Page 159 of Reckless Hearts

“Yet, you’ve managed to stop yourself.” She tilts her head, studying me. God, her penetrating gaze makes me feel like she’s doing an audit of my soul.

“I don’t think you’re incapable of loving someone properly, Marcus. I think you might be scared of loving properly, of building a future with someone, but you’re not incapable of it.”

“If Seb couldn’t fix me, then no one can.”

She sets her notepad aside, folding her hands in her lap as she regards me. “The right person doesn’t heal you. The right person makes you want to put in the work so you can heal yourself.”

Her words slice through my carefully constructed defenses, leaving me raw and exposed. She fixes me with an intense stare.

“Are you prepared to put in the work?”

I’ve spent so long running from myself, from my past. The idea of standing still, of finally looking in the mirror without the benefit of Hollywood lighting and careful angles, makes my chest constrict.

I’ve gotten so good at pretending that sometimes I forget which version of Marcus is real. Maybe that’s what scares me most about therapy—discovering there’s nothing left beneath all the masks.

But something small is flickering inside me. Fragile as a heartbeat but steady.

It almost feels like hope.

“Yes, I’m prepared to put in the work,” I say.

37

Seb

One Year Later

Here’s the problem when your ex is one of the hottest movie stars on the planet. You can’t escape him.

Even when I deliberately go out of my way to avoid seeing any mention of him, Marcus is still everywhere.

Magazine covers at the grocery store checkout blast Marcus’s handsome face across them. A late-night talk show clip featuring Marcus auto-plays when I open YouTube. A giant billboard on my commute to work shows Marcus smoldering in a Ralph Lauren suit.

And tonight, because the universe apparently likes messing with me, he happens to be starring in the film my date wants to see.

It’s the first time I’ve been on a date since I broke up with Marcus. I kept waiting for it to hurt less, for some sign I was getting over him. But the emptiness has persisted, expanding into all the spaces Marcus used to fill. I catch myself making mental notes of things to tell him—a fascinating article aboutdeep-sea creatures, a new theory about dark matter—before remembering I can’t.

The human brain processes emotional pain in the same region it processes physical pain, which explains why every thought of Marcus feels like pressing on a bruise.

Everyone says time is the great healer. It’s complete bullshit. Time for me has been the great torturer. Time seems to have slowed to a crawl as if the universe wants me to experience every excruciating second of longing.

So I’d decided that instead of waiting to get over Marcus, I would fake it until I made it. Which meant accepting this date.

“Are you sure you want to seeThe Weight of Whispers?” I ask my date Brad as I read through movie synopses on my phone. “Belly Button Battlegroundis playing and looks really interesting. It’s where the aliens are actually microscopic and have been living in our belly buttons this whole time, secretly controlling world events.”

Brad gives me a skeptical look.

“Everyone is sayingThe Weight of Whispersis going to win the Oscar for best picture this year.”

I force my voice to be upbeat. “Okay. If you want to go for potential Oscar winner, we’ll have to save the extraterrestrial navel gazing for another time.”

Brad gives me another weird look.

The date is not going that great anyway. I accidentally knocked over my drink earlier, drenching our menus and Brad’s phone in iced tea. My attempt to help by suggesting he put his phone in rice somehow spawned a fifteen-minute lecture about the mythical nature of the rice-saving-phones theory.

Brad also spent twenty minutes explaining why pineapple on pizza is a culinary abomination, apparently unaware of the pineapple chunks nestled in my Hawaiian pizza.

We might as well add two hours of my ex-boyfriend to this date.