Separation Anxiety

by Lisa Suzanne

  SEPARATION ANXIETY

  Lisa Suzanne

  © 2014 Lisa Suzanne

  All rights reserved. In accordance with the US Copyright Act of 1976, the scanning, uploading, and sharing of any part of this book without the permission of the publisher or author constitute unlawful piracy and theft of the author’s intellectual property. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system without the written permission of the author, except where permitted by law and except for excerpts used in reviews. If you would like to use any words from this book other than for review purposes, prior written permission must be obtained from the publisher.

  Published by Lisa Suzanne at Amazon.

  ISBN-13: 978-1494906016

  ISBN-10: 1494906015

  This book is a work of fiction. Any similarities to real people, living or dead, are purely coincidental. All characters and events in this work are figments of the author’s imagination.

  All songs, titles, and lyrics mentioned in this book are property of the songwriters.

  Cover Art by Kellie Dennis at Book Cover by Design: http://www.bookcoverbydesign.co.uk

  PRAISE FOR LISA SUZANNE’S BOOKS

  How He Really Feels

  “I found myself completely lost in the story and hated when it had to come to an end… Romantic and steamy, a perfect combo.” –Nikki S., Winding Stairs Book Blog

  “I feel the budding of a wonderful writer in our presence.” –Desiree, The Book Bar

  What He Really Feels

  “I absolutely fell in love with Lisa Suzanne’s writing style and storyline in ‘How He Really Feels’ and my feelings have only solidified in this recent installment.” –Kelly, Kiss and Tell Reviews

  “Lisa Suzanne did an incredible job in keeping me very interested in the general story line… not just in Travis’ story, but in the whole thing.” –Lydia, HEA Book Shelf

  “I started the book before going to bed, thinking I could just start it but ending up staying up until 4 am to FINISH the book!” –Jessica, Jessica’s Book Review

  “Reading this book reminded me why I love to read.” –Penny, Promiscuous Book Blog

  ALSO BY LISA SUZANNE

  How He Really Feels (He Feels, Book 1)

  What He Really Feels (He Feels, Book 2)

  Coming Soon

  Since He Really Feels (He Feels, Book 3)

  To Rock Man and Sadie Elizabeth,

  my family,

  and

  Team LSD

  CHAPTER 1

  We all get one true love in our lives, and it’s up to us to find it. Fate will act and try to push us together, but ultimately it’s up to us to recognize who that one person is when he’s standing in front of us.

  Maybe other people don’t believe that, but that’s what I believed. And I thought that Richard was that for me. I truly believed that while we were dating and when we got engaged.

  But then we got married.

  Is it strange that I considered us separated from almost the moment we had gotten married?

  Now that we actually were separated, I was starting to wonder when one of us would finally make the first move toward the inevitable incision that would sever the ties of our marriage.

  And as I sat there thinking about the very thing that had weighed heavy on my mind for a year, I wondered if I should be the one to finally make that first move.

  I never thought it would be us, at least not when we’d been dating or after we’d gotten engaged. I’d always heard about those stupid Hollywood couples citing “irreconcilable differences,” and I always thought it was a really clever way to say that they couldn’t solve their own problems. Well, guess what?

  Richard and I couldn’t solve our own problems.

  It wasn’t for lack of trying, though. For my part, at least, I had done everything that I could.

  I suggested counseling the moment I saw that we were growing apart. Richard made it to one session before giving up. One.

  I tried talking to him, but it was like talking to a wall. I asked him what I could do to fix things, but how do you fix something that’s irreparable?

  Those damn irreconcilable differences came back to haunt me. Our lives had grown separate ways, and in the end, that was what tore us apart. Unfortunately, I just didn’t have it in me to try to make something work that just wasn’t working anymore.

  “Veronica, is there anything you’d like to add?” Bill’s voice intruded on my thoughts.

  Shit.

  I really needed to focus. I was sitting in a meeting with the parents and teachers of one of my students. Jacob’s parents were concerned with his behavior and grades, and our assistant principal, Bill Robinson, had pulled together a meeting and scheduled it for the end of the day on a Friday.

  Nothing pissed a group of teachers off more than scheduling a meeting on a Friday after school.

  But there I was, dwelling once again on my personal issues that had plagued me for over a year while I was supposed to be focusing on the meeting I was sitting in.

  I smiled warmly at the people sitting across from me. “I think that covers it,” I said, hoping that I didn’t miss a beat somewhere. I’d already given my feedback earlier. He was a good kid who got bored easily, and honestly, after five years as an English teacher, it wasn’t the first time I’d seen it. I found ways to keep him entertained so he didn’t become a behavior issue for me.

  “Thank you for your time,” Bill said. “Teachers, you are dismissed.”

  Thank God.

  I walked at my normal brisk pace back to my classroom, grabbed my purse out of my desk, and headed out the door.

  I hadn’t told anybody about the separation, and neither had Richard. Instead, he slept in the guest bedroom and we avoided each other as much as possible. We avoided our friends who were couples while we both postponed the inevitable. But, honestly, we both knew that there was no hope, and I wasn’t sure anymore what we were holding onto.

