Mostly My Girlfriend

by Doyle, S.

  All unopened.

  “Fuck,” I muttered. “All this time and you didn’t even read them? These last two days you kept denying what I said was the truth, but maybe if you’d read my fucking letters, you would see that wasn’t the case. That I spent those three months apart from you so I could figure out how to let myself love you.”

  “I was trying to quit you,” she whispered. “I thought I was being strong by not opening them. Then you showed up at my apartment last night and I had no strength all.”

  “Trying to quit me? Like I’m some kind of bad habit?” I hated how much that hurt. That, somehow, I was poison to Jules.

  “You are,” she cried. “You’ve spent the past twelve years hurting me without even realizing it, but this last time… This last time you knew what you were doing. You knew what leaving me, after that night we shared, would do to me and you did it anyway!”

  “I’ve also spent the past twelve years loving you, Julia! And you’ve loved me, too. And yes, I get that I’m the worst possible asshole you could have picked to fall in love with, but I’m the one you did!”

  “I never said I loved you,” she whispered.

  “Oh come on! You’re kidding me right now. Of course you love me. Why the fuck else would have you gotten on your knees for me? I’m tired of this, Julia. And yes, it took me a few months, but I’ve finally figured it out. We’ve been lying to each other since we’ve met! Each for our own reasons. It’s got to end.”

  She shook her head. “It’s got to end? Why? Because you suddenly decided you’re ready. Well, maybe I’m not! You started us down this path of friends. You made the rules. You said I shut down after my father died. Well, you shut down when you realized your birth mother abandoned you. When your parents finally told you the truth about the fact that you were born addicted to drugs. And maybe I don’t want to be with someone who is that fucked up!”

  It felt like a slap across the face. My darkest secret. That I was born addicted because my biological mother couldn’t stop herself from doing drugs for nine lousy months while she carried me.

  That Jules would say it in front of a stranger also hurt. Because, despite yesterday and today, that’s all Carol was to us. Really.

  I stood then, slowly, making sure my legs wouldn’t give out. I ran my hand through my hair. My unique reddish-brown hair. From a mother and father whose DNA I carried, but whose faces I didn’t know. DNA coming together in a combination that made me highly intelligent but also highly volatile unless I was either under stringent control or medicated.

  “You don’t want to be with someone so fucked up.” I repeated her words clearly so that they might sink in. “Then what was the point of today? Did you come here just so you could hurt me? Was this supposed to be payback?”

  Jules stood and approached me, but I backed away. “Ethan. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it like that—”

  “No. You know I went to her apartment last night, right?” I said to Carol, who was quiet. “I went there, and I begged her to give me another chance. Kissed her, fucked her, and made her promise to give me one more hour or I wouldn’t let her come. That’s how I got her to meet me here today. Kicking and screaming, or should I say biting and scratching, the whole way.”

  “Ethan!” Jules shouted at me.

  “What? That’s not something we can share with Carol?” I asked snidely. “But my meth addiction as a baby, that’s open for discussion? Maybe you’re right. Maybe we’re both too fucked up for this. I thought therapy might be a way through to the other side, but this isn’t…we’re not getting anywhere.”

  In my head, it had all been so simple. Come back, admit that I screwed up, and tell her I was finally ready to love her.

  What I hadn’t considered was how much I’d hurt her. How that pain would make her curl up inside herself. Just like she’d done when her father died.

  I was finally ready to love her.

  But now I could see…Jules wasn’t ready to love me. And I didn’t know if there was any amount of therapy that might fix that.

  I walked toward the door. If I opened it and left, then this was it. There would be no going back. I’d had to drag her here today because, the truth was, she didn’t know how to say no to me.

  To me, it was proof she couldn’t let me go. Wouldn’t let me go.

  But maybe she was right. Maybe I was just the unhealthy thing she was addicted to and she needed to quit me like a bad habit.

  “Ethan!” she screamed. Screamed with a level of pain I’d never heard before. I did that to her. I’d hurt her and she’d hurt me back. And we were both caught in this twisted fucking relationship.

  And maybe the best thing for both of us was for me to walk away. Because even though she’d tried, she couldn’t.

  I couldn’t look at her. I couldn’t see her agony and I didn’t want her to see my heart breaking. My hand stayed on the doorknob. Such a simple thing to do. Open a door, close it behind me.

  There was some new world out there to conquer. I suppose I could do that…without her?

  “Maybe it’s okay to let go, Jules. Maybe once we’re both free of each other, the pain will stop.”

  I opened the door, stepped through it and closed it behind me. There was no satisfaction in being the one to walk away this time. No sense that I’d done the right thing or the wrong thing.

  Just the sense I’d lost a piece of myself. But if that piece had been cancerous…maybe this was the only way to survive.

  * * *

  Therapy

  Julia

  I dropped into the chair I hoped was behind me. Otherwise, I would have fallen flat on my ass. I was breathing heavily, as if there had been physical exertion, but there’d been none.

  Other than the clenching of my hands into fists so I wouldn’t slap him.

  Really, talking about making me come. In front of our therapist!

