a hot mess of a woman.