A blur of movement to my left—a chrome grille filled my window. There was no time to brake. The glare of headlights bleached everything white.
The impact was a deafening roar of tearing metal and exploding glass. A white-hot spear of pain shot through my shoulder as the seatbelt locked, yanking me back with brutal force. My head snapped forward and then whipped back, cracking against the headrest with a sickening thud. For a single, disorienting second, the world was a violent, spinning carousel of noise and impact.
Then, an eerie, ringing silence descended, broken only by the ticking of the dying engine.
When my senses crawled back, the world was wrong. My car was canted at a nauseating angle, the driver's side door pressed against the asphalt. The air was thick with the acrid smell of deployed airbags and gasoline. A million shards of glass glittered in my lap, on the dashboard, like a grotesque constellation. I tried to breathe, but a searing, burning pain bloomed deep in my chest with every ragged inhale, a clear,terrifying signal that something inside was broken. My head throbbed in a brutal, pounding rhythm, and a warm, sticky trickle of blood seeped from my hairline, blurring the vision in my right eye. I was trapped, folded into a wrecked metal cage, and for the first time, the unshakable Oak Black felt a cold, primal fear clawing its way up his throat.
I heard footsteps—fast and frantic. Then, Valentina’s voice.
“Oak!” she screamed. I watched her red-bottom heels splash through a puddle as she ran toward me.
Her voice was the last thing I heard before the world went black.
But my last thought was a prayer for Jordin.
Let her be happy.
With or without me, just let her be happy.
thirty-Jordin
Who would’ve thought my husband cheating would land me in a tug-of-war between the past and the present?
Seeing Oak again made me realize how much I still cared—but what about Ciarán?
I sat curled up on the opposite end of the couch, a wine glass in my hand, trying to act normal.
It had been three days since my meeting with Oak, and he was still heavy on my mind. Sitting just as heavily in the back of it was the fact that Ciarán had a vasectomy and hadn’t told me. But then, why would he? We weren’t in that kind of situation.
Was I tripping… or just looking for an excuse to pull back from him and run to Oak?
I’d gotten my revenge. I’d fucked someone else. I’d let another man see the parts of me Oak used to swear were only his. But now I felt like I was right back at the starting line, staring at the ruins of my marriage and wondering if I was supposed to rebuild them or just walk away for good.
I sighed, my eyes landing on Ciarán. He was sitting across from me, one arm draped over the back of the couch like he didn’t have a care in the world. His legs were stretched out, relaxed, as he watched me silently unravel in real time.
He looked fine as fuck in an army green polo and camo pants, like he was ready for war. It pissed me off how beautiful he could look while being emotionally absent.
But he was also direct. That was the thing about Ciarán—he didn’t do hesitation or uncertainty. He said what he meant, and he meant what he said, no matter how you felt about it.
And somehow, that made it worse. Because you can’t change a man who refuses to flinch. He was stubbornly committed to his own truth, his own boundaries, and his own way of being.
He wouldn’t bend, even for me.
That was the disconnect between us.
He got on my nerves.
I sucked my teeth, rolling my eyes.
He stared at me, face and eyes unreadable. Then, after a short beat, he spoke.
“So, you ready to talk about what happened with your husband? Instead of mumbling and sucking your teeth like I did something to you?”
I’d told him I didn’t really want to talk about Oak and me, and he had respected that. But now…
I nodded, staring down at the deep red liquid in my glass.
“I met him.”
