Simple Perfection

alive. She had just left. She had left. “She left me,” I said, and my voice broke.
    “Yeah, she did. But you can’t beat the hell out of your house. It won’t bring her back and you’re getting out of control. Get it together. I know what this feels like. I’ve been there. Losing your shit doesn’t make her come back to you.”
    Rush had been here. He knew. Blaire had left him once. But she’d been betrayed. She’d had a reason to. I hadn’t hurt Della. I had only loved her.
    “I didn’t let her live,” I said, lifting my eyes to look straight ahead at Jace and Thad, who were keeping their distance from me.
    “She needs some space. Let her have it,” Rush said.
    “How do I keep going? With her gone? What do I do?”
    Rush let out a sigh and slowly let his hold on me go. “You wake up each morning and you go to work. You smile when you think you’re supposed to. You spend your free time thinking about her. Thinking about what you’ll say when you see her again. Then you go to bed and hope you get some sleep. Then you wake up and do that same shit over again.”
    I leaned against the wall and hung my head. “What if she never comes back?” He didn’t say anything at first. We stood there in silence among the destruction.
    “Then you find a way to keep living,” Rush finally said, and I realized that was my biggest fear. That I’d be left needing to find a way, because Della might never come back.
    “She was my go-all-in,” I said as I stared down at the smashed-up bar stool.
    “Your what?” Jace asked.
    “Della was my go-all-in. She was my winning hand. You can’t play when you go all in and lose. I’m out.”
    “No, you’re not. This hand ain’t over yet,” Rush said.
    I hoped he was right.

Two weeks later . . .

Della
    “W here are we now?” I asked Tripp as I got off the back of his bike—without his help this time.
    “What have you been doing back there? Sleeping? We’ve passed several signs announcing our arrival at the home of the King,” Tripp said as he grabbed our bags and headed for the hotel to get us a room.
    “The King?” I asked, following him.
    “Yeah, you know . . . hunka hunka burnin’ love,” Tripp said.
    “Elvis? “You mean we’re in Memphis?”
    “Yep,” Tripp said as he pushed open the door to the hotel and held it for me so I could go inside. Our first night I had tried to stay in my own room, but the night terrors had come fast and hard. Since then, we got rooms with two beds and Tripp helped me when the dreams came, which was every night so far. We were both so tired this week that most nights we ended up falling asleep in the same bed once the terror was over, sleeping that way through the rest of the night.
    “One room, two beds,” Tripp told the lady, and she glanced over at me, then back at Tripp and flashed him a flirty smile. He got that a lot. When females realized we weren’t together they started throwing themselves at him. He ignored it for the most part. Sometimes there would be a girl he couldn’t ignore. He would flirt back and take her number, which I thought was pointless since we weren’t coming back. But he said he might just come back one day.
    Tripp got the key to our room and we headed to the elevator. I didn’t feel like talking much. I had called Braden earlier and she’d told me that Woods still hadn’t called her. That bothered me. I should have been relieved. But I wasn’t. The longer I was away from him without his calling Tripp or Braden, the more I realized this was what he wanted. Deep down, I’d given him his out. I didn’t want to think about his being in pain. It made it easier to function each day knowing that the never-ending ache in my heart was something I suffered alone.
    “You’re quiet today,” Tripp said as the elevator door opened and we stepped out onto the second floor. That was as high as Tripp would go. He had a thing about being too high up in a hotel. He said that if the place caught on fire he wanted to know he didn’t have too many flights of stairs to take to get the hell out. I hadn’t really thought about it but he had, apparently.
    “Just not in the mood to talk,” I told him.
    “Your talk with Braden go okay?” he asked.
    Sure. It had gone fine. She hadn’t brought up Woods. She had only asked me where we had gone and what we were doing. Nothing more. “Yeah, it was fine.”
    Tripp opened the door to our room and glanced back at me. “You okay if I go out and