Page 48 of Freed By Wrath
Four weeks have passed, and it sounds longer than it felt. Or maybe it feels exactly as long as it was and I just didn’t notice because for the first time in longer than I can remember, I’ve had somewhere worth being at the end of a shift.
Specifically, my trouble’s inner thighs. But that’s a different conversation.
I’m sitting at the bar at the Harvest, nursing a beer I’ve been working on for forty minutes, watching Valerie move through the dining room like she’s been doing this her whole life.
She hasn’t.
Four weeks ago she was a woman whose entire future had been organized around someone else’s preferences, and now she’s carrying menus through a restaurant in Greenbrook with her red hair pinned up and an expression on her face that means she’s paying attention to everything at once and enjoying every second of it.
She looks good.
She looks beautiful.
Fuck, can’t wait to get her home.
The Harvest is warm tonight. Dark wood and amber lighting, white tablecloths, the kind of place where everything smells like something worth eating. Matteo, the chef, runs a tight operation—kitchen noise contained, service smooth, clientele the kind of Greenbrook crowd that knows how to behave in public without being reminded. He and Fabien usually play football together on their days off, and the moment Valerie decided to stay, Fabien called in the favor without being asked.
Our girl had always been curious about working in a restaurant. What kind of boyfriends would we be if we didn’t make it happen?
She cried when she got the job.
Happy tears, we eventually figured out, because this was her first real job. Ever. I’m not joking. That fucker had wanted a trophy wife, so everything she’d done since high school amounted to some arts and crafts, some volunteering, and eight years of making herself smaller on command. No career. No direction of her own. Just Daniel’s vision of what she was supposed to become.
Not anymore.
She started three weeks ago, right after she finished moving into the apartment. She’d stayed that first night out of necessity—nowhere to go, no keys, no plan—and then the second night because nobody asked her to leave. By the third night Fabien had quietly cleared his own room, and Isaac had ordered a bed frame online without mentioning it to her.
It arrived in two days, so we immediately put it together while she sat on the floor the entire time and laughed at us.
That laugh.
That’s the one I missed.
The real one.
The one I drove to Serena’s party to hear one more time, told myself would be enough, and now get to hear every day in my own apartment.
I’ll never tire of it.
At some point, whatever being together meant sorted itself out.
We all know our relationship isn’t exactly conventional, but honestly? None of us cares.
The only thing all of us agreed on was making her happy, and that is the easiest compromise I’ve ever made.
That said, we rearranged our lives to nurture the relationship. Shifts got rearranged, and someone is always home now, or close enough. Isaac runs the schedule in his head without writing anything down. Fabien cooks when he’s home, which is more often than before. I take the early mornings because I’ve always been up first and now there’s someone to make coffee for and share it with, and we divide everything between each other: time, space, patience.
Our apartment is full of joy and… well, sex. But with sex also comes joy, so…
Most importantly, they didn’t make me take down the Halloween decorations. Eheh.
We’re all so enthralled by this new phase in our lives that the apartment looks like Halloween still. The carved pumpkins on the windowsill are starting to look more philosophical than spooky. The skull string lights along the kitchen shelf are, objectively, still festive. Valerie commented on the skeleton on the porch last week—said it looked like it had settled in for the long haul. I told her I’d deal with it after Thanksgiving.
She said I could just put a pilgrim hat on it.
I’m considering it.
Eventually she grabbed her stuff from her ex-fiancé’s house.
