Harlequin E New Adult Romance Box Set Volume 1: Burning Moon\Girls' Guide to Getting It Together\Rookie in Love (20 page)

Dear Damien,

I hope you’re having fun.

This is really hard for me to say, but I think we need to stop talking to each other. I also don’t think we can be friends on Facebook anymore. So I’m going to block you. I hope you understand.

Look after yourself,

Lilly

I pressed enter and watched the message appear on my screen with that all-too-familiar pop. And then I just sat and stared at my screen. There was no way I could take it back now. I momentarily panicked and started pressing buttons in an attempt to remove the message from the conversation, but it was there to stay. I’d said what needed to be said.

I never heard back from Damien again. Not once. He was officially out of my life and now I had to systematically pick up the pieces of my shattered heart.

So I went back to work, I joined a gym and got a personal trainer—a scary-looking bodybuilder named Leonard—and then I did something that all girls do during a breakup, I cut my hair.

Short. Very short. As in pixie-cut short.

I started going on dates again after about six months. Well, at the time I didn’t actually know it was a date, thanks to the underhanded machinations of Sue and Val. It was supposed to be a simple dinner.

Brad was his name. And he was perfect. Med student, ridiculously good-looking—blonde, green eyes, big, broad shoulders, a great smile. He should have been exactly my type, but I wasn’t attracted to him in the slightest. And to top it all off he was polite and funny and really interesting and intelligent. No,
he
wasn’t the problem. The problem was me. My tastes had changed completely. I now liked weird, tattooed guys who dressed in black and wore ironic T-shirts. Or did I? Was it just Damien I was attracted to?

One thing was sure—I was confused. I barely knew what I liked anymore, and I definitely had no idea what I wanted. I went on a few dates with Brad, we landed up kissing a few times, but it was nothing like with Damien. I knew I had to stop comparing, but I simply couldn’t help myself.

After Brad, I went on a few dates with a guy Stormy introduced me to. Maxwell. He was an intense creative type who had directed a short black-and-white film about a lonely computer who fell in love with the telephone on the desk next to him, the whole thing made no sense. He made no sense. We made no sense.

It was hopeless, no matter what I did; no matter how many aerobics classes I went to, how many hours I put in at work, how many times I cut and dyed my hair or redecorated my apartment and bought myself a new wardrobe, no matter how many self-help books I read or how many guys I went on dates with, it was still the same. I missed Damien so much it felt like a little piece of myself was missing. We hadn’t spoken for eight months by then and it had been excruciating.

But if I look at it holistically, some good had come out of it. I was much more independent now, not as reliant on my friends and family for support. I often went to movies on my own and even went away for the weekend alone once. I was alone and fending for myself in the world for the first time ever, and I wasn’t doing too badly, either.

Christmas came and went and the calendar ticked over into the New Year. I’d heard that Michael had shacked up with someone else, a girl that I had gone to school with. Actually, she’d been a mutual acquaintance of ours, which of course sent Stormy straight into conspiratorial mode. She was convinced they’d had a little “thing-thang” during our relationship—but then she was naturally suspicious. It didn’t bother me in the slightest, though.

February approached and suddenly I was staring at the one-year anniversary of my failed marriage and the one-year anniversary of the painful breakup with Damien. I thought that after a whole year I would be over him, I’d have at least moved on a bit to the point that I didn’t look up at the moon at night wondering where on Earth he was and if he had forgotten all about me.

It was clear now—if ever I was in doubt about it—Damien was true love.

And the closer I got to the one-year anniversary, the worse it got. I saw him everywhere: on the street, at work, in restaurants. I couldn’t stop wondering when he was coming back to South Africa. He’d said a year, and that’s what it was.

And then one day, while sitting in a coffee shop reading yet another self-help book, I caught the glimpse of someone familiar.

Chapter Seventeen

My heart jumped into my throat and then into my ears where it started beating so hard and fast, that I could no longer hear the clang of spoons against coffee cups and the idle chatter of the people around me.

I scanned the room frantically, looking, hoping, praying, wanting to see Damien. But I didn’t. Instead what I saw was Jess, sitting at a coffee table in all her blunt fringed, faded-pink T-shirted coolness sipping on a tall latte and eating a giant piece of red velvet cake. How was she so thin? If I ate that, Leonard would have to tie me to a treadmill, weigh me down with ten-kilogram weights and beat me for the next week while I ran nonstop without sleep.

