A fresh wave of humiliation flooded me. Getting cheated on was one thing. Getting cheated on by your fiancé and sister was a new level of betrayal.
Even though Georgia and I weren’t close, I hadn’t expected her to be so callous. She’d never even apologized.
“Jesus.” Xavier let out a string of Spanish curses. “I’m so fucking sorry, Luna.”
“It’s okay. It was an important lesson,” I said flatly. Don’t trust people, and don’t let them in. I couldn’t get hurt if I didn’t care. “They barely showed remorse. I kicked Georgia out, but not before she blamed my overworking for why he strayed. After she left, Bentley and I got into a huge fight, and he…” My knuckles whitened around the edge of my chair. “He said I was too frigid. That I’d always been an ice queen and that I got worse after I started my PR company. He said I couldn’t blame him for hooking up with Georgia when she was so passionate and I couldn’t even show proper emotion. Needless to say, we broke up that night. He and Georgia started dating officially a week later.”
If you weren’t such an ice queen all the time, maybe I wouldn’t have gone looking elsewhere.
My throat and nose burned. “The worst part was my father took Georgia’s side. There was no way his precious perfect daughter would’ve done that without good reason. He blamed me using the same reasons they did, and when I refused to let it go, he gave me an ultimatum. Get over it or get out. So I got out.”
Recounting the story out loud carried the sting of fresh wounds, but as my words dissolved in the sterile air, the initial pain gradually transformed into a therapeutic numbness.
By locking away those memories, I’d given them power. They’d festered over the years, sprouting horns and claws and morphing into a nightmare I constantly ran from, whether I knew it or not. By sharing them out loud, I’d stripped them of that power.
They were nothing but a small man behind a big curtain, trying to convince me they could hurt me.
They couldn’t.