Gabriel and Breah

Chapter 3: Breah

It's so easy to say and think, in the heat of the moment, that you're going to get over someone you're so in love with. You're mad, you want to hit at them and hurt them the same way they hurt you, so you start spewing forth all of these angry promises.

I'm ending whatever this farce was between us.

We already ended, the minute I found out you've been lying to me from the very beginning.

I'm not playing your games anymore. 

I'm tapping out and walking away.

Sometimes love doesn't matter. It's not enough. Especially when it's one sided. And especially not when what I did have, thought I had, at least – trust – is shattered.

I'd meant what I said to Gabriel when I'd (practically) shrieked those words at him. Twenty minutes after he left my apartment, I'd wiped my eyes, inserted my spine and driven to the phone store where I scrapped my old phone and bought a new phone with a new number. Over the top reaction? Yes, but I didn't want Gabriel to be able to contact me easily. I'm sure he'd get the message when he heard that my old number had been disconnected. Of course, he still knew where I lived, but I was hoping he'd stay away after I'd made my feelings on the subject of us known -- as in, there was no us.

Someone had knocked on my door for fifteen minutes that night I ended things with Gabriel, but I didn't answer, relatively sure if it wasn't Gabriel, then it was someone from his club, a minion sent to do his president's bidding. Gabriel probably couldn't be bothered to come over himself because he had, you know, his girlfriend and son to hang out with. Since I didn't want to deal with any of the above, I'd let whoever it was continue knocking until he gave up and went away. Had I kept my old phone, I'm sure it would have been blowing up right after that. No matter how many nights he spent away from me, Gabriel always always always kept in touch; looking back, sometimes his texts to me were so frequent on the nights he had "club business" -- as the bastard had referred to overnight visits with his son and girlfriend -- I'm not sure how he could have kept them from his live-in girlfriend. Although, he'd managed to keep both a girlfriend and a son from me for seven months, so...the man clearly had mad skills as the master of deception.

How he could have kept that from me I would never know -- and I don't mean from a logistics sort of how, but from a human decency sort of how. To be honest, I couldn't even think of it without feeling as if I'd inhaled a huge gulp of sub-zero air into my lungs. It burned, plain and simple. He'd had his son and girlfriend living with him for months before I'd ever even met Gabriel -- he knew he wasn't free to pursue anything with me, yet he had. Relentlessly. Charmingly. Purposefully. And now, I could add dishonestly to that list.

As a freelance copywriter, one of my regular clients, Philip Donnell, had asked me to write a blog post for his company's website about the huge Thanksgiving/Christmas charity drive they were sponsoring with Gabriel's MC, the Lords of Misrule. Phil wanted me to interview some of the people at his company and at the MC, so he'd called Gabriel and asked him to walk me through what would be happening from the MC side of things.

I'd called Gabriel after Phil called him, and we'd talked on the phone for a few minutes to set up a meet. I'd liked his deep, smooth voice and his quick humor. When I'd met him in person two days later at his club, I'd had to rely on every professional bone in my body to keep me upright. To put it in old-fashioned terms, I literally went weak at the knees when I saw Gabriel Donovan, with his dark hair, green eyes and dark, neatly trimmed beard. When he stood up from behind his office desk, I saw he was tall, well-built and muscular, but not overly developed like a gym rat. Without saying a word, the man pulled at me on every level, as if he'd been designed specifically to draw in the female of the species.