Mated to My Ex (Hayes Brothers #1)

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Elise

Word of advice: if a guy ever refers to your tit-jobs as “mystical,” don’t be swayed by it. He’s just gonna ghost you the way the guys who don’t wax poetic after sex do.

Don’t get all enamored with the tiny picture of him in the text chat bubble. Don’t develop a Pavlovian butterfly-in-stomach response to the little buzz-buzz of your phone’s notifications, hoping it’s another message from him, even after he drops off the edge of the earth, again.

Don’t forgive him when he comes back. Don’t be so happy that you don’t even care what the explanation is.

Don’t spend so many nights at his apartment that all your clothes are in every load of laundry, and you might as well live there, really.

Don’t marry him because no one else has ever made you feel this way.

Don’t love every moment of it when it’s good. Don’t pretend the red flags aren’t there.

Don’t be surprised when it crumbles.

Really, you shouldn’t have kissed him the first time you met, when you stepped into the street, and he pulled you back onto the curb before that car went roaring past. It doesn’t matter that both your hearts were pounding, it was the first of many bad decisions. Maybe it would have been fine if it hadn’t led to said tit-job that evening.

Here’s what you do after your dizzy whirlwind romance drops and shatters you on the ground: you pick up all the pieces.

Move. Cut your hair. Listen to Fleetwood Mac’s “The Chain” until the lyrics are burned into your heart. If he can’t love you now, he will never love you again.

Cut your hair again. Move to some ass-end of nowhere town. Change yourself and your address as many times as it takes to scrub the memory of that idiot girl you used to be out of existence.

She wouldn’t recognize me today. Letting my roots grow all the way out, the nails I stopped biting, the absolute puddle of mustard-colored sweaters I wrap myself in these days.

She would have hoped I knew better by now.