❤💗 BOOK 2 💗❤Jane is still recovering from her breakup with Shannon and the tumultuous events of the last few months. These are excerpts from her journal as she goes on walkabout, trying to sort her head out.
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I mostly stayed in my room for the next week, knocking out several chapters of the Moonthieves sequel and returning over and over again to that short little email that Jared had sent.
We miss you a lot around here.
We miss you
We
I hadn't heard a word from Shannon, but every time I laid my head down at night I saw him, whiskey eyes staring back at me in silence, never letting me forget just how far I had let him in or how much I missed him. I discovered the only thing worse than being chased by someone you were trying to forget was being ignored by them. Your brain fills in that void with a hundred competing scenarios, each one outdoing the last in twisting that knife a little a deeper, never allowing you to get the upper hand against your own ever-escalating imagination. I was humiliated and angry and I still missed him so much I felt as if I were hollow. But did we even mean Shannon? Maybe the guys missed me. I certainly missed them, especially Tomo and the enthusiastic way he hugged me every time he saw me. I missed the adventure of it all, the changing cities, the mix of familiar and new faces, the energy of crowds and the quiet hours on the road. I was the one that was doing all the missing.
I typed out a dozen replies, some of them only a few words, some of them page after page. I had so much to say to Jared. I had a lot of questions. None of them felt right for an email, and I wasn't ready to hear his voice again just yet. My resolve was still thin. It wasn't going to stand up to the sound of his smooth voice in my ear. I may have been healing but I was still acutely aware of how alone I was, and I didn't need the temptation of one of the few people I could still tolerate asking me to come see him. Not that he necessarily would. I just couldn't risk it. I finally sent him the following:
Hey Jared.
I miss you too. It was a wonderful adventure and I'm sad it all had to come to an ugly end. I'm not okay, not yet but I'm working on it. I'm sure someday we'll talk again. I'm sorry I'm not ready yet.
Jane
After knocking out several chapters of the book I realized I was paying a lot of money to stay in a nice resort when I never saw more than the inside of my room. I needed somewhere to work and going back to New York was out of the question. That apartment still half belonged to Roger, and although he was busy with the theater thing, he hadn't told me enough about it for me to even know if he was in town working on it or off workshopping somewhere. I couldn't very well avoid him in his own home. I needed a new base of operations.
Having grown up in the landlocked portion of the country, when an escape came to mind, I always pictured it near a beach. So I packed up what little I had in South America and moved it all to South Beach. I found a nice furnished rental with a gorgeous view of the ocean. I planned to put in a few chapters and some editing and then resume my walkabout when I was once again firmly ahead of schedule.
Being set up in Miami also meant access to more reasonable phone rates and no excuse not to resume calling my mother regularly. Twenty minutes on the phone with her confirmed that Roger had indeed gone back home for Labor Day and had given my parents a highly edited version of the current situation. My mother was upset. She adored Roger and didn't understand why we couldn't just bury the hatchet and get along again. After all, that is what we had always done through the years, working through our little spats like siblings, a hundred minor grievances lost to the passage of time. I couldn't make her understand how different this was, not without spilling a lot of details that would just worry her, and so I listened to her concerns and told her I'd take her advice under consideration. I didn't have any intention of doing that. I was still far too angry with Roger to entertain any thoughts of reconciliation. But I missed him too, even more profoundly than Shannon. I missed him so much I couldn't think about him at all. Mom tried to mention him every time I called and I rapidly changed the subject. I couldn't get my brain around it no matter how hard I tried, and if I couldn't understand how it had all gone so sideways so quickly between Roger and me then how could I ever make her understand?
I keep mostly to myself here in Miami and I fill in the evenings doing a lot of online shopping. Not for shoes or clothes or ridiculous things to fill spaces I no longer inhabit, but for experiences. I want to meet people and learn about life in a different way from what I have always been presented. I've spent hours searching through travel blogs, investigating volunteer opportunities and considering destinations. I don't know what I'm looking for but with over six billion people in the world, six billion people with six billion experiences, there has to be one for me. There has to be an answer out there. I'm counting on it.