  Maybe it was easier just to stay married and live separately, but I was starting to think that was stupid. I was ready to be done with my life with Richard, and I was ready to be done with the lie we’d been living for the past year.

  I thought about the things that helped me to know that it was over. When I got home from somewhere and saw his car in the garage, I felt my heart drop as the heavy weight that had disappeared when we were apart bore back down on my shoulders. I didn’t miss him when we were apart, and I didn’t feel those same urges to reach out to squeeze his hand or to lean in for a random hug. We’d lost the affectionate side of our relationship a long time ago, and we both knew that there was no getting it back. And affection was something I craved. I didn’t need to always be on top of my significant other; but I missed those sweet glances from across the room, or the knowing smile, or the way we had found reasons to touch each other when we had first gotten together.

  Our initial attraction had been instant. As silly as it sounds, we met on a blind date. A friend from work, Quinn, was dating Paul. Paul had a single friend and Quinn had me, and the four of us went to dinner and a movie one night. The instant attraction crackled through the air between us.

  My jaw dropped when I had first seen him; he had dark hair that he pushed back when it fell across his forehead, and his green eyes were piercing and locked onto my brown eyes. Even sitting in a chair as he was when I first spotted him, I could tell that he was strong and powerful. When he gracefully unfolded himself from the chair and walked toward me, arm outstretched to shake my hand, I felt an instant connection when his skin touched mine.

  Three years later we were married in a quaint cer
emony with two hundred of our closest friends and family. And now, another two years later, we were on the brink of divorce.

  Thank God we hadn’t had kids yet, because this was hard enough without considering the little lives we’d be tearing apart with our separation.

  So what had happened from that magical night of our blind date to the present?

  In one word, plenty.

  I thought back to our courtship with really fond memories. We had taken things slowly mostly at my request. He had been ready to sleep with me the first night he had met me, he’d revealed to me after the first time we’d had sex. But I made him wait a month. I wasn’t sure why, but I just felt like rushing things was going to be a mistake. Who knew five years later that even taking things slowly would still be a mistake?

  We were in our early twenties when we first met, and now we were in our late twenties. We’d grown together before we’d grown apart, and I wasn’t sure exactly who I was on my own anymore. I was so used to being part of a couple, to being the other half, that I wasn’t sure how to strike out and just be me anymore. Veronica Thomas had once been Veronica Freemont before she married Richard Thomas. So how did I go back to who I was before I’d met him?

  The answer was difficult as it stared me right in the face: I couldn’t go back to the girl I was before him. For better or worse, we’d changed each other, just like any person has the ability to change another person, and I could never be who I was before him again. So the task ahead of me was to figure out who I was – on my own – now.

  As I got into my car after my parent meeting that Friday afternoon, I glanced at my text messages. I had one from Quinn.

  You coming to happy hour? her text asked. I was late because of the damn parent meeting.

  I replied, On my way now. Then I started my car and headed to the bar.

  I met Quinn when I started teaching at Central Valley High School five years earlier. It had been within the first month of school that she had set me up with Richard. Now Paul was long out of the picture, and Quinn was happily living the single life, hopping from bar to bar on the weekends and bed to bed where necessary. I’d always been a little jealous of her single life. I guess even from the start, Richard had made me feel tied down, like a prisoner in my own home. Okay, that was a bit dramatic, even if it was kind of true. But I was so damn blinded by those green eyes and the money and promises that Richard had made that I let some of the little stuff slide.

  I was lost in thought as I pulled into the parking lot of our weekly happy hour haunt, and then I felt that little fluttery feeling when I spotted Jesse’s truck in the lot.

  Richard hadn’t been unfaithful, and neither had I. But I had never been blind, either. Jesse Drake was gorgeous. He had these mysterious, dark brown eyes and this perfect silky and thick, dark hair that was always manscaped in that beautiful way that looked at once like he didn’t bother and like he ran his hands through it a million times a day. He had that look of a healthy, lean athlete. He was one of our school counselors, and he was the kind of good looking that encouraged the teenage girls to literally make up problems so that they could get out of class to go talk to him. He was the kind of good looking that caused me to take the long route to the office copiers just so I could swing by his office and catch a glance. He was the kind of good looking that made my heart skip a beat when I saw his big black truck in the school parking lot when I pulled into my space each morning. And he was the kind of good looking that set the flutters on fire in my belly when I saw that he was at the bar for our weekly happy hour.

  Jesse and I became friends when I had started working at Central. He had been there for a few years before me, and he filled me in on who to avoid and where to go to get all of my questions answered. He’d become a mentor my first year, and over the years, we’d grown closer as friends. I’d always held an attraction to him, but I was with Richard. Not only was I in a relationship, but Jesse was so far out of my league that we weren’t even playing the same game.

  We exchanged numbers so that he could help me anytime I needed it, and now, five years later, we were text buddies. His tended toward funny picture texts, and I always tried my best to respond with something equally witty so we’d have a little inside joke together. He was a great colleague and an even better counselor. He loved his job and he loved working with high school kids, and, from what I knew about him, he loved women. He was single, a pretty well-known player, and he was an expert with the flirty banter. He occasionally told me about his conquests, building his reputation as a sexy bad boy, and I shared stories mostly about my classroom. For some reason, I just didn’t want to talk to Jesse about my relationship.

