Happily Never After

by Lynn Painter

And Pastor Pete apparently forgot that his lapel mic was on, because he sighed and said, “Are you fucking kidding me?”

Haha Love that!

but I’d wholeheartedly believed that it was a onetime mistake and I’d chugged the Kool-Aid of happily-ever-after like a damn fool.

Honey we've all done at least one shot of that kool-aid :(

“Nope.” The bride shook her head, kicked off the boots, and said, “As much as I want to get ripped, I don’t want to end up with my head in a hotel toilet. Pretty sure that’s how you get dysentery.”

“I strongly suspect that love is a trick your brain plays on you to encourage procreation. Survival of the species and all that. Serotonin and hormones go to work, and it’s all just propaganda to make us keep trying for magic that doesn’t exist.”

“But I do think love is a gamble and most people walk away from the table with less than they brought.”

I was good at conflict avoidance—it was a big part of my job, in fact—but I’d be damned if I’d let some Miranda Lambert wannabe take me down in front of hundreds of people like she had the upper hand. Oh, hell no.

“So just when I thought the entire ordeal couldn’t get any more Jerry Springer, Callie called Ronnie pathetic and told him she didn’t love him and never had. She said—and I quote—‘I only love your penis.’ ”

Not that I was thinking about sleeping with him—God, no—but objectively speaking, he seemed very . . . capable. He struck me as the kind of guy who was remembered as “the best I ever had” by everyone he’d been with.

“Take a picture with me before I go in?” “What is this, prom night?” he teased as he came around the car. “No, this is the first night since my wedding that I haven’t cried about Stuart. The first night I haven’t felt broken and alone.”

“I guess I just want to remember the night I reconnected with happy for a few hours.”

I rather enjoyed figuring her out. She was like a stubborn puzzle who didn’t want to be solved, which made me want to toss all the pieces into the air.

And then solve it anyway, just to piss her off.

but my melancholy over my foolishness doesn’t negate how spectacular my independence is.”

“I like to keep my food and my body-part ogling completely separate experiences.”

It was as if Sophie were a hundred percent in it for herself, and that scorched me like a wildfire, flames licking over every nerve ending in my body.

Sophie Steinbeck thought love was no different than Santa Claus. Sophie truly believed that the concept of romantic love was a brain trick.

“Because it was your whole world,” I said. “Every moment of every day belonged to the two of you, together. So how do you not feel a loss when those moments are only yours now?”

“Because feelings eventually come with chemistry whether you want them to or not.” “Bullshit,” I argued. “It’s a conscious decision, not an inadvertent reaction.” “You keep telling yourself that, poopsie.”

Maybe talk to me when you haven’t been out playing ‘taste the tonsil’ with Julian the Hot.”

I stopped walking and turned to her. “What?” She grinned, a sexy, tipsy smile, and I swear to God I felt it in my lungs.

That’s the only explanation for why I stopped breathing entirely for a full second as my eyes memorized the length of her lashes, the slope of her cheekbones, the soft curve of her lips, and the way she looked at me like she wanted to play.

Her heavy-lidded eyes fluttered open. “Stop?” “If you still want this when you’re sober, Soph, I am yours—night or day,” I said, meaning every word. Because as she stared up at me, I realized that I was very into her. Not into this, this chemistry-gone-wild thing that existed between us, but into her. I was falling for her.

I didn’t know if it was possible to literally consume another person, to absolutely inhale them into your body, but I was trying, dear God.

I was burning alive and all he had was kindling.

But as I bit down on her shoulder blade, my eyes met hers in the mirror above the refrigerator. And I was undone.

He grinned and shut off the faucet. “So you did. What did he think?” “That we’re ‘Captain Dipshit and the Brainless Twit,’ to quote him,” I said, taking the water from him. “Please tell me I’m the captain.” “You wish, twit.”

“The truth is that who gives a flying fuck if you’ve been hurt in the past? Who cares if you’ve been cheated on? You have to get hurt to get to the good stuff, don’t you see?”

“No.” “When you’re a baby, you don’t stop taking steps just because you’ve fallen once, or you’d never walk. The falls help you learn how to walk, for fuck’s sake, to make balance and gait adjustments. If you never fell, you’d do something outrageously stupid, like walk on your toes like a ballerina, which would result in you getting your ass kicked every day of your life for looking like a dipshit.”

Fuck me, I’d fallen so hard that I wasn’t even trying to get up.

Something inside me lit up when he said that, felt a little less scared, because I realized that I trusted him. I trusted that he meant it, even though it came with no guarantee. I trusted that he’d take care of my feelings, and that he wouldn’t lie about his.

Because as it turned out, love was actually real. It wasn’t a trick at all, but more like this amazing thing that was mislabeled a shocking amount of the time, leading to endless confusion and piles of unhappiness. They really needed to fix that. But the truth was that if you looked hard enough and didn’t die from the disappointments along the way, the real thing was out there.