Chapter 28
All the stress from work, the fact that this is my birthday and I'm not going to break, all the pain I feel all over my body, and now the reopened wounds of my heartache are just too much right now. I just cry.
It's quiet back here. Even if someone sees me, it isn't the first time a waitress has cried her eyes out on shift. As long as I get myself back together and don't do it in front of customers, it's fine.
“Why are you working so hard on your birthday?” a deep voice vibrates through me from behind, causing me to almost jump out of my skin.
My whole body stiffens. Turning away from the person, making sure my back is fully to them, I wipe my face quickly, taking a napkin and blowing my nose.
It's Lincoln. I can recognize his voice from anywhere, and I don't want him to see me like this.
I turn only halfway, just enough that he can see the left side of my face. I sniff, force a smile, and keep my eyes on the wall instead of on him as he stands there to my left.
“Um… sir, your order will be out—”
“Gabrielle,” he cuts me off with a gentleness in his voice that I need right now.
Closing my eyes momentarily, I hiccup in an attempt to hold back another sob.
“I'll be right with you just please… give me a minute,” I say, trying to maintain my professionality.
“Are you okay?” he asks.
No, I'm not okay.
I want nothing more than to tell him how not okay I am. How hurt I am. How much pain I'm still in from what he did to me, even though it's a couple of years later. It still feels raw.
I can't tell him to leave me alone because he's a customer. As long as he's in Macady’s, I have to treat him like royalty.
“I… I’m okay,” I tell him unconvincingly.
He stands there, now allowing himself to lean on the wall with his left shoulder.
“Is there anything that I can do for you?”
A hug. Everything inside of me wants to ask for a hug. Anytime I was ever sad, that's what he would do.
He would hold me, just hold me, until I cried out all the stress. Then he would kiss my face and then we’d make love.
He's so pretty. Look at him, all dressed up in his spiffy little suit.
Well, maybe it's not a suit. It's more like a black dress shirt, or a deep blue that almost looks black. His pants are ironed and jet-black.
“Excuse me,” I say, prepared to go to the bathroom to get away from him.
I go into the girls’ bathroom and just cry. Because I miss him.
It's okay to admit that I miss my husband.
Ex-husband.
That ship has sailed. It has a new captain.
Even when I entertained the possibilities of us ever getting back together, I would never trust him again.
And what?
Would we have to spend the rest of our lives in constant mistrust?
He would spend the rest of his life trying to earn back my trust, and I would spend the rest of it not trusting him or always doubting him or believing that the minute I let my guard down and finally trusted him again, he would just hurt me again.
People always say that cheaters will always cheat a second time.
What is to stop him from doing this again?
And on top of it, he still works with that stupid fucking bitch out there.
Even if we did get back together, Sarah is in his life, and she will be for the foreseeable future.
And even if that weren't the case, and he could put those boundaries back that he claimed he did all those times ago…
how would I deal with the entire internet rooting for my man to be with someone else?
So many times I wanted to clear things up and put them on blast and come out as the wife and say that Lincoln cheated on me with Sarah.
That Sarah was a homewrecker.
These people were straight up writing awful things about me like, “How do you fumble a man like Lincoln looking like that,” as if I’m ugly.
I know that I'm not a supermodel, but I'm pretty in my own right, and I clean up pretty nicely.
I've never been fat in my whole life, not like you can’t be pretty and fat, and while I do have a nice-sized ass and a bit chunkier thighs, that's something that my husband loved about me and that I love about myself. But it’s the ‘women supporting women’ types that will tear you down the fastest when you’re at your lowest.
Every girl has self-esteem issues.
Mine was my hair when I was growing up, but I learned to love it.
Then it was my acne that I had well into my early twenties.
I covered it with makeup, but most of the time, especially when I was at home, I didn’t wear makeup.
Maybe I should have.
But my lovely and oh-so-loyal husband convinced me that he loved me without it… only for him to jump into bed with someone who has layers of it on.
This is the reason why women have self-esteem issues.
This is the reason why women are always chasing their youth when they shouldn’t be, when they should be enjoying their golden years.
Men will be the same ones to shame women for trying to be young or act young or look young… but then they’ll be the same ones who shame women for not looking young enough.
It's like us women can't ever get anything right.
The same guys that will tell you they like when you’re a good girl and they don't like or respect women who are whores and put themselves out there sexually… will be the very same ones who end up leaving the so-called good girls and cheating on them with these supposed whores.
Then when the good girls decide to compete, figuring that the only way they're going to keep their men is to act like the whores, the men get all bitter and say bitches ain't shit, when they're the ones that created the very monsters they're complaining about.
It's exhausting.
Even thinking about it is exhausting.
Lincoln was supposed to be different.
Especially since we have so much history together.
But he just proved that he's not.
I'm still mourning him.
I'm mourning the years I can never get back because I wasted them on a relationship that went nowhere.
And now I'm here on my birthday crying on a freshly cleaned toilet seat that plenty of strangers have put their ass on, because I’m still hurting over a man I was married to who's now out there living large with the bitch he left me for.
Why must humans go through this kind of pain?
What is the point?
Why?
But it's all good.
“Get it together Gabby,” I say as I sniffle and stop crying, taking a deep breath and closing my eyes to center myself.
Lincoln is just a man.
He's just some other stranger.
He's no different than all the other men out there, and I'm going to treat him as such.
Even when he tries to pull that shit, trying to get me to reminisce, to prove that I still know him, I'm going to do it with a professional smile and zero emotion.
After that, he and his work wife can kick rocks.
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