  So maybe I had nursed a little crush on him, but I knew that even thinking about hooking up with him was all kinds of bad, not that he would even want me. For one thing, I depended on him for a lot of help since I was the senior English team lead and he was the head senior counselor. And for another thing, I was still married in the eyes of God and the law, and I knew I was in no way even close to being ready to jump into something new.

  Even separated, I was still married. I had to keep reminding myself of that fact as I stared at Jesse Drake’s truck for a moment. I took a deep breath.

  Those little flutters low in my tummy just weren’t going away, and as I found myself walking toward the door to enter the bar, they started battling against the inside of my stomach as my heart joined in and started pounding in my chest. I forced another deep breath into my lungs, wondering why I suddenly had nerves. I’d always been attracted to Jesse, but my body had never reacted quite like that before just in anticipation of seeing him.

  I glanced around and found my group in the usual spot. About half of the English department showed up to happy hour, as did about half of the Social Studies teachers, so we had a group of over ten teachers. My heart stopped its loud pounding and those flutters went away when I saw that Jesse wasn’t at the table. I snuck a quick scan of the entire bar, but I didn’t see him anywhere.

  “Veronica!” my happy hour friends exclaimed as I approached the table. Our ritual was to yell out the name of each person upon arrival.

  I grinned, feeling disappointed that he wasn’t there as I took one of the two open seats at the table, wondering why his truck was there but he wasn’t. The bar was at the end of a strip mall, so maybe he was visiting one of the other shops in the area. I silently berated myself, picking up a menu as Quinn’s eyes met mine across the table. She grinned and I smiled back as I thought about how adorable she always was. Her naturally curly blonde hair and her bright blue eyes and her high cheekbones and her perfect figure always tended to draw the attention of men.

  “Good meeting?” she asked.

  I shrugged. “Who the fuck schedules a meeting on a Friday afternoon?” I complained.

  “Bill!” everyone in hearing distance exclaimed. He was notorious for doing that, and we all hated it.

  “What can I get for you, sweetie?” the waitress asked, pen poised over her pad of paper.

  “Double vodka seven,” I replied. “And potato skins,” I added on second thought. Shit, I was separated and a little depressed, and it wasn’t like anyone was around who was going to judge my eating habits. I might as well enjoy some fucking potato skins.

  “On your own check?” she asked, and I nodded.

  The moment she stepped away, something in the air changed. I felt an electric undercurrent, and instinctively I knew that he was there. Then he appeared, pulling out the chair next to me and sitting down.

  Those annoying little flutters immediately reignited in my belly.

  Great.

  This crush of mine was starting to get out of control.

  “You know they don’t pay for overtime, right?” Jesse asked, his eyes meeting mine. I noticed for the first time the half-drank beer that had been sitting on the table, and no one had yelled out his name when he sat down, so apparently he had been here for awhile. If I had to guess, I figured he’d either gone t
o the restroom or he’d gone to the bar to chat up some of the ladies seated there, but my quick scan when I’d walked in hadn’t spotted him, so I figured it was the former. And I was glad, because I didn’t like the thought of him flirting with other women. I wanted him flirting with me.

  I had to stop these thoughts. This was wrong on multiple levels.

  I started a repetitive chant in my head: “Stop it! He’s not for you! Stop it! He’s not for you!”

  “Yep,” I said, trying to catch my breath as his dark eyes bored into mine. God damn, he was hot. And just like that, those eyes of his made the chanting stop. In fact, it was replaced with a new chant: “Holy fuck! He’s so hot! Holy fuck! He’s so hot!”

  Dammit.

  “What was the holdup?”

  “Parent meeting.”

  “Fucking Bill,” he muttered, running a hand through his hair as I chuckled.

  The waitress was on the other side of the table, and Jesse held up his glass and tapped the side, the universal signal meaning, “I’ll have another.”

  She nodded, and I swore I saw her blush a little, and then she scampered off to put in our orders.

  “How did that lesson on satire go?” Quinn yelled from across the table, interrupting what was sure to be the start of some flirty banter between Jesse and me.

  “Fine,” I said. She had helped me plan a killer lesson, and I was using it first with my honors kids. She was going to try it the following week with her on-level students. “They came up with some really great examples.”

  I had thought about telling Quinn that Richard and I were over about a million times, but I still hadn’t. She had become my very best friend over the past five years. We had a great time together, laughing at lunch until we both had tears streaming down our faces at the most ridiculously immature things, and we gave each other solid advice and could have lengthy, deep talks. But something about the fact that she was the one who helped me find Richard made me pause when telling her. I literally had told not a single soul about the separation. I just wasn’t ready for the assured looks of sympathy I’d receive and the advice about how to fix a marriage. It was too broken to recover. We weren’t just bent; we were broken beyond repair, and the bigger issue was that neither of us wanted to fix it anymore. We’d given it the old college try for two years, and sometimes things just don’t work out.