Chapter Thirty-Seven
SAVING GRACE
-- May --
“Amy, why did you kiss him?”
Amy looked up from the morning newspaper and sighed. They’d managed to avoid the topic of her ex-boyfriend for a week, but now Matthew was bringing it up once again.
“I told you – I got caught up in everything he was saying.”
“What was he saying? Tell me everything that happened.”
Amy’s eyes widened frightfully.
“I need to know,” Matthew insisted.
“Donna and I were dancing, then she got lost in the crowd. TJ came up to me and asked for a dance. So I gave him one.”
“Why?”
“Remember when we spoke to Scott in the shopping centre last year? I told you that I’d forgiven TJ. I felt that way on the night of Scott’s wedding. I didn’t hold anything against him anymore. So I gave him a dance... and I was too nervous to say no.”
Matthew reached out and grasped Amy’s hand. “Why were you nervous?”
“Lots of reasons,” Amy admitted, but made no move to explain further.
“Please tell me,” Matthew insisted.
Amy sighed. “For one, I wanted to prove you wrong. I wanted to prove to you that I was okay – that I could be around him without turning into a blubbering mess. Dancing with him was a way for me to show that. I wanted to prove that I was stronger than you gave me credit for…
“But I also think I was nervous because I was scared of him. After he left me, I was depressed and suicidal – as you know. And at the wedding, I was scared that those feelings would come back to me, and I didn’t want that. I was scared that, if I said no, he would yell at me or force me to dance with him.
“But to be honest, I’m not one hundred per cent sure.”
Matthew thought about Amy’s answer for a moment before prompting her to continue. “So, you two danced?”
Amy nodded slowly. “Only one song. He behaved, I swear. We just had some awkward small talk – he asked about me, and I asked about him so that the focus wasn’t on me. It was uncomfortable talking to him. He was acting like nothing had happened, and though I’d forgiven him, it hurt me that he was pretending everything was okay… like I was just an insignificant part of his past, when he’d shaped my life pretty dramatically.
“I wanted to leave – find Donna and go. I was really uncomfortable. Then he said he wanted to talk privately. So he took me to an empty room… and we talked.”
“If you were so uncomfortable around him in the crowd,” Matthew began, “why did you leave with him to somewhere private?”
Amy’s heart sank – she could hear utter disappointment in her husband’s voice. “I thought we would talk about what happened – we never did. We never talked it through, understood one another’s side. We just ended… I thought that, talking to him alone, I’d be able to get some sort of closure. That’s what I needed: answers, closure.
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Recovering Amy (Amy, #2)
Romance“You’re mine,” it told her in her dreams, “you don’t deserve happiness”. She would wake up screaming most nights, crying, begging for forgiveness that no one dared to offer her. She was sorry – she didn’t mean for anything quite so terrible to happe...
