Page 44 of This Time Around
Fifteen
Rebecca
Sleep well.Sleep well.
I punched my pillow again and flipped to my other side.
Sleep well.Yeah right.It was the kiss of death when he said that.
Like I could sleep when Cooper was downstairs, spread out all over my couch.I could still feel his lips at my temple.The brush of his thumb over my cheek.
I could still see the heat in his eyes he didn’t bother trying to hide when he leaned in close to me.I saw it coming from a mile away and I still stood there.Let him press his lips to me, and I inhaled the scent of him, the heat of his body so close to mine and still touching me.
And I liked it.
Nothing wrong with trying to find happiness.
Brooke’s message assaulted my brain, mixed with Cooper’s voice telling me practically the same thing.
Earlier conversations I’d had with Brooke and Kelly, another friend, Jordan’s best friend’s wife who’d been at The Tavern the other night, too.One I was surprised hadn’t contacted me yet.
But, both of them had told me the same thing one night, drunk at my house, crying over Joseph and the despair at the mere thought of ever having another man touch me.
Both of them, the traitors, had saucily said, “Get it over with.Sleep with someone when you’re ready, when you want it.Take it for you, who cares about them.”
It was rotten advice.
I wanted to follow it.
Freaking Max and Cooper.And Brooke and Kelly and their perfect happy marriages with children and living everything I had and still so desperately wanted to have back.
It wasn’t possible though, and like Jordan said earlier, I really needed to begin dealing with it.
I knew exactly where to begin.
Shoving off my sheets, I grabbed the lavender robe I always dropped on the floor next to my bed.
Unable to bear it another moment and before I lost my nerve, I stomped to the closet and flung the door open.It slammed against the wall and bounced back toward me.I tossed my hand out, stopping the door before it smacked my shoulder.
We had a small walk-in closet.Clothes were crookedly jammed onto hangers.Shoes were piled and kicked into buckets at the bottom, toppling over — mostly on my side.
Sweaters and sweatshirts and jeans were stacked on shelves so haphazardly that if I pulled the wrong one without having a grip on the right one, the entire tower came tumbling down.
Cooper was right, damn it.I’d known that.I’d just been avoiding it.
Tonight, I wasn’t.
Living in this house with every single freakinginchof it reminding me of Joseph wasn’t helping me a single little bit.
Before I changed my mind, I grabbed a stack of his sweatshirts and flung them all to the floor of my bedroom.I grabbed another pile, and another pile.
With every toss of his clothes I heaved over my shoulder, my cheeks grew wetter and my arms more tired.I didn’t stop.
I cleaned out every damn inch of his side of the closet, swooping down to pick up two shirts from the pile that snagged my attention.His favorite Iowa State Sweatshirt and a Cyclones Football long sleeve shirt he’d worn to every home game he’d attended.
I slept in his shirt sometimes and over the winter I practically lived in his sweatshirt.Unable to let them go, I shoved my face into them, inhaling.They no longer smelled like him.
They were clothes.He was gone.
