Chapter 15
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
VIOLET
“Circle your legs in the opposite direction,” I hear as I walk into the Pilates studio. Ashley’s eyes are wide as she sees me walk in. I give her a slight smile.
I’m a little late because I debated going all morning. I haven’t updated Ashley on anything yet. She’s texted me a few times over the past few weeks, and I’ve ignored her. Not on purpose; I’ve been too exhausted to talk about it.
Today I feel good. Enough to finally go out into the world instead of just dropping off my orders. It was easier to go out and drop off orders because those people don’t know that much about me, so I knew I wouldn’t get questioned.
I’m sure if I told Ashley I wasn’t ready to talk about anything, she would respect that. A part of me feels like I owe it to tell her what happened since she was the one who gave me the idea of getting the text messages and all those times she talked to me and made me feel like I wasn’t crazy.
“Hey.”
I’m cleaning the reformer off after finishing my workout. I turn around and see Ashley standing behind me with a curious look on her face. “Hi,” I say with a smile. I look over her shoulder at the last of the girls leaving.
Ashley turns around and waves bye to them. She shifts back around and gazes at me. I sit down on the bench, and Ashley follows and sits right next to me.
I take a deep breath and say, “So he was cheating on me.”
Her mouth parts as she reaches for my hand. “Oh, no. I’m so sorry. How are you doing?” she asks with a slight squeeze to my hand.
Before I tell her how I’ve been, I start from the very beginning.
I explain who Rya, Ezra, and Zayn truly are to me.
Not just friends. Not just husband and wife.
But my best friends. My childhood friends.
The ones who have been there for as long as I can remember.
She has to know all that because that’s the only way she’ll really understand where I’m coming from.
“So, all this whole time it was Rya,” I say.
Her breath catches as she shakes her head. “Oh my hell.” She reaches for my hand again and gently squeezes it. “Are you okay?”
“Well, there is more,” I say, and I go into everything else from the time Zayn walked into the house, me shoving the papers at him, going to the bar, and then Ezra and me at the hotel. I even get into the time I was falling for Ezra back in our senior year.
Her mouth closes into a smirk, and her head bobs.
I gaze at her reaction, trying to figure out what she’s thinking. I’m not even sure what to think of it. Sometimes I think I cheated, and other times I wonder how this could be called cheating.
“Damn,” she says.
“What?”
“I want to say I wish I had someone to fall back on like that, but I have a feeling he’s not someone you’re falling back on.”
“He’s not a rebound or anything. It just happened.”
“Well, if you had some sort of feelings for him before, did they come back that night? Or have they been there all along?”
I sit in silence and lean my back against the wall.
Her questions throw me off, and I’ve been trying to make sense of them myself, but honestly?
I can’t. Not right now. Not when everything is so up in the air.
And with what Rya said the other day in front of both of us, I still wonder why he hasn’t asked me if I liked him. Was he thrown off by it?
“You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to,” Ashley says.
“No, it’s just…” I pause, still at a loss of words. “I can’t even answer it for myself right now.” I take another pause. “And now Ezra moved in with me.”
“That’s good.”
“Is it? I don’t know anymore.”
“And that’s okay. Right now isn’t the time for you to be answering those questions with everything else that happened.
” She shifts her body to fully look at me.
“Give yourself time. Work on yourself. Do what you want. Stop second-guessing whether what you’re doing is right or wrong.
The way I see it is two best friends being there for each other. ”
I glance back up at her, feeling some weight lift off my shoulders from the guilt I’ve felt with my decisions. Decisions that I didn’t even want to make, but I had to. I had to because of the selfish assholes who put me in the position to make them.
“Take it day by day. Soon enough, you’ll realize how much time has passed, how much better you feel, and you’ll look back and think to yourself, ‘wow I can’t believe I got through it.’ It will literally feel like a lifetime ago. Even if only a year has passed,” she says.
I smile up at her. “Thanks. You always make me feel better.”
She smiles back at me and tilts her head with such empathy. “I’m glad. No one deserves this kind of bullshit. And I’m always here for you.”
“What did you do that helped you move past everything your ex did?”
She groans while dropping her head back. “Ugh,” she says, lifting her head back up and giggling. “I did a lot.”
I giggle alongside her. “What do you mean?”
“Well, for the life of me, I couldn’t sleep. When I thought he was cheating, I couldn’t sleep that well. When I found out he actually was, I couldn’t sleep at all. Even though I felt a huge weight lift off my shoulders, my brain would not shut down.”
“Really?”
She nods her head. “One day I took a day for myself. I went shopping and bought all new sheets, pillowcases, a comforter, towels, pajamas, all the skin care, and self-care shit that you can think of. I went home, washed all the new stuff I bought and threw away the old stuff. I took a long shower. I washed my hair, exfoliated, and shaved. Then, when I was done, I did my skincare like I’ve never done before.
I put masks on and put multiple products on my face after.
I lathered myself in body oil. And I couldn’t believe it, but I finally had a good night of sleep.
When I woke up, I felt like a new woman. ”
I never thought of giving myself a self-care day like that. I know people do it, and it makes them feel better, but I never think to do it. I always end up putting myself to bed to rot away in my feelings.
“So I thought I had cured my insomnia, but nope the next night I was wide awake.”
“What did you do then?”
