PROLOGUE “Someone Like You” #2
My eyes found his again before he looked past my shoulder to the line that was forming behind me.
Married? Of course, he got married. Why wouldn’t he?
“Have a great flight.”
The front desk clerk carefully dismissed me. That desk clerk had no answers for me. Neither did Buddha. I pulled myself together enough to make it to the curb, where a heavily coated bellman greeted me.
“Airport?”
“Yes, please.”
“How was your stay?”
A gust of freezing wind stung my face as I remained guarded behind a new set of eyes and forcefully collected myself enough to speak.
“It was great, thank you.”
The older man studied my features, and I averted my gaze, the tension heavy in my body and oozing into my frame.
Shoulders slumped and head swirling, I knew he could see the rip in me.
I was sure of it. My mother always told me my facial expressions gave me away.
But could that bellman see my shame? I had no right to feel the way I did.
Absolutely no right. But it didn’t matter.
I felt it anyway—the jealousy, the ache, the sharp twist of the knife that repeatedly dug in my chest and refused to be ignored.
His wedding.
I choked on another gust of freezing wind as the bellman stepped off the curb into a patch of dirty snow and opened the cab door for me. The driver took the bag from my hand, and in seconds, we were speeding toward the airport, while the skyscrapers disappeared out of the foggy window.
“Where are you going today?”
My phone erupted again in several distinct chimes, and I reached into my purse to silence it.
“Home.”
He eyed me in the rearview briefly before he took the hint. I was unapologetically rude. My face was burning, my chest on fire.
Get a grip, Stella.
I unbuttoned my tweed coat, suddenly in need of more brisk air. I wanted to be covered in it. I wanted to numb myself, but even in sub-zero temperatures, I knew I would still feel the burn.
Minutes later, at the airport entrance, I studied the people rushing past me to take cover from the bone-chilling wind.
Moving at a snail’s pace, I walked through the sliding doors and stood in the center of the chaos.
A wave of noise pulsed through the air: voices, the click of heels next to me, the beep of the baggage scanners.
I focused on one of the flight attendants, who was whizzing past the chaos, her stride long, her hair in a tidy bun on top of her head.
Her perfectly packed luggage glided alongside her.
I wondered briefly where she was going as she beat the strollers to the checkpoint.
At least fifty people were waiting to be screened, and I didn’t want them to look at me.
Any of them. I was incapable of smiling, incapable of polite conversation.
Eyes down, I took a step forward and then forced another.
He’s married. Good for him.
Keep walking, Stella.
I pushed out a deep breath, kicked my shoulders back, and figuratively brushed off the dust. I was so incredibly good at doing that. I’d done it my whole life.
Lexi had been right. The coincidences, the happenstance, the cruelty of life, and fate’s sick sense of humor had always played a huge part of everything that had to do with him.
With them both. Maybe it was life’s way of letting me know that on this day of all days, I was in the right place in my journey.
So why did it sting so damn much?
I’d come so far from the place where every one of those signs mattered. Where I’d analyzed and overanalyzed to the point that I drove myself insane, until, finally, I just let things be as they were.
And I could do it again. I could do it again so easily if I could just push past this. The life I lived was my consolation.
Because Lexi was right.
I was happy.
Satisfied that I may have been through the worst of it, and no doubt slightly overdramatic, I reached into my purse for my ID. And that’s when I heard the first few notes of the song ring out over the airport speaker.
“MOTHERF—” Stopping myself, I cupped my mouth in horror.
Every single head in the line was turned in my direction, as hundreds of eyes swept over me in scrutiny.
A few mothers gripped their children tight with disgusted faces, and I saw the smirk of a few guys grouped in front of me.
Paralyzed as the song drifted into my ears and detonated in my chest, I mouthed a quick “I’m sorry” before I gripped the handle of my suitcase and scurried away like I’d just screamed “Bomb!”
Humiliated and unwilling to subject myself to any more stares, I wheeled back to the lobby of the airport, my eyes on the floor.
Some miles later, with my flight safely in the air without me, sweat poured from my forehead as I scrambled to keep up with my rambling brain.
Uncomfortably bundled in my winter coat, I wandered aimlessly through the airport, rolling the burden of my lightweight suitcase, which felt like a case of bricks, with no destination.
It was always the music that hurt me most. It did the most damage.
For every single day of my life, I had a song to coincide with it.
Some days were repeats. Some days I woke up to the lyrics circling in my head.
The lyrics sometimes set the tone for my day, and as a slave, I followed.
But some songs were like a sharp fingernail poking into open-wounded thoughts.
Because music is the heart’s greatest librarian.
A few notes had the ability to transport me back in time, and to the most painful of places.
