Pete:Looking for my first rebound mistake. U?
If I want to consider Mitch my rebound after Hunter, then I don’t need to repeat my mistake with someone else. At least Pete knows me well enough to appreciate sarcasm.
Liv:Living my best life in paradise.
My last message deserves a photo attachment—proof of life and paradise. But that means leaving my bed, and if Hunter can’t coax me to eat on the balcony with ocean views or lie beside our private pool, then I’m not going to do it to send a photo to Pete. My bed can be the center of my world for a little longer. Through the open door, I don’t have to get up to see Hunter out on the balcony, reading or checking something on his phone.
The sun is setting, and an idea starts to form. We booked the resort for three weeks. Mitch insisted we’d get bored and want to leave, but as long as I agreed he could fly back to the mainland if we—or he—got stir-crazy, he allowed me my dream honeymoon. A honeymoon that Hunter paid for. No, I can’t think about Hunter and honeymoons in the same sentence.
This would have been the perfect place to start the rest of my life as a wife. For all the same reasons, it’s the perfect place todecide what I want for the rest of my life. My friends and family are obviously concerned, and the best way to stop their worrying is to give them a reason to stop.
Without leaving my bed, I wait with my phone poised until the sun shoots out the last of the day’s energy, reds and oranges exploding across the sky as the perfect backdrop to the ocean view. Click, click, snap. The perfect photo is muted by the sheer drapes but captures my range of emotions.
Life was happening outside while I was inside planning a wedding. I can’t stop searching for a reason or a sign—from why Mitch felt the need to cheat to why I had an urgent need to go back to the house and print out my vows. I’d practiced them so often, I could have taken ten minutes to rewrite them. Why had I wanted to call on Hunter to take me back to the house instead of rewriting my vows? Thinking about Hunter, why is he sitting alone on the balcony of my honeymoon villa instead of back in Sydney with friends or down on the beach catching a wave?
I have hundreds of questions and decisions to make, but I can start with putting people’s minds at ease.
Relationship Detox Day 1: The sun will come up tomorrow. #heartbreak #hope #newbeginnings
The perfect tag for the perfect photo, posted on all my socials. My family will understand, and maybe one day I’ll look back and admire the woman who chose when to face the world and when to take a time-out.
My phone reads two am, but that can’t be right. The villa has an unlimited supply of alcohol and after an initial nap, I opened and downed half a bottle of wine. After crashing out for another couple of hours, sleep evades me, and I don’t want to be alone with my thoughts. Hunter is still asleep outside on the day bed, and I hate feeling trapped inside with my pain, feeling unlovable and alone.
I want the other half of the bottle to numb the humiliation and pain. I want Hunter to wake and take the bottle from my hand. I desperately want him to look into my eyes while reassuring me that I don’t need to drink to forget, and that memories of yesterday will fade with time. I want my family to get their asses on a plane and come here and insist that even if I don’t need them, they’re here for me.
I want to stop feeling like the most stupid girl in the world.
Having loved and lost once, I can’t believe I’d been stupid enough to trust and love again. I mean, if insanity is doing the same thing and expecting a different result, why did I think that I could be enough for any man? And, even worse, how on earth did a supposedly smart girl like me end up on my honeymoon with an ex because the man who was supposed to be my groom ended up in bed with someone else—who is not only my friend, but one of my closest friends and a bridesmaid?
I’m all cried out, but after sleeping or resting for most of the day, I can’t go back to sleep.
Two thirty am. Watching the minutes tick over on my phone doesn’t help. Doing online searches for how to get over a breakup doesn’t help. Flicking through the TV channels on silent doesn’t help—I’d turn on captions, but the alcohol has buzzed my brain too much for reading, and not enough to blot out the pain or get me to sleep.
Food. I need food so I can drink more. Hunter left my share of the poached salmon with asparagus and thrice cooked chipson the sideboard, hoping I’d change my mind about eating. The meal would have been perfect for hand-feeding a lover, which only makes me want to either cry or throw up—or both. After a couple of forkfuls, I set it aside.
The champagne on arrival is still waiting for me to tell Hunter I have something to celebrate. The chocolate-dipped strawberries half melted in the heat before Hunter understood I couldn’t eat the bloody things and put them in the refrigerator after I said he could have them.
“Consider them my wedding gift to you,” I said, but he didn’t eat them. As I close the refrigerator door, I can’t help wondering if he remembers how we used to spend weekends going from farmers’ market to farmers’ market to get the first berries of the season. Does he remember the time we ate so many, we camped in his bedroom for days with stomach aches and couldn’t even look at them again until the next season? “Or throw them at the birds. I don’t care,” I added, hoping it sounded genuine.
Actually, I’m so sick of pretending that I don’t care that it would be easier if I didn’t try faking it with myself. I care. I care about letting my family down. I care that my father paid out money on wedding that didn’t happen and I embarrassed him in front of his family and friends. I care that my mother, who has every reason not to trust men and had asked me hundreds of times if I was sure about Mitch, I care that I let her down and gave her another reason not to trust men.
And I care that Hunter trusted I knew what I was doing when I agreed to date, love, and then marry Mitchel, only to prove to the world I don’t have a bloody clue how to hold onto a man.
Two fifty am and I give up on the salmon but finish the last of the wine as Hunter stirs and loses his blanket. Why he didn’t go to his bedroom is beyond me. But perhaps he’s exhausted from playing nursemaid for a day and a half. Yes, I got a couple of hours of sleep in the casino coffee shop last night, but Hunterhas been my alpha protector and I doubt he got anything longer than a cat nap or two.
“Hunter?” I call softly, not wanting to wake him, but if he’s uncomfortable and not sleeping, perhaps he’ll hear me. “Hunt?”
“Liv? You okay?” Hunter stretches out, before swinging his long legs around and sits to face me. I’m curled up back in bed, an empty bottle to the side, but there’s nothing but floorboards and a living area between us. In the moonlight, and with his eyes still puffy from sleep, he is beautiful. While some of our friends started letting themselves go once the sixty- or seventy-hour weeks claimed their priority, Hunter is still sexy as all hell, and the chequered board shorts can’t stop my memories or imagination.
“Hunter?” I call again and he comes to me.
The bed creaks under his weight as he sits to my side and takes my hand. Could he look more ruggedly handsome in his four- or five-day growth? It reminds me of all the times photographers chased his mother, desperate to make her son the face for everything from baby formula to daycare centers.
My best friend and first love is handsomely beautiful—inside and out.
“Rough night?” He uses my hand to brush aside a strand that’s escaped from my messy bun.
“I can’t sleep.” My voice comes out as a bratty whine, but I don’t care. It’s my breakup party and I’ll whine if I want to.