She rolls her eyes. “I did that whole routine every night.”
My eyes go wide. “Every night?”
She nods her head. “Yup. Every night I washed my sheets, pillowcase, comforter, and pajamas. I took a shower and did that whole routine and then would do my whole skin care routine.”
“Wow, that’s a lot.”
“I know. But something about everything being fresh and clean put me to sleep. I don’t know what it was.
Almost like I was washing away my ex or something.
Then, each day, I would get rid of something we both shared.
And that seemed to help. Eventually, I bought all new stuff like furniture and home decor.
” She shakes her head and shrugs her shoulders.
“It was like I had to throw away every part of him and us to help my body heal from it all.”
I got rid of my bedding and bought new ones but that’s all. Maybe that’s something I have to do so Zayn isn’t still lingering around in the place that I live. Shit, maybe I should move since we shared the house. But all that just seems too much right now.
“Did you stay in the same house you two had together?” I ask.
She nods. “Yeah. I wasn’t in a position to leave with opening my business and everything.
Plus, after everything I did with his shit, he wasn’t willing to sell the house so I could at least move out.
I was trying to get an apartment, but he wouldn’t pay the mortgage, and I couldn’t pay both rent and mortgage. ”
My brows raise. “What did you do with all his stuff?”
She howls with laughter, slapping her hand on her leg.
“Oh, a lot. It was so toxic, but I would do it again,” she says with a bitter laugh.
“I withdrew all our money because I knew he would have done the same to me. I left him a little. I wasn’t that harsh but still took the majority.
” She eyes me. “Do you have shared accounts?”
I shake my head. “He never wanted to.”
“Good,” she says sternly. “Too many people get fucked over when they do that or when one manages the accounts and finances.” She shakes her head in disappointment. “So I did that. Bleached all his clothes.”
My mouth falls open. “You didn’t?”
“Yup,” she says proudly. “He came home to pack a bag and had no clothes but the ones he was wearing.”
We both giggle.
“What did he say or do?”
“Oh, he was pissed. He couldn’t believe I had done such a thing”—she rolls her eyes—“when he was the one that cheated on me.” She scowls.
“Wow. Some men,” I say, shaking my head.
“Right. So then, when he found out I had taken all our money, he threatened not to pay the mortgage. And I told him that was the exact reason I took the money because I knew he would spin some bullshit like that, and I wasn’t going to be fucked over even more than I already had been.
Then I hurried and changed the locks because I didn’t trust him to not fuck with my stuff. That threw him overboard.” She laughs.
The side of my lip rises in confusion. “After everything…that made him flip out more?”
“Yeah. Who knew?”
“Why did that make him freak out?”
“He thought I changed the locks because I was bringing men over to sleep with to get back at him.” She huffs. “I was like seriously that is the last thing I have on my mind and time for. With opening up my studio, and trying to get all our shit separated, I didn’t have time to fuck around.”
“He was upset about you having sex with hypothetical men when he was the one who cheated?”
“Oh yeah. Men are like that, or most anyway. They’re the ones that fuck up, and then when it’s you trying to move on, they turn everything around on you.
It’s like they didn’t make you miserable enough in their eyes, so they have to make you even more miserable.
Their goal is to make you as miserable as possible. ”
I guess I’m lucky Zayn hasn’t been that bad.
I haven’t heard from him except when he stopped by the other day.
At first, I was shocked that he wasn’t trying to get me back or wasn’t trying harder.
Even though I know it would make me more miserable with him bugging me, a part of me wonders why he isn’t fighting as much as I thought he would.
Was I not enough for him? Did he have some spare time on his hands that one day he stopped by, and that’s why he came?
“So then how did you finally sell the house?” I ask.
“He eventually got over himself and said he would, but that he wouldn’t help me move anything out. He expected me to move everything that was his into a storage unit for him.”
“Are you kidding me? Don’t tell me you did that?”
“Hell no,” she says in a raised voice. “I told him I would. Instead, I hired a dump company that hauls your stuff you don’t want away.”
I burst out laughing because that seems fitting for everything else she did.
“They even came into the house and grabbed the shit themselves and hauled it away. I didn’t have to lift a finger. It was a lot of money, but hey, you can’t put a price on that,” she says with a side-eye and a smirk on her face.
“Did he find out?”
She shrugs her shoulders. “Sort of. I never told him what I had done. He paid for a storage unit, dropped the keys off in our mailbox, and texted me to tell me where I could find the key and what storage place and unit it was. Months later, he asked where his stuff was. I never responded. Apparently, he stopped by the house to get his stuff, thinking I was still living there, but the new family was already there.”
“What!”
“I felt bad I said nothing because he started freaking out at the new family living there, thinking it was me playing a joke on him. They called the cops on him because he was trying to enter their home.”
My mouth parts. “Wow, this payback gets better and better.”
“Right. And this was all his doing, and he still blames me. Anyway, a cop called me to explain what was happening and to verify if I had moved out and if all his stuff was moved out too. I told him yes and that I’d been gone for months, and the family living there owned the house.
I think they ended up charging him, but I’m not sure with what. ”
I cross my arms, shaking my head. All this to sleep with another person. It’s never worth it. I can’t wait to see what karma comes for Zayn and Rya. I do already see it with Rya. But Zayn, who knows when his karma will come? But I know it will.