The Wife by S.P. Cervantes Read Free Book Online

touch. “I miss sharing a bed with you,” he says in a whisper as his kisses move toward my mouth. “I miss everything about us. I want us to go back to the way things were, but you have to let me in.”
    My body tenses when he slowly slides his hand up my thighs. “I want to believe that.” I know deep down that he’s saying what he thinks he needs to, to get me to stay. Mike has always tried to use sex to make up for being late, or show his love for me, and it makes me sick that he’s doing it now. This isn’t a simple fight that can be cured with a kiss. He’s just admitted to cheating on me.
    I don’t want to lose him, but don’t want to lose me either. Isn’t this what I’ve been working for all this time in therapy? Haven’t I always told myself that I wouldn’t walk away if he truly wants to get our relationship back on track? I haven’t ever seen him this broken—this raw—and it’s tearing me up, making me unsure of what to do.
    I can feel pieces of myself falling away with each touch that I allow him, losing all sense of myself. There’s no denying that each kiss makes me feel wanted and desired again. A feeling that has been absent for too long to remember.
    Need.
    Desperation.
    Passion.
    Loss.
    Love.
    They all swirl through me like a black hole of sadness that he has caused. I take a step back from him, knowing that anything that feels this wrong shouldn’t be happening. He has already taken so much from me that I can’t give him the little piece I have left.
    “Alexa, don’t,” he protests.
    “If you really do love me, then you wouldn’t think this was ok. It’s not ok. We are not ok. You need to be a part of our lives again and show me I can trust you before this…” I say pointing my naked, shaking body, “will ever be yours again.”
    Mike stares at me in disbelief when I turn and grab my clothes from the bed, and walk out the door feeling more proud and more myself than I have in years.

“Y ou’re my forever.” No three words meant more to me than those when Mike whispered them in my ear as we sat in the sand and watched the sun set on the horizon of the Jersey Shore. The three words I love you no longer held truth in them to me. Jamie destroyed that phrase for me when he left NYU to return to Ireland two years ago. You’re my forever held promise and truth in them that I didn’t think I’d find again.

    It’d been a little over two years since Jamie left abruptly when he got word his dad had cancer and needed him home. I understood he had to leave. It reminded me of the time I wasted away from my mom when she was dying of cancer, and I didn’t want him to have the same regrets. I wanted him to be with his dad, especially because that was the only family he had left. Our relationship was better than ever after spending a year and a half in New York City together, and I would have never imagined he was capable of treating me like a piece of trash like he wound up doing, so easily discarded.
    I knew something had changed in Jamie when he left me to go back to Ireland. I saw it in his eyes that night when he left. At first, Jamie called every night, and I thought he’d keep his promise and come back to me. But after only a month apart, Jamie’s phone calls became less frequent. By the time his father passed away after only a little over two months, I could tell he was completely shutting me out of his life, and would snap at me every time we talked on the phone. One night when I returned home from working at the coffee shop, Jamie left a message on my answering machine to tell me he wasn’t ever coming back and I needed to move on. He didn’t even have the guts to tell me over the phone.
    He left me a message to break my heart.
    I know he didn’t want to hear my tears or listen to me try to convince him to let me come to him. I told him over and over when I sensed him pulling away and stopped telling me he loved me that I’d move to Ireland for him. I wanted to be by