“Goddamn you, Travis,” Nate shouted. “Enough!”
His friend grabbed his arm and dragged him out the door. Travis was consumed with bitterness and betrayal as he watched his wife break to pieces in front of him.
He couldn’t comfort her. She was crying over another man.Fuck. He couldn’t breathe.
Travis stumbled out of the room, jerked his arm out of Nate’s grip, and stalked up the hallway. Finding an empty room, he entered it, and paced around like a caged tiger.
“Are you out of your ever-loving mind?” Nate yelled at him. “Jesus Christ, Travis! Could you be more cruel? I thought you loved Sarah, but you’re nothing but a fucking asshole.”
Crack!
Travis stared blankly at his friend who staggered back a few steps.
He fucking hit Nate.I’m losing it.
Travis found himself taking deep inhalations. He felt like an IED had exploded in his chest, tore his insides to pieces, and had opened the floodgates of every single emotion that he had tried to hold at bay for the past three days.
“She was with someone else,” he said hoarsely. The words grated on his throat like sandpaper.
Nate took a couple of tentative steps toward him. “We don’t know the whole story, buddy.”
“How the fuck could she do this?”
“You need to get a grip. She doesn’t remember you or your life together.”
His eyes snapped to Nate’s, prickling with stinging heat.
“Well I remember!” he shouted as excruciating pain lanced through him. “Her smile, her laugh, how she used to fucking look at me!” His voice turned ragged. “I fuckingremember. And while I was grieving over her, she was fucking someone else.”
He flinched at his own words.
Nate stared at him with a mixture of sadness and consternation. Travis turned away and gripped his head with both hands in frustration. “FUCK!”
“Knowing this, do you still want her back?”
Travis searched inside himself for the answer and it didn’t take long. “I do. It’d kill me to lose her a second time.”
“You’ll have to get over what happened with John Cooper.”
“I know.”
“Maybe you should let her decide. Leave her alone at first.”
“No—fucking—way.”
“Travis,” Nate eyed him warily. “You have to consider that she might have left with John Cooper willingly. They’ve been friends since they were kids.”
“Not another word on that, Reece, or you’ll be picking yourself off the floor,” Travis warned. “I’ll say this to you only once. John Cooper may have been a fixture in Sarah’s life. I hated it. But what Sarah and I shared was real. I just fucking know it. I suspected that fucker Cooper had always been in love with her, but Sarah never looked at him the way she looked at me. That was how I knew her heart was all mine the way it fucking mattered.”
Nate nodded solemnly.
“The only way Sarah or Caitlin would know that she belongs to me is if she spends time with me. We fell in love overnight, Nate. I’m not saying it’s going to happen that way again, what with everything that’s gone down between her and Cooper, not to mention this distrust she’s harboring against me right now. But fuck, man, I’ve held on for three years. You think I’m going to let her get away now?”
“It might not be up to you.”
“I know. That’s why I’ve made contingencies and flew via chartered flight instead.”
“Uh . . . you don’t mean abduct her?”
