Page 28 of It Destroys Me

Once I stopped trying to sabotage our every move, things had gotten better, headed in a direction I didn’t want them to go. “Better.”

“They were bad before?”

“I was a dick to her.”

“You’re always a dick. To everyone.”

“Well, I was an exceptionally big dick to her.”

“Why?”

I took another drink and watched him stare me down. “It became too real, too fast. I was fucking a married woman, and then I found myself…in a relationship. Once I became aware of that fact, I tried to tear it down. Like I always do.”

“Like you did with me,” he teased.

“Yeah, pretty much.”

“And now that you aren’t being an exceptionally big dick, are you happy?”

“Happy.” I uttered the word like it was the first time I’d ever said it. Like it was in a language I didn’t understand. “That’s too harsh a word.”

“Hate is too harsh a word.”

“Not for me. It’s in my everyday vocabulary.”

“So, are you happy or not?”

I’d never been happy my whole life. Even when I was married, I was miserable because I knew how it was going to end, with me as a widower. Even when I smoked and exchanged laughs with my brother, that wasn’t happiness. It was just a brief respite from the grind and hustle of my misery. Even my best moments with Axel weren’t happy ones. “No.”

He cocked his head slightly.

“Are you?”

He continued to stare at me like he didn’t understand the question. “You really need to ask?”

“No…I guess I don’t.” He grinned every time Scarlett was mentioned. Smirked whenever she walked into the room. Lit up like the sun whenever he talked about his kids. He was a different man from the one he’d been when he’d had to dump Scarlett and pretend it was for someone else. He was the lowest he’d ever been, low like I was now.

“You got the woman you want, Theo.”

“Not really. It has contingencies.”

“What contingencies?”

“Bolton, for one.”

“What’s another?” Axel asked.

“Everything else.”

He continued to stare.

“Once he’s dead, I have to deal with everything else.”

“Such as?”

“Marriage and kids…shit like that.”

“That sounds terrible right now, but if you give it enough time, it won’t,” he said. “If you read the last page of the story without all the pages in between, it’s not going to make any sense. It’ll feel rough and abrupt without all the context and buildup.”