Stillwater Lake by J.P. Choquette

Author:J.P. Choquette [J.P. Choquette]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: J.P. Choquette
Published: 2022-07-06T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 15

Jessica Brown

Jessica stared at the blinking cursor on the screen. In the past hour, she’d written two sentences. She re-read them for the third time. Two not very good sentences. She deleted, watching all the words disappear. The room had gotten dark. The glow of the laptop’s screen was the only light in the cabin. Night came faster up here in the mountains than it did back home. Already the forest was shrouded in blackness, the dark trees silhouetted against the slightly lighter gray-blue sky.

She’d dropped Tony off after their impromptu picnic at the lake and surprised herself by agreeing to meet him early tomorrow for a hike. He wouldn’t get them lost, he’d promised with a laugh, and it had made her laugh too. It had felt good. She hadn’t realized how little she’d laughed these past few months. Tony was funny, nice, interesting…and she was a complete imbecile for being attracted to him.

Look how it turned out with Bryan, that annoying little voice in her head reminded her. Bryan had taken her heart and not only stepped on it but ground it into the dirty alleyway with his boot for good measure. What happened to staying single and free? And not putting yourself out there to get emotionally mauled again?

For months, Jessica had talked herself out of the idea that he was cheating. There were good reasons that he was staying over less often. His work often took him to book shows around the country—sometimes even in other countries—and he was tired after these trips. The fact that he’d stopped inviting her didn’t mean he was fooling around. He was just being considerate of her time. He knew she’d had a pressing book tour schedule. And after all, she’d told herself, she knew Bryan. Inside and out.

Or so she’d thought.

It wasn’t until she’d found the credit card bill with the purchase at Tiffany’s nowhere near her birthday or Christmas that she really started to question other things: the late nights at work, the weekends away—supposedly on guys’ golfing trips—that began happening with more regularity. His distractibility when they were together. The way he obsessively checked his phone and popped up from the couch to take “important work calls” more often than ever before.

Still, in her defense, Jessica could say that all these things happened before there had been signs of trouble. She and Bryan were independent people. She’d never minded his trips with friends or the fact that Bryan and she had always maintained separate apartments in the city. But it was the culmination of all the seemingly disparate parts that painted a picture in her mind. Unfortunately, this was months after he’d started sleeping with one of the CEOs at the publishing company where both Jessica and Bryan worked.

Her agent, Theresa, had tut-tutted the company’s decision to overlook the dalliance after it had come out. Company policy stated that those in administrative positions were not allowed to have romantic relationships with those in non-administrative roles. Bryan was second in charge of the marketing department.

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