  “Julia, are you all right? Can I get you some water, tea?”

  I looked at the older woman sitting calmly in her chair as if what had just happened had not fazed her, even a little. The epic twelve-year-long saga of Ethan and Julia had just come to a crashing end in front of her face.

  And she wanted to know if I wanted water?

  “I suspected this might happen,” she said quietly.

  That I would be destroyed. That we would destroy each other in the telling of the truth.

  He made up the business trip to Paris so he could take me. I’d almost cheated on CJ with Ethan, so I agreed to marry a man I didn’t love just to prove to Ethan that I could live without him.

  There was no getting around any of that. Lying to him about the night he took my virginity, why he was so cold to me the day after the wedding. Because I’d retreated first.

  All these missing pieces were now suddenly out there for both of us to see. But instead of smoothing the way between us, we’d used the truth like knives, slashing at each other until we bled.

  I looked at the stack of letters. Unopened.

  What was in them? What had he said?

  “What? What did you think would happen?” I asked.

  “Ethan’s looking for proof. You left yesterday and he was able to bring you back. We don’t need to go into the details of how. Now he needs to see that you’re invested in this, too. That’s it not him pulling you along, but you choosing to go. So the question is…are you?”

  I tried to logic my way through what I was feeling. The reasons I’d come to my decisions. “I’d decided that Ethan was an addiction and not very good for my emotional health. I chose to leave because of that. Him, walking away from me…that could be a good thing. I’ll be less likely to relapse, right?”

  Carol sighed and smiled a little sadly. “Julia, Ethan isn’t an addiction. He’s a man you’re in love with and sometimes love…is painful. You’re a grown-up now. You know that. He made mistakes. You also made mistakes. The question is, what do you want to do about it? You have two options. Yes, you can walk away from him. Or you can fight.
”

  FIGHT!

  It was strange how quickly my thoughts answered that question. As if I had been a general in a past life and someone was calling me to battle.

  Fight for Ethan. Fight for us.

  We’d never done that before. We’d only ever fought against us being…us.

  “Well?” she asked me, her eyebrows raised.

  I looked at the clock above her head. “We still have thirty minutes left. Do not go anywhere.”

  Standing then, I ran out of the office, through the lobby until I reached the elevators. I kept hitting the down button as if, somehow, that action controlled the speed of the elevator.

  After an interminable amount of time, the elevator dinged. Thankfully it was empty so when I hit the L for the lobby, I could jump up and down saying hurry, hurry, hurry over and over again.

  When it reached the lobby, I took off my heels and ran over the slick marble tile of the executive office space as fast as I could. I pushed open the doors to the street and saw that it was raining.

  Awesome. A woman running down Union Street with a pair of shoes in her hand would look even better if I was drenched. It wasn’t a question of which direction to go. Because this was Ethan and I knew him better than anyone on the planet. He would want to walk, and he would want to be near the water. Which meant toward the piers.

  Not three minutes into my sprint, I saw him, also drenched because he’d left his coat behind at the office.

  He was wearing the same clothes from yesterday because he’d spent the night at my place. Had Carol already known what happened between us last night?

  “Ethan! Stop!” I freaked out a few of the people casually walking under their umbrellas in front of me, but when I skirted around them, I saw he had stopped at the end of the street.

  He turned and the look on his face…it was like that time in college after his parents had taken him home. When he’d come back to tell me he was leaving. When I saw him for the first time, and he was looking at me.

  Not that he was happy. More like he was whole again.

  I stopped a few feet in front of him. “We’re not done our hour,” I panted.

  “I’m trying to do the right thing by you, Jules,” he said. “What if that means leaving?”

  “I’m not going to let you run again. You asked me to forgive you for leaving. Okay. You do it a second time and I won’t.”

  “I had to beg you to come back…”

  I shrugged. “You led with begging. How do you know I wouldn’t have come back if you just asked me nicely? Now come with me. Our time is running out.”

  “An hour, two hours isn’t enough time for us to fix this, Jules.”

  “Good, because we’ve only got twenty minutes. Twenty-five if we hurry back.”

  “Jules…”

  “Ethan!” I shouted, feeling the frustration get the better of me. “I’m fighting for us! I need you to fight with me!”

  “I don’t want to hurt you anymore,” he said, reaching for my hand.

  I grasped it, linked my fingers with his, then pulled him. “Then don’t. Now, let’s go.”

  12

  Therapy

  Ethan

  “You’re both back,” Carol said with a smile when, together, we burst through the door of her office. “Stay here. I’ll get some towels from the ladies’ restroom so you can dry off. And don’t sit on my good leather chairs.”

  She left us alone in her office. We were panting because Jules had made us run and, truth was, I had no idea what she thought was going to change in the next twenty minutes. But the reality of seeing Julia running after me, screaming for me, wasn’t something I could walk away from.

  If she wanted to fight for us, I would fight with her.

  I watched as she walked over to Carol’s desk and picked up my letters. She opened the one on top and started reading.

  “You don’t have to read them,” I said. “I can sum up. I apologize a lot and tell you how I’ve always loved you, which until recently, has scared the crap out of me.”

