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

his side. Isn’t that what we promised each other?
    I’ll never forget the coldness and disconnect in his voice on the answering machine that night. I must have listened to it a million times, crying each time. It didn’t sound like Jamie at all. The life in his voice was gone, replaced by emotionlessness and indifference to never seeing me again. My heart broke into a million pieces that night and I never thought it would ever be healed again. I tried to call him several times and convince him to let me visit and talk things out. He never answered, and soon, his number was disconnected and he had moved, leaving him lost to me forever.
    I wondered night after night what I could have done to him to make him treat me that way, but there was nothing I could imagine, other than he’d found someone else. Perhaps it was self-preservation, imagining him being the bad person in the situation rather than believe I did something so horrible to turn him against me so suddenly. I never thought I’d be able to trust another man after he broke me. The man who once promised to never hurt me and to always love me was gone and had been gone for too long for me to mourn any longer. I couldn’t save the little part of my heart he left behind for him anymore. I needed to open my heart to someone who deserved it.
    Mike was that man.
    I met Mike in a business management class in the second semester my junior year at NYU when we were paired for a project a year ago. After Jamie left, I submerged myself in working at the local pizza parlor as a waitress and hanging out with my best friend, Lee, and some of my friends from home. Being paired with Mike on the project was the first time I spent any amount of time with another person other than my tight circle of friends, and was also the first time I was actually looking forward to any type of socialization with a man who wasn’t an old friend.
    Mike was the first guy to strike my attention since Jamie left me last year, and how couldn’t he? He was tall, much like Jamie was, but had short, spiky black hair and equally dark eyes that were hypnotic to look at. Physically, he was very different than Jamie, with a sleeker, fit build, rather than a broad, muscular rugby boy body. He seemed like a bad boy to me because of the Celtic knot tribal band around his bicep and he had an air of confidence about himself that I found sexy as hell.
    We worked together almost nightly for a month to complete the project, and he always made time each day to talk with me and get to know me in a subtle way, asking questions about my family life, my hometown, my interest in design, and of course he finally got to Jamie. Over time, I gave him bits and pieces about my relationship with Jamie, and its inevitable demise. I told him how Jamie was my first love—my first everything. The more I talked to Mike about Jamie, the better I felt about my current situation. I realized our relationship was doomed to fail at the start. Not only because his home was Ireland, but also because the deep, all-consuming love we both had for each other could have never stood the test of time. I only wished my heart was the one to have lost the love first, instead of his. I wished I didn’t still love Jamie, and perhaps I always would, but the more time I spent with Mike, the more I was sure that I would never let what Jamie did to me hurt me again.
    The last night of our project, Mike pushed our books aside and looked at me with his fiercely protective brown eyes in a way that left no doubt he cared about me. I couldn’t imagine what was making him act so seriously then, when our conversations were usually laced with sarcasm and jokes, even when talking about Jamie. But that night, I knew something was different. He took my hands in his and brushed his thumb over my knuckles, shocking me with the tenderness in his touch. The only other times we ever had physical contact was when we hugged hello or good-bye—like friends do. But the