Snippet of He Loved Me Not

He Loved Me Not is free to read on Inkitt here or Wattpad here!

Context: To give you some context, Ben is back in town after leaving a note on the nightstand to break up with Courtney years ago. Since coming back, he found out he has a daughter, and Courtney is with her high school boyfriend. Here, we have him talking with Marcus, Courtney’s father, in a cafe. He’s asking what he should do next after seeing Courtney and the other man together.

Ben:

“Thank you for meeting me,” I say, sliding into the booth. “This must have been hard.”

“Hard was telling Elizabeth where I was going,” Marcus says, already shuffling the menu off to the side. He must eat here often and know the offerings.

“You look well,” I say, nodding at his shoulders and hoping to impress him. “Different.”

“Old?” Marcus asks with a chuckle, and I blow out a breath. If he’s chuckling, he probably isn’t here to kill me.

“No, I didn’t mean that! Just different.”

That’s a lie. He looks old. His hair is almost fully gray, and it wasn’t like that the last time I saw him. He has new glasses, a style a man in his sixties would wear. Five years ago, he still kept up with trends. Now, I guess he prefers functionality.

“You meant old, and it’s OK,” he says, fidgeting with the silverware rolled with a paper napkin. “Becoming a grandfather does that.”

“Does becoming a father change you?”

“I don’t know. I guess we’ll see when you man up and become one.”

Damn.

I nod and suck on my bottom lip as the waitress sets two glasses of water between us and walks away. “I deserve that, but I just found out about Maddie, and I will be around for her.”

“You deserve a lot more than that snide comment after what you did to my daughter. You have no idea about having a daughter, but I’m going to enjoy watching you learn.”

He’s scary in his calm delivery. He doesn’t scream. He doesn’t get red in the face. He’s had a few years to practice what he’d like to say to me. This is a serene, calculated man.

“That’s why I’m here. Let’s hash this out.”

“My daughter’s been handling that just fine, but why don’t we cut the shit and get to the point?”

I nod. It’s probably the best choice. “Yes, sir.”

The waitress comes back, and I quickly order a pot roast sandwich with fries while Marcus orders a slice of chocolate pie and a cup of black coffee.

When she’s gone, Marcus crosses his arms on the table and glares at me, unblinking. “You betrayed the whole family because we all thought you were better.”

“I’m sorry for what you and Elizabeth went through. I can’t imagine how much Courtney needed you to pick up the pieces.”

He leans back, looking down his nose at me. “She had to go to the hospital. Did you know that?”

I shake my head. “When she had Maddie?”

“No, I’m talking after you left her, you dumb fuck. She was so distraught that we were scared for her. She had to go to a…facility.”

My chest suddenly hurts the kind of pain they talk about with heart attacks. “Did she try to hurt herself?”

I let a tear fall. I don’t even care if he thinks I’m a baby. That ship has sailed.

“We were so scared she would. She didn’t eat. She didn’t sleep. She’d randomly scream your name, running from room to room like she was looking for you. At some point, it got too hard for us, and we needed help. She found out she was pregnant when they did the intake process.”

Another tear escapes.

“She had to take a drug test to be admitted. Imagine everyone’s surprise when they said they had to give her a different sleeping pill option because they can’t just give anything to a pregnant woman. We all kind of did a double-take.”

“What did she do when they told her?” I ask, my hand shaking as I take a drink of my water.

He inhales as the waitress comes back with his pie and coffee, and half shoves my sandwich and fries at me. She sweetly pats Marcus on the arm as she leaves.

Marcus adds cream to his coffee and stirs it, looking behind me like he’s lost in thought.“I remember her slinking down the wall and pulling at her hair. Just pulling it out in chunks.” With his hand not stirring the coffee, he pulls at his hair, probably remembering. “She pulled these huge clumps out and had blood running down her forehead.” He closes his eyes and inhales. “Elizabeth was frantic, trying to wipe it away. I felt powerless.” He grits his teeth and looks at me. “You made me feel powerless to do anything to help my daughter and wife. I will never forgive you for that.”

