Fine, months. Whatever.

My phone begins to ring in my hand and I know it’s him without even looking. “I’m not going,” I say as I answer the phone. I lean against the island in Parker’s pristine all white kitchen wondering if I should fix myself a drink to calm my nerves.

“So, you’re just going to avoid him… forever?”

“No, but it’s going to be on my terms how I decide to see him and it’s not going to be alone and without Parker.” My fiancé was currently out of town on business in New York and wouldn’t be back for almost a week. Normally, I would go with him but I was in my first year of law school and it just so happened to be my midterms this week and jet setting across the country with my fiancé wasn’t exactly an excuse to get me out of my exams plus I had a paper due Monday.

“Why? Do you not trust yourself?” Mason asks and part of me thinks he’s being a smartass, but the rational part of me knows that he’s genuinely curious if the feelings are still there. If there was still a spike in my heart rate at the thought of seeing him tonight. If I wasn’t already going through my closet to find the sexiest dress I had that didn’t appear that I was trying too hard, but actually that I didn’t give a fuck. The opposite of love isn’t hate, it’s indifference. The opposite of love isn’t hate, it’s indifference. I begin chanting to myself.

Clearly the answer is no to all of these questions.

“It’s not that, I just… it’s going to be awkward.” I hadn’t seen or talked to him since I left his house the day he broke up with me. He’d left for Mexico the next day and this was the first time he’d been home in three years. I’d texted him a few times and called him even more during the first month post breakup when I’d had too much to drink but he never answered.

“That’s fair. Do you really think he’s here because he heard about you and Parker?” It’s hard to say. I got engaged a month ago and the engagement party invitations went out earlier this week. But there is no way that my parents would have waited until he got the invitation to tell him. I would be surprised if they hadn’t called him the night I got engaged. My dad and JP told each other literally everything. Their bromance is actually kind of cute even after all these years.

“Part of me thinks yes, but do you really think Mom and Dad didn’t tell him before now? If that were the case, wouldn’t he have come home a month ago?” I know he’s not on social media anymore, I remember the exact day he deleted everything about two months after we’d broken up. I spiraled even further after that. I liked having a little bit of a connection to him and he severed that without so much as a reason or warning. One day he had a Facebook and Instagram and the next both were gone. I’d been stalking him almost hourly at that point, so I guess he’d done me a favor but it had hurt like hell to just be completely cut off from him. The only things I learned was through my parents here and there when they’d mention that they had talked to him and it took everything out of me not to go crazy with questioning whenever his name came up.