Take any song from the Rolodex of your life, and you can pin it to a memory.
It translates, resonates, and there it will remain.
And no matter how many of those Rolodex cards you want to rip out and burn like an old phone number to make room for new ones, those songs remain and threaten to repeat.
And the song that circled through the deep recesses of my brain—while I tried my best to rip it from the Rolodex—bruised me well thanks to my good friend coincidence, and was cruelly pulling up every memory associated with it.
It filtered like a burn through my nose and out of my lungs while I stomped along the white tiled floor of the airport in my heavily abused Chucks and stared at the Sharpie-stained lyrics I’d scribbled all over them.
The song that played was a tattoo over my heart, like several others. And for the second time in my life, I wanted the music to stop. I needed the repeat to cease. I didn’t want to feel that burn. It was too absolute.
And that logic was ridiculous.
There were a few things I knew as I worked up a sweat, staring at the small cracks and stains on the surface of the floor beneath me.
The first was: I was not getting on a plane that day.
The second was: I was not going to call Lexi back and ask her a single question.
And the third: I refused to acknowledge. The hurt was far too present.
What was it about a woman’s psyche that refuses to let us ignore the old aches, the ancient pains, and the memories of the men we bind ourselves to?
I used to think men were experts at forgetting about the past and moving on, but I was finally old enough to know better. Their memories were just as vivid, just as painful. They were just better at letting go.
Exhausted, I stopped in the middle of my walk, and a man slammed into me.
“Sorry!” I quickly apologized as he gripped my arm to steady us both. He was prematurely balding, had soft green eyes, and was dressed from head to foot in Army camouflage, his pants tucked into boots. A soldier.
“It’s fine,” he said quietly as he readjusted the bag on his shoulder and gave me a quick wink before taking off toward a group of others dressed like him. I moved away from the steady flow of human traffic, my back against the wall as seconds ticked past.
What in the hell are you doing, Stella? Go home!
Furious with myself, I resigned to transfer my ticket to a later flight and stop the madness before I looked up to see a neon sign directly above me. I winced at the flickering, bright-yellow letters that stood out blatantly, blinking at me like a fucking wink.
Drive. Drive. Drive.
Alamo. Drive happy.
My feet moved before I had a chance to think it through—before I could reason with myself that I was being overly dramatic and that the news didn’t make a bit of difference in my life.
I was in charge of myself and my reaction.
All of these thoughts filtered through my sense of reason and were batted away by the slow leak of disappointment in my chest.
When it came to the men in my life, my emotions were my kryptonite, and so was my indecision.
And that day at the airport, I was, again, crippled by both.
I was driving.
I rolled my suitcase down to slot fifty-two and unlocked the Nissan Altima with the fob before I threw my suitcase in the trunk.
Inside the musty cabin, I pressed my forehead to the steering wheel, started the car, and rolled down the window.
The cool air hit me, waking me up from my exhausted stupor.
I looked at the clock on the dash. It had only been three hours since I did my podcast.
Three hours.
Buckling up, I pulled my phone from my backpack to start directions.
I already had more notifications than I could handle in a week, and the emails just kept coming in.
Six hundred unanswered texts were waiting, and I couldn’t bring myself to look at any of it.
I prompted Siri and gave her my home address and put the car in gear while she sounded out the first of the directions.
My five-hour flight turned into over twenty hours of driving.
I was pissed at myself, pissed at Lexi, just .
. . pissed. I slammed the car back into park and banged on the steering wheel.
Even in the silent car, the music wouldn’t stop.
It refused to loosen its tight hold. The noose was around my heart, squeezing like a vise.
The wound was opening, and I was helpless to stop it.
It bled as a reminder of where I’d been.
And if I couldn’t stop it, then I would embrace it.
Whatever I had left, whatever part of me needed closure had revealed I would have to relive it, piece-by-piece, song-by-song.
But I didn’t really believe in closure.
No, closure was an excuse for some, a scapegoat for others.
But that myth didn’t do anything but temporarily stifle the ache of missing someone.
And after that phone call, that text, that brief meeting, that moment in time where it was assumed you could move on, realization strikes that all it really did was reset the timer on the heartbreak.
Love doesn’t die, even when you stop feeding it. There is no expiration date on the ache of missing someone you shared your heart, life, and body with.
Pulling my phone from the seat, I hesitated only a second before I flipped to the playlist I had made years ago. If I was going to indulge myself, I was going to do it properly.
White-knuckling the wheel, I fought traffic for a solid half hour before I finally hit the freeway and made it safely out of the city. I had hundreds of miles of open highway until I took my first exit.
Swallowing the lump in my throat, I pushed play.