  She twirled around. “You’re not scared anymore?”

  “No. The only thing that scares me is the thought that I pushed you too far. Hurt you too much. That I broke us, and I can’t fix us. That Carol can’t fix us.”

  Jules looked at the letter and smiled at something I’d written.

  “When I left this office, I thought about what came next. What new world I would conquer. I thought about doing it without you this time and, holy shit, did that suck.”

  She shook her head.

  “You have to say the words, Jules. I need to hear them. I love you. I’m in love with you. I’m so over the moon crazy about you that it fills me up. And it fucked me up, but not anymore.”

  She set the letters on the desk and walked toward me. When she was close, she looked into my eyes. Then over them. “Your eyebrows need to be trimmed.”

  “Probably,” I huffed.

  “No, that’s what I would always say when I wanted to say something else instead. I love you, Ethan Moss. I always have. Even when I thought you were weird.”

  I cupped her face in my hands and kissed her. And in that kiss, I felt whole again. But even more than that, I felt bigger and more invincible, just like I always did when I was with Jules. I’d been such an ass. I’d always been afraid of letting myself love her because I didn’t think I could control it when, the whole time, loving her made me stronger than I’d ever been before.

  I pulled away nearly in shock from it. “I really get to have you?”

  She nodded. “Yeah. Don’t fuck it up.”

  I could feel the tears well up in my eyes, knew she could see them, but it didn’t bother me even a little bit.

  Then I remembered something.

  “Hey, do you have a dollar?”

  She blinked. “Are you serious right now?”

  “Yeah, you need to give me a dollar.”

  “Hookay. Like I said. Weirdo.” She turned and grabbed the purse she’d left behind when she’d come running after me.

  Running. After. Me. I was going to remind her of that for the rest of my life.

  Opening her wallet, she searched through her bills and pulled out a five. “I only have this.”

  I took it from her and shoved it in my back pocket. “That’s okay, I’ll give you change.”

  “What are we doing here? An emergency trip to the vending machine?” she asked as if I’d suddenly gone insane.

  “You never asked me who I sold the company to,” I told her.

  She shook her head exasperated. “I still can’t believe you did that, Ethan. I think we could manage a relationship and working together. If you think about it, we’ve done it this long. Only now it will also include sex! Okay, so who was it? Oh, please tell me not that asshole British billionaire, Harry Britton. He’s been pushing you for years to merge your two companies. I mean, really, Ethan we’re nowhere close to finishing the job you started in changing the airline industry. I can’t believe you’re willing to walk away from that. Maybe you can undo what you did?”

  I shook my head. “I don’t want to undo it. And if you think we can manage a relationship and working together, then maybe you’ll hire me.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “It was you. I sold the company for one dollar…to you. We just now completed the transaction. There are some things you need to sign, sure, but Daniel has it all drawn up.”

  I watched her jaw drop and smiled. “I wanted us to be equals. So now I’m a billionaire, well, less of a billionaire but still freaking rich, and you’re a billionaire…”

  “Ethan,” she said, clutching her chest. “You’re insane.”

  “No, I’m in love and the company was the only other thing of value, besides me, I had to give to you. No matter what happened.”

  The door to Carol’s office opened again and she entered with a roll of paper towels in her hands. “Okay, are we ready to begin?”

  “No need to bot
her, Carol,” Jules said, still smiling at me. “We’re not going to need the full hour, after all. Turns out we were just in love with each other this whole time.”

  “Shocking.” She chuckled. “I’ll send you my bill.”

  We left the office, hand in hand. We were alone when we got on the elevator. When I hit the lobby button Jules gasped.

  “What?” I asked her. The truth was, I didn’t think my heart could take any more emotion in one day. I wanted to take Jules home, fuck her like I meant it, then order a pizza and watch a movie. Nothing more dramatic than that.

  “I just realized something. If I hire you, then I get to be the boss of you.”

  “Turnabout is fair, I suppose. Just tell me you’ll be kind.”

  “Sure I will,” she said with a ruthless gleam in her eye. “Ethan, get down on your knees. Now.”

  Yeah. This was going to be fun.

  * * *

  Three months later

  A yacht near Fiji

  Julia

  “What are we going to do today?”

  I was currently lying on Ethan’s naked chest in our ridiculously GINORMOUS bed on our yacht, admiring my wedding and engagement ring combo. Suffice it to say, I only had first-world problems these days.

  “I was thinking of making love to you in a little bit.”

  I rested my chin on his chest while his hand stroked my back, pausing every now and then to squeeze my ass.

  “But we just did that.”

  He sighed. “Jules, the way I see it, we’ve got twelve years of sex to make up for.”

  I kissed his fuzzy nipple. “That’s a lot of sex.”

  “Which makes it a good thing you’re so insatiable when it comes to me.”

  I rolled onto my back and lifted my left hand up so I could keep admiring the physical representation of being Mrs. Julia Moss.

  The media that covered our wedding, which we’d tried to keep as small and as private as possible by doing it on a remote island in Hawaii, declared Billionaire Visionary Ethan Moss Marries College Sweetheart.