Total pages in book: 196
Estimated words: 180438 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 902(@200wpm)___ 722(@250wpm)___ 601(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 180438 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 902(@200wpm)___ 722(@250wpm)___ 601(@300wpm)
She wasn’t lying. Our interaction went much better than I expected, but I’m almost certain that things will be much different with Sydney. She was almost as hurt as I was by everything that happened, and I know she still hates Ryder because of his dealings with Scott and the fact that Scott tried to rip her off.
Maybe once I tell her that it was Janie behind those posts back then, she’d cut him some slack, but I’m not holding my breath. “Girl, you’re broken the damn Internet. Are you seeing this?”
“No, I closed my phone after posting, and then you called. What are they saying?”
I reached for my tablet but was almost too afraid to look. I hadn’t thought this thing through, but then again, I was always too careful in the past, and it got me nowhere. “Mom, let me call you back.” I was barely aware of hanging up the phone, too sidetracked by the number of notifications on my phone.
Thankfully the first twenty comments are positive, but I didn’t dare push my luck. But just those few bolstered my confidence a bit, especially the ones that said, ‘I knew it’ or ‘I knew they would get back together eventually.’
As I read further down, there were some pretty mean posts aimed at Janie and even more mentioning the podcast mom had talked about. There was wild speculation in the comments section and some statements that showed how closely his fans and mine had been following our story.
I don’t know what I expected, maybe some backlash and I’m sure if I went diving into the wrong side of the net, there’d be plenty of that, but for now, my soul was content with this. I wanted to jump right in with excitement and actually answer some of the comments, but in the end, I cautioned myself not to get carried away.
My PR team, sans Rachel, was going to have a field day, but since I’m not in the habit of giving them too much trouble, I figure they’ll get over it. I thought about hiring someone else to handle my social media accounts but thought that maybe I should hold off on that for now.
Thankfully unlike Janie, Rachel hadn’t used my handles to attack anyone because I guess she knew I would’ve known if she’d been posting anything under my name. She was only in charge of posting commercial news about me, like the release date for my series and anything to do with my music, but until I just posted that picture, there was nothing personal from my end for quite some time. Maybe that’s why the post was garnering so much attention.
My phone started ringing, but since the caller was neither Sydney nor Ryder, I ignored them all. I didn’t stay online too long because I’d done what I intended; now, it was time for the masses to go on a feeding frenzy.
I wasn’t doing this to get back at anyone, and that made it feel all the better. I made up my mind right then and there that I was no longer willing to hide the fact that we were back together. There were too many people involved in our lives the last time, too many voices with their opinions; this time, I wanted to do things our way and not let anyone commercialize my relationship.
I’m going to come at things completely different this time around. I won’t let anyone get in my way, and I certainly let anyone else have the power to destroy us or come between us again. I’d told Ryder to get rid of the people around him who’d had a hand in him marrying someone else, and he’d agreed, so I guess that was the first step in the right direction.
His actions in that regard will decide how we go forward because this was a deal-breaker for me. If he even hints at keeping in contact with any of those people, I know that I am strong enough to walk away. And this time, I won’t bury my head in the sand or hide myself away to lick my wounds. This time I would make him pay because there couldn’t possibly be any excuse he could use after all that we had already been through.
Chapter 73
*Ryder*
“Whoa! What the hell is all this?” I got onto the service elevator in her building that the guys had somehow found and brought me to and pulled out my phone to call her, but there were over a thousand notifications on my phone; at least, that’s what it looked like.
I was expecting it to be more fallout from Janie’s little meltdown since that’s all I’d been seeing on my timeline for the past few days, but instead, I got the shock of my life when an image of Elena and me popped up on the screen.