Delete.
Goddammit. This was definitely not the time to be a smartass, either.
None of it was good enough. No words powerful enough to convince the inconvincible.
My nose stung and my eyes burned and the screen of my phone blurred before my eyes.
I’d fucked up in a way I didn’t know how to fix—didn’t know how to breathe through the fucking pain.
Jesus. If I couldn’t even put together a few fucking words that sounded convincing to myself, she was never going to believe me. Not ever.
“FUCKKK!” I screamed until fire raged in my throat and chucked my useless phone clear across the room and watched it shatter.
I punched at the top of my desk over and over until my hand developed a throb, pulling the pain and blood away from my pathetic pumping heart. Each thud enhanced the ache, and I prayed that somehow, someway, I’d find a way to make it end before the cycle purged my vital organs of enough blood to end me.
Time.
I needed it. Time to think, time to plan, time to understand what this was going to take.
Taking a deep breath and blowing it out, I pulled the sheet of paper over to expose the one beneath it and immediately lost my footing. I turned just in time, sinking to the floor with my back to the mahogany of my desk and clutched at the paper.
Her resignation letter, effective immediately.
She didn’t want my hollow words or pleading looks.
My little shark had bitten the lines of contact clean through.
It was done. Done in a way that I wasn’t remotely ready for. Done in a way that I couldn’t even conceive.
Done in a way that would never actually be done, not ever.
This pain would haunt me for the rest of my life.
I gave myself twenty-four hours to wallow and cry and browse Reddit “my boyfriend is a cheating, cock-sucking, piece-of-scum dirtbag” threads. Okay, maybe they weren’t really titled that, but I’d always enjoyed nicknaming shit.
And when I wasn’t trolling Internet threads, I could’ve been found doing any of the following:
1. Crying. A lot.
2. Turning my phone on and off every five minutes, in hopes that Kline would attempt to contact me. He didn’t, by the way. Not a text, a call, nothing but complete radio silence.
3. Re-watching the first four seasons of Gilmore Girls. If only we could combine Logan, Jess, and Dean to form the perfect man.
4. Eating all of our food. (Cassie was not happy about this.)
5. Taking one thousand BuzzFeed quizzes. I was a Hufflepuff, who should live in San Francisco and preferred NSYNC over Backstreet Boys. Chris Pratt should have been my celebrity husband, I’d have two kids, and my chocolate IQ was insane. Just in case you were wondering.
When BuzzFeed told me The Notebook was the Nicholas Sparks book that best described my love life, I gave it both middle fingers and shut my laptop.
If I was a bird, Kline Brooks could go fuck himself.
But you know what the hardest part was?
I still loved him. God, I loved him. I loved Kline just as much as I had before I’d seen that screenshot from Cassie. And this voice in the back of my head kept insisting something was off.
That Kline wouldn’t have broken my trust like that.
Stupid voice. It was that kind of voice that made people stay in relationships with someone who didn’t deserve them. I also gave that voice both middle fingers. Frankly, I was ready to give every-fucking-body the middle finger. Misery loves company and all that jazz.
Day Two, Post-Kline-breaking-my-heart:
I had managed to get myself out of bed, shower, and make some phone calls to a corporate headhunter so I could find a new job. Sure, I’d slept in Kline’s t-shirt that night and cried myself to sleep, but at least I was taking a step in the right direction. And it should be noted, I left my cell phone on and only checked for missed calls or texts every ten minutes that day.
Baby steps, folks. It was all about the baby steps.
Day three, Post-Kline-breaking-my-heart:
I woke up red-eyed and snotty but had several voicemails with possible job prospects and interview requests. One good thing out of the entire Kline mess, I had a killer résumé and other companies really wanted me on their payroll. I took an interview that day. It was a marketing position for an NFL team, popularly known as the New York Mavericks. They’d had a recent change in management that had left them in dire straits.
I didn’t know anything about football, but I knew marketing. When I sat down for the interview with Frankie Hart, the Maverick’s GM, I reminded myself of that very fact. It didn’t matter how much I knew about the game; all that mattered was if I could market their franchise in a way that was both profitable and creative.