“Yeah.” Once again, I feel something in me freeze over, the wrapped package feeling impossibly heavy.
“Here's what we're gonna do.” Lucy takes the package from me, replacing it with a taco. “You're gonna eat. I'm gonna unwrap this shit. And you can tell me why he's a dick for sending each one of them.”
“He's not some kind of monster. Just...” I shrug. “Maybe he actually thought I'd want these things.”
Lucy gives me an understanding look. “Anyone who ignores your boundaries like this isn't doing it for you. They're doing it for them. He might not be a monster, but he's making it very clear he doesn't respect you.”
Was that it?
“What's the story behind this?” She unwraps the rectangle, revealing a journal he'd bought me when we first started dating. He was always mad I didn't use it for my 'doodles', but I explained that while it was lovely, its thin paper and rigid spine made it hard to sketch in.
Venting to Lucy is far more cathartic than I could have anticipated. And as it turns out, she isn't wrong, damn near every single item David sent feels centered around him more thanus. Like the framed photo from our trip to Mexico with his family. In it, we're smiling and sun kissed, but I remember crying in the shower because he'd let his mom fat shame me the whole trip, justifying her behavior as concern. When the fire turns the photo and frame into a pile of goo and ash, it feels like letting go of all thosepesky poundsshe was so concerned about.
“In front of everyone?” Lucy asks, shocked and clearly disgusted, when I tell her about David's misguided proposal.
“Everyone. And they all let me know I was the would-be-fiancée who stole Christmas.” She hands me a small jewelry box, one of the few things I had from my very unhappy childhood. In the barrel it goes; watching the wood catch fire feels deliriously good. “His mother actually called me crying about it.”
“Oh, for fuck's sake!” She grabs a cookbook.
I didn't hate cooking, but it wasn't my favorite thing, and he'd made it clear that the expectation was for me to use it when he “gifted” it to me.
Lucy hands it to me. “Here's to leaving that toxic shit in the past.”
My heart twists. “Again. He wasn't some abusive fuck. I never would have stayed if he were.” My dad gave me very little, but he did leave me with that lesson. “We were just incompatible people who tried too hard to make it work.”
She sighs, plopping down on the rug. “Someone doesn't have to lay hands on you to be an abusive fuck.”
I know that. Had said nearly the same to others before. So why did her saying it knock the wind out of me?
A million tiny moments play through my mind as I watch the paper curl in the fire.
“Sorry, that was . . . Sometimes my mouth moves faster than my brain.”
“No.” I shake my head, pulling my focus from the flames to join her on the rug. “I think I needed to hear that.”
Lucy settles one gloved hand over mine, and we appreciate the glow from the fire in comfortable silence until her phone pings.
“Shit,” she says, one finger from her glove between her teeth.
“Everything ok?” I ask, nudging my hair from my face.
She grimaces. “Not really. It's an SOS from Cillian.”
“What?” My pulse rockets.
“Oh, he's fine, technically, just the bar is short-staffed and they're slammed.” She picks up the fire extinguisher. “Would you be too mad if we continue the ritual later? He never calls me and Oliver in to help, so it's gotta be wicked busy.”
Relief renders me practically giddy. “A rain check is absolutely fine.” I tug the gloves off and gather our trash as she gives the embers of my past a good dousing. “Think they could use an extra body?”
Lucy looks at me, surprise evident on her face. “Are you offering?”
“Yeah?” I help her roll the rug up and carry it inside. “I know my way around a POS, and I’m an excellent busser.”
“You're hired.”
CHAPTER 17
Cillian
