Me, Love, & Secrets

Back To Normal

"Mhm. We were dating up until...a little before my 19th birthday. He just got too possessive and I didn't like that. You'd think I would have been turned on by it, but he was taking everything personally." I sighed, jabbing at the home button on my phone. "I loved him, I really did, but I couldn't deal with his mess. His aunt was already pissing me off with the silent treatment."

"Silent treatment?" Lucas reached across me to grab the remote.

"Don't tell anyone, but he might have gotten me pregnant when we first started dating," I said. "His aunt told me I was a bad influence on him and blamed everything on me. Robert tried to make her think otherwise, but she wasn't having it. You can guess what happened next."

"I'm not gonna try, but I'm glad I know everything. We can put this all behind us and I won't have to be jealous of that loser again."

"I don't know why you were jealous in the first place. You saw how he acted when I came back home." I put my phone down and looked at Luca. "The best four years of my life have ended and now it's time for me to put my degree to good use."

"Are you taking over your father's business?"

"Step-father. And no. His company deserves to go bankrupt. It wasn't doing good from the start. I don't want to make it better, then he gets out of jail and takes it all from me."

"He wouldn't be able to unless the board of directors welcomed him back."

"If he has a board of directors. Knowing him, he probably works alone. Besides the many partners he has every once in a while."

"Ruby, it's not like you to worry about what your step-father thinks of you. Come on! You used to be a baddie before he went crazy. You thought he was wrong about any and everything. What's stopping you from taking over his business and making it yours?"

Lucas didn't understand. I wasn't afraid of my step-father. I wasn't afraid of anything he could probably do to me. What I didn't want to do was make something of his profit from my hard work and have him take it away from me. I'm afraid of being a failure for the rest of my life. I let my mother down when I failed to fight against the judge about my step-father's prison sentence.

I now have a chance to do some good, but I don't know where to begin. There's so much I still have to figure out with no one to lead me. Yeah, I may have a group of friends who claim they'll be there for me when I need them, but they don't understand anything I'm going through right now. I messed up when I came after my best friend's ex-boyfriend. And him liking me isn't even my fault.

Samantha no longer had the right to tell me to stay away from Lucas. He was free for any girl to take him. He hadn't been in a relationship for just as long as I haven't. And to think we were both hurt by people we thought we could trust. If that wasn't a sign to say we belong together, then I don't know what made us start dating. Even he understood we needed each other no matter what we were doing to mess up our lives.

"Nothing's stopping me," I said. "I don't want to touch anything that belongs to him. If you hadn't offered to let me stay at your place until I got my own place, I would still be living in his house."

"You mom sold it, didn't she?" Lucas mindlessly clicked through a couple of channels. "I feel like you would have come to me if I didn't say anything."

"Or I would have gone back to my cousins. It's not an ideal arrangement, but at least it would have gotten me a home and people who still love me."

"You think too much about if people like you. I think it's time you decided to relax and do something fun."

"Like what? The fair doesn't open for another week."