“I knew that Load-y chick was bad news,” Melissa chirped happily, like she’d won a prize or something. Goddamn rotten bitch.
“The whole reason I hired her on the spot was because she hadn’t heard of the show. She wasn’t lusting after him like all the other little tarts I met with. Clearly, that backfired.”
“She probably wanted him from the beginning. Lied about not knowing about the show,” Melissa proposed just because, without Melody here to defend herself, she could.
Going crazy from the comments but having literally zero energy to deal with them, I ducked inside the break room instead of going all the way to my office, tossed my briefcase down on a chair and sank my face into my hands.
Fucking shit, I don’t want to live like this anymore.
Up and down, I scrubbed at the skin as if it could erase every miserable thing that had happened in the last week.
The show. The goddamn breakup. Life here, without her.
I hated all of it. And this one fucking week felt like it had lasted a year.
Frustrated that I couldn’t get any relief from the terrible ache in my chest no matter how hard I scrubbed at my face, I snatched my briefcase from the chair and turned to leave the room when bright blue and pink icing caught my eye.
A cake, celebrating the end of the show.
Congratulations, Dr. Cummings, it read. Dr. Obscene has cum to an end.
Cute.
Obviously, I wasn’t in much of a mood to gorge on sugar and celebrate the ending of a docuseries that had pretty much ruined my life.
All of the rage inside me built and broke at once, raising my arm with my briefcase up above my head involuntarily and bringing it down roughly…right on the cake.
Icing and perfectly moist crumbs shot out the sides and sprayed the fabric of my pants, the table, and everything else within a three-foot radius.
All of the women came running.
Marlene was actually the first to slide through the door—and start to cackle hysterically.
“Oh dear,” Betty remarked.
Melissa and Beth just stood there, hands to their mouths.
Done with it all, I grabbed my icing-coated briefcase and headed back for the door.
“I’m taking the day off.”
“Uh…” Melissa started as I shoved past her, forcing her to pull her body up and out of the way to avoid getting coated in icing. “But what about your patients?”
“I don’t care. Give them to someone else.”
And I didn’t. I couldn’t have cared fucking less in that moment if I’d tried.
Funny, I thought. That damn show tried so hard to fuck up my career and failed. Until the last episode…where it broke two people’s hearts.
My life had been reduced to six cardboard boxes.
Sound familiar?
Well, it was familiar, only this time, I was moving out of my parents’ apartment.
It’d been two weeks since I’d last seen Will. Two weeks since I’d quit my job at his practice and ended our relationship. Time had nearly stood still for the first few days. They’d gone about as awful as anyone could imagine they’d go for a twenty-nine-year-old woman, fresh off of another failed relationship, jobless, and still living with her parents. But, eventually, after I’d had time to isolate myself from the world and lick my wounds to a tolerable level of pain, I’d found a way to pick myself up off of the floor and put myself back on shaky, unstable feet.
It’d taken baby steps, but slowly and with determination, I found things to focus on, things to fill my days so that my mind didn’t have much time to think about Will. And it had worked for the most part, besides when I’d lie in bed at night, without the warmth and comfort of his arms. It was those quiet, lonely moments when I’d realize just how much I missed him. Just how much I still loved him. But before I could do something rash like show up to his apartment and beg for him to take me back, I’d remember just how much he’d hurt me.
How much I’m willing to give up for one of his stupid smiles.
And that was still a very present reminder of why I needed to look forward, to move on.
My frugal money habits had turned out to be a positive force. Before quitting my job, I’d managed to save enough funds so I could put down a deposit on an apartment in SoHo. Of course, I was renting for cheap from a friend of the family and had only enough reserves to pay bills for six months until I figured out what my next career step would be, but it was something.
I wouldn’t say life was good, but I was doing everything I could to make it better.
“Melody,” my mother said as she peeked inside her work-out room, where I was putting the last of my clothes inside an empty box. “Do you want me to box up the microwave for you?”
I smiled and shook my head. “Thanks, Mom, but I don’t need your microwave.”
She’d been at this line of questioning for the past two hours. Like clockwork, every fifteen minutes, Janet would peek past the door and try to give me something from their apartment. First, it was the coffee table. Then it was the sofa. Although, Bill quickly interjected his opposition to that. My father lived for that leather sofa, and the worn-in print of his ass on the seat beside the window proved he’d spent more time on that piece of furniture than anywhere else in the apartment.
Basically, she’d been trying to give me everything but the kitchen sink. Though, I wouldn’t have been surprised if she eventually offered to pack that up in a box, too.
Janet sighed and leaned her head against the doorframe. “I just want to help you somehow.”
“Mom, you’ve already helped me enough,” I said with a thankful smile. “Don’t worry, I’m a big girl. I’ll be just fine on my own.”
“I guess I should just be happy that you’re only moving a twenty-minute subway ride away instead of all the way across the country.”
I grinned. “Exactly.”
She slid open the door and walked toward me with a small white envelope in her hands. “Here,” she said as she held it out toward me, and I tilted my head to the side in confusion.
“What is this?”
“Just a little something your father and I wanted to give you.”
“Mom, seriously, you guys don’t—”
She cut me off with a raise of her hand. “We do, actually. We want to give this to you.”
I stared at the envelope. “I know it’s money, Mom.”
“Yeah, so?” She shrugged. “We’re proud of you, Melody. And we just wanted to give you a little extra funds so that you have the time to find a job that you really love.”
“Wow… I don’t know what to say…”
“You don’t need to say anything right now,” she said with a soft smile. “Because there’s actually someone here to see you.”
Will?
My heart jumped into my throat at the mere thought of his name, but then it quickly plummeted to my feet when the person who replaced my mother in the doorway wasn’t him.
“Need any help packing?” Georgia asked with a friendly grin and a motherly hand resting on top of her belly.
“What are you doing here?” I asked and hated that my voice held a hint of disappointment.