Before I Let Go (Skyland, #1)

by Kennedy Ryan

Then she laughed and I wondered if this—finding someone you can laugh with when everything hurts—was the stuff happily ever afters were made of.

Our soul fusion restaurant, Grits, is a shining example. The two-story Victorian with its wraparound porch stole my heart as soon as I laid eyes on it. The house had fallen into disrepair, but we had a loan from the bank, more ideas than we knew what to do with, and a stack of family recipes. Josiah had the business degree, but I brought the vision for an upscale, “down-home” restaurant that specialized in reinventing old Southern favorites. It took us awhile to get to “upscale.” For a long time we were more “mom-and-pop,” our entire operation squeezed into a small retail space on the south side of Atlanta. So much has changed, been lost, gained.

If therapy has taught me anything, it’s that you run from your pain in a circle. You end up exhausted, but never really gaining ground.

cruelty. I can’t go down memory lane.

“You learn to live with it, ya know?” Deidre says, sympathy, rare understanding in the smile she offers. “But anyone who thinks you ever ‘get over it’ hasn’t lost what we have. I’m just glad you’re still here.”

Right now, ma’am, I need you to find your happy place, go there, and bring a bad bitch back.”

steps. “You know

Vashti leans her head on his shoulder and links their hands in her lap, and I have to hold back a snarl.

This is so messy

“How dare you!” I surge to my feet, unable to stay seated one more second. I need to move, let this anger circulate, or it will clog in my veins. My steps eat up the space separating us, and before I know it, I’m right in front of him, standing in the vee of his powerful legs. The air sizzles with a lightning strike, sudden and hot and dangerous. Unpredictable. I should take shelter, but I don’t step back.

I want him. I shouldn’t. It’s too late. I won’t act on it, but this traitorous ache I’d nearly forgotten roars at me from dusty corners, peers from the shadows and reaches for me through finely spun cobwebs. It’s wild and hungry. If I’m smart, I’ll starve it, deny it, because unlike before, it won’t be satisfied.

Wanting my ex-wife is not new. Have I ever not wanted her? I may want her till the day I die. We’ll be eighty years old and my dick will probably still get hard when that woman shuffles into a room using her walker, but I won’t let her close again. She has proven she cannot be trusted, and I’d be a fool to ever believe otherwise.

us. I can almost feel the air whipping over my face, hear the clackety wheels on that metal cart protesting our combined weight. Smell his distinctive scent—clean, male, him—and feel his warmth at my back.

I wonder if that’s true of everything and the truth hides somewhere between what we each remember? Reshaping our memories to be what we thought they should. Did I make it better than it was? Did I ever make it worse?

“If I waited until I don’t have feelings for Yasmen before I moved on,” I tell Vashti as gently as I can, “I never would.”

Broad and tall, he towers over me in a way that used to make me feel safe when we stood together. I don’t feel safe right now, though.

“What the hell do you mean, there isn’t another room?” Josiah snaps,

IKTR!!!

“I was no walk in the park, Merry.” “Who wants to walk in the park? I think that man would run wild with you.”

So many days I would sit in the rocking chair and stare at the words on his wall, think of him unable to breathe, and hold my breath, deny myself oxygen for as long as I could, until black spots appeared before my eyes. A tiny punishment that never changed a thing.

My body, which for eight months had been the source of life for my baby, had become a tomb.

I close my eyes and give myself over to the primitive dance of our bodies and the feral sounds we make as we take and take and take and give and give and give until

But he was maybe jealous of Mark tonight. He called me baby. He looked at me with desire and affection. I can work with that. I can build on that. I have to try. Before I let go of the past and grab hold of a future without him, I have to be sure. I don’t know when or if I’ll get a second chance, but as long as it’s possible, I’ll hold on to hope.

grabs her pen and pad from the side table, lifts her head, and stares me down. “So let’s set a date.” “A date? For what?” “We need to put it on the calendar, the day you’re going to forgive yourself and get about the business of living your life.” “Um, pretty sure it doesn’t work like that.” “It can work like that. You can’t change what has already happened. What you did or decided. So you have two choices. Wallow in it, stay in the chokehold of guilt and shame that holds you back from the next phase of your life”—she

The orgasm storms through me, and I can’t hold the sobs back. They shake my body, and it’s not just a physical release. It frees my soul, my heart. Everything locked away, imprisoned, flies loose, takes off. I bite my fist to keep from screaming.

“If this is something you want,” Dr. Musa says, “and you obviously have very strong feelings for her, lay some ground rules. Agree on your expectations. Articulate what you think this relationship will give you both, what you want from it, what’s acceptable, the grounds for ending it. All of it. Be up front and protect both of you in the long run.

There is a part of me that knows this is where I belong. There’s another part, though: the self-preserving part that remembers she gave up on us and it ruined me. The woman standing in front of me is the fighter I needed then. How could I not love her?

Since that night, I haven’t allowed myself to trust her. I thought she razed my life, but now I know she did what she did to save her own. Now I know I played a part. Now I understand that everything I saw in black and white was shaded, nuanced in ways I wasn’t in touch with my own pain enough to grasp. Now my feelings rise, unwilling to be denied.