I move my sandwich aside, no longer hungry, place my forehead on the table, and cry. Hard. No silent tears like I’ve done whenever I cry as a man. This is a cry I’ve not done since I was a child. Blessedly, there’s no other soul in the café, other than the waitress who probably already hates me. I cry loudly for minutes, my shoulders shaking so hard that the table moves. I sob, gripping the edge of the table with both hands.

He keeps going. Even though he knows I’m absolutely fucked, he keeps telling me. Maybe that’s his ultimate revenge as her father.

“She wanted an abortion at first. We all did.” I lift my head enough to look at him.

“Why didn’t she abort?” I ask.

“She thought about it. Had the appointment. Back then, she’d go back and forth. I think, in those early days, she thought it was a mean prank, or you were just being a dick. She thought you’d magically come back. We finally had to show her the wedding announcement.”

I suck in my breath. I’m surprised her parents showed her.

“She still didn’t believe it.” He takes a bite of his pie. “By the time she did believe and had accepted it with a lot of work from everyone, well, everyone but you, you little shit, it was too late for an abortion.”

I wipe my face and sob more, not caring that Marcus sees my red cheeks and crumpled expression.

Marcus, knowing this is his time to twist the knife, calmly cuts another piece of pie. “It was just Elizabeth in the birthing room with her when it was time.”

My hand comes to my chest, covering the space where a cold, cowardly heart resides. I wish I could rip it out with my bare hands.

“Courtney cried the whole time. She cried when they put Maddie on her stomach. Elizabeth thinks that she was happy crying then, but she didn’t stop crying until about six months after Maddie was born. She had terrible post-partum depression.”

I run my hands through my hair, shaking.

“She talked about adoption. Started working with a lawyer, then backed out. By then, I think she had bonded with Maddie, and Maddie was just…here now. We made it work.”

I sob for another minute, and he stares at me with a lopsided smile that I let him enjoy. If someone hurt Maddie the way I hurt Courtney, I don’t think I’d be calm. I just met Maddie, and I feel that way. The anger this man must have for the shithead who treated his beloved daughter like crap is visceral.

“Tell me how I can make this right with her,” I say between jagged sobs.

He laughs. He laughs so hard that he chokes and takes a drink of coffee to wash it down. When he finally clears the food, he pounds on his chest and then points an angry index finger at me. “Listen here, you dumbass. You don’t make that kind of shit right. You have to start all over.”

I cock my head. “Start over?”

“With Maddie first. Then, you work on salvaging something with the woman you once loved.”

“I still love her.”

“Shut the fuck up.”

“Yes, sir.”

He jabs his finger at the air. “Your mistake was waltzing in here and wanting to fix something unfixable. You can’t fix what you did, you dumb fuck. You have to look in the mirror, tear apart everything you know about Ben and Courtney from the past, and look at her as the woman she is now, the woman she built from the ashes after you lit a match and threw it on her.”

“I don’t know where to start.”

“Be a mature man and get to know your daughter. Then you can work on knowing Courtney as a woman and not your college girlfriend, but you don’t set the terms. If she gives you one-word texts about child visitation, you take it. If she flips you off for the next twenty years, you take it with a God damn smile and you never say a fucking word.”

“Yes, sir.”

“She sets the terms here.”

“What do I do to apologize properly?”

He laughs again, this time slightly maniacal. “You aren’t listening. You apologized for the past. She’s told you to pretty much eat shit.”

“Right, but —

“There’s no but here,” he interrupts. “Eat your shit sandwich. It’s all about Courtney, so put the past in the past, and move forward. That’s it. You accept how she wants to play this from now on. Whatever that is. It used to be the Ben and Courtney show. Now, it’s the Courtney show. Strap in.”