Lucky bitch.

Jess looked up from the red velvet calorie hell and a huge smile lit up her face. She put her spoon down and jumped up immediately.

“Oh my God! Lilly!” She shouted so loudly that I’m sure not only the whole restaurant heard, but the entire block, too. She hugged me hard and then pulled back and looked me up and down.

“You look amazing. Wow.”

I felt slightly self-conscious and instinctively ran my hand through my new, shorter hair. “Thanks, I got my hair cut.”

Jess looked me up and down again and then shook her head. “No, it’s not that at all. It’s something else.” She paused for a moment and I could see she was thinking. “It’s your whole vibe, I can’t explain it, but you just look great. Sit! Sit, babes!”

I sat down with her and realized I’d forgotten how much I liked her. She was probably one of the most straight-talking people I’d ever met. There was no bullshit with her, ever. “So how’ve you been? It’s been a year, right?”

“Um…” I was wringing my hands under the table in a desperate attempt not to bleat out the following:

So how’s Damien? What does he look like? Is he still so gorgeous? Is he seeing someone else? Is he in love? Where is he? When is he coming home? Does he know how much I love him and want to have thousands of babies with him and change my surname to his and live happily ever after and have amazing sex all night long and spend the rest of the time cuddling? Huh? Huh? Huh?

So I mustered all of the cool, calm nonchalance I could find and simply said, “I’m fine,” but then straight afterward felt like screaming,
NOT!

Miraculously, my talented attempts at feigning nonchalance didn’t stop there, “Mmm, great. Yeah. Just…fine. Totally,
so
fine.” I nodded and tried to smile, but failed dismally when it felt like my face was made of putty and had a mind of its own. God knows what weird expressions it was contorting into right now.

We sat in silence for a second or two, as Jess stared at me with a suspicious look plastered across her face. And then she leaned toward me, slowly and deliberately, “Okay, I’m just going to say it for you then.”

“What?”

“How’s Damien?” The second the words were out of her mouth my sigh of relief was audible and my whole body relaxed.

“So…” All my pseudo nonchalance had left me and I didn’t care. “How is he? How’s he been? What’s he been doing?”

“Honestly…” She hesitated for a moment and I could see she looked very conflicted. But about what? “What the hell, I’m just going to tell you the truth. I’m not going to lie to you or mince my words.”

My poor little heart did some funny acrobatic maneuvering in my chest before it settled into the rhythm of a galloping racehorse.

I didn’t want to hear this.

He was seeing someone else.

I just knew it.

“He’s terrible,” Jess finally said. “He’s so fucking miserable, he’s become unbearable to be around!”

It took a second to switch gears in my brain. “Really?” The word came flying out and I mentally kicked myself for seeming so happy and enthusiastic about his misery. “I mean, really?” I tried to sound casual this time but the giant smile plastered across my face was not helping to convey that sentiment in the slightest.

“Yep. Since you left he’s just been moping around. To be honest, I love him, to bits. He’s my best friend in the world, but if I have to endure another night of ‘Lilly this’ and ‘Lilly that’ and ‘Lilly the next thing,’ I might beat him.”

This was the best thing I’d heard in almost three-hundred-and-fifty-six, bloody long, depressing, painful days.

“And I’m not saying this to try and make you feel bad or anything. I mean I know you’ve got on with your life and started dating again—”

I cut her off immediately. “I’m not dating anyone!”

Jess looked genuinely confused. “Really?”

“Absolutely not. What gave you that idea?” I felt angry with her for even making that assumption.

“Okay, I’ll be honest again. I’ve been stalking you on Facebook…on Damien’s behalf, though. If I don’t voluntarily go to your profile and scan your wall, he steals my phone and does it himself, since you blocked him. And we saw those pictures of you with that guy, that good-looking blond one that had his arm around you. We just assumed you were a couple, you looked like one.”

I mentally ran through my Facebook photo album in an attempt to figure out what she was talking about. And then I remembered it. That “surprise” blind date, when Sue had taken those pictures and shouted out, in a very not-so-subtle fashion, “Put your arm around her, Brad.”

I was mortified then, and I was mortified now.

“I…I wasn’t dating him, well, sort of…just a little…” Great! My nervous stutter made an untimely return. “I mean, we were kind of, but…not really, we only went on a few dates, but I didn’t really like him.”

“Well Damien thought you did. In fact, it couldn’t have come at a worse time for him. He was just about to fly out to South Africa and then he saw those pictures, and, well…”

I gasped. I couldn’t believe it; Damien had been planning to come to South Africa. The timing couldn’t have been more horrid if that bitch Karma, the evil movie producers and writer wench had sat down around a table and conspired together. I mentally cursed Sue for her new obsession with Instagram, and this uncontrollable urge she now possessed to take photos of everyone and then post them on Facebook.

I could only imagine what Damien must have thought when he saw those pictures.

“Why…why was he coming to South Africa?” I finally managed to ask.

I looked at Jess as she moved a piece of red velvet cake around her plate, which left a thick snail-like trail of icing behind it.

“He wanted to get you back.”

“Shit!” I put my head in my hands. “But he’s coming back soon isn’t he?”

Jess shook her head. “He’s decided not to come back.”

Her words stung me. “What? Why?”

“He doesn’t think he has anything to come back to. I think that at the back of his mind he was hoping you guys would get back together.”

Everyone and everything in the coffee shop disappeared in that instant. I took in the full implications of those words.

Damien was not coming back to South Africa.

I would never see him again.

There was no chance for us.

It’s amazing what an impact social media can have on our lives. One photo of me—taken at the wrong time, and with bad hair—goes viral for the world to see; a few innocent photos of me with some guy I didn’t even like has the power to stop Damien dead in his tracks. “So where’s he now?” I asked Jess while waving the waiter down. I needed cake.

“He’s in Japan, but he’s going to Thailand tomorrow, it’s Burning Moon again.”

*FLICK!

The sound of a light bulb turning on.

The sound of clarity.

Brilliant, shiny clarity.

The same kind of clarity I’d had when I decided to go on my honeymoon alone.

“Where…where is it going to be?” I was getting fired up now and got up from my chair.

“Not sure, the map hasn’t gone out yet.”

“How do I get a ticket?”

Jess looked at me for a moment before her face lit up. “That’s a brilliant idea. Please, please save me from the torture of having a miserable best friend and for God’s sake go and get him.
Please.
I beg you.”

“I need a ticket. Can I come with you?”

“Sharon and I aren’t going this year. But I can get you one.” Jess jumped up and grabbed me by the shoulders. “And please, when you get there, have sex with him as soon as possible—”

“Jess!” I hissed at her, looking around to see if anyone had heard.

“Sorry,” Jess said. “But I think if a man goes without sex for a whole year it makes him mad. So go and do something about it! For all of our sakes. Please.”

I smiled at Jess; she had such an elegant way with words. “Fine! I’ll do something about it.”

“Oohhh.” She playfully slapped me on the arm. “The new and improved, non-prudish Lilly. I like it. You’re a nasty gurl.”

And then her face changed and her expression became serious for the first time ever. I’d never seen her like this before.

“He’s crazy about you, Lilly. Completely head over heels. I’ve known Damien since we were kids riding our bicycles up and down the street. We’ve been through a lot together and I know him better than anyone on this planet—and that’s why I know you guys are perfect for each other. So go and get him, hot stuff!”

Chapter Eighteen

My mother said something to me once. Well, she’d burbled something to me in a somewhat slurred-sounding voice with the half-closed eyes of a mad, drunken woman, while trying to pick herself up off the floor. (It was a delightful sight, which is probably why her words have stuck with me through all the years.)

“Sometimes in order to move forward, you have to go back to the beginning again.”
*Hiccup

At the time I’d paid her no heed. I thought these words, just like all the others, were nothing more than the intoxicated ramblings of my liquored-up mother—the actress who talked incessantly, but never said a single thing. But now, holding a ticket to Thailand in my sweaty hand once again, almost a year to the day
, I got it.
There I was, right at the beginning all over again. The trip had been very easy to sell to my family and friends this time—they practically pushed me onto the plane when I told them what I was doing. I’m pretty sure I heard Val and Sue breathe a collective sigh of relief, a heavy sigh that had been an entire year in the making.