Danielle was miserable. She felt like she was coming down with a cold. She was nauseated and throwing up. And she was exhausted. She needed to work on a book cover for Isabella Quinn, but she had zero energy, much less any creativity.

Samuel had dropped her off at her apartment, so now that she was alone, she collapsed on the sofa and, curling her feet beneath her, pulled a throw off the back of the couch and closed her eyes.

She wondered, again, if her father was secretly paying Samuel to watch out for her. He said he was on her father’s payroll, but here he was hanging out with her. He couldn’t possibly be bored enough to want to spend time with a girl who was always either being sick or complaining about feeling sick.

She would go to his doctor and get something to get past this, then she would be better-able to fight her growing attraction and attachment to this man.

Samuel was nothing like Joey. She’d met Joey when they were just freshmen in college. That had been ages ago. Her stepfather, Grayson, had inspired Joey to join the military, and she had watched him become a different person. Unlike most guys, the uniform had not been good for Joey. He’d gone weeks without calling while he was stationed here or there, and they had drifted apart. He’d dropped out of college, and they’d grown even further apart. But then, just when she’d moved on and put him behind her, he’d show up again.

Joey had a certain charm that she wasn’t immune to. He would use we language and talk about getting married. Danielle considered herself trendy when it came to fashion and hair color. She was the first to jump on the mermaid hair color trend, and she did yoga at least once weekly. She enjoyed her mother’s artsy friends. They were so different from Claire, her very traditional mother, that Danielle had been fascinated – like a moth to a flame, she’d studied them and learned about the art world. Not the history of art, but modern art, what attracted people to a painting. Things like that.

She’d switched her major from psychology to fine arts. She had enough of her mother in her to take on a second major, marketing, and so far, the combination was serving her well in the real world of work.

Her downfall had been Joey.

He’d crooked his finger, and she’d followed. Come join me in Houston. We’ll have so much to do. It’ll be fun.

She should’ve known better. She knew him well enough to know that come join me did not translate into come be with me and be my girl.

At least not in the sense of any depth. He wanted her to be his girl, alright, for just about three days.

Then he’d recruited a young eighteen-year-old into his bed.

Danielle wasn’t shocked. She pretended to be. But she knew he’d been playing around on her ever since he put on that uniform and went off to basic training in San Antonio. A girl could tell those things.

Instead of being shocked, she’d been repulsed.

She wondered now why she suddenly developed repulsion toward her on-and-off boyfriend of five years. Perhaps it was the detail of walking into his apartment and finding him in bed with a young girl, kissing her on the stomach.

Still… not a complete shock.

There were rose petals tossed all over the room. Rose petals? Joey had never used such a romantic gesture with Danielle. Not even once.

When she stripped it down to the bare bones – and Danielle had taken plenty of time to dissect her feelings – it wasn’t finding him with the girl. It was finding him with the girl in the very same bed where they had made love the night before.

The. Very. Same. Sheets.

And rose petals?

He’d told Danielle that he loved her. He always did that when they were intimate. He would tell her when he thought she was asleep.

And that was the one detail that tripped her up every time. Because he told her when he thought she was asleep, she believed him.

She believed that even though he wasn’t ready to commit, that he still loved her more than anyone else.

She’d thought he would commit eventually.

The old Danielle, back when she was a teenager, hadn’t been very good at coping. In high school, while her mother had been out at a gallery event, and her father had been with his new girlfriend, Danielle had been alone after a breakup with a boy she’d particularly liked. His name was Richard, and he’d completely swept her off her feet. She had thought they were going to get married. He was five years older and was a pilot she’d met through her father. She’d had enough sense to never tell her father those two details. Even after weeks of family therapy, she kept those details to herself. In retrospect, she’d sensed it was rather Freudian. She hadn’t known about Freud at the time, but she had known that her father didn’t need to know.

Nonetheless, in a moment of desperation, she’d taken her mother’s Xanax and mixed it with her father’s bourbon. That had led to intense individual and family therapy during a mental health hospitalization. It was not a time in her life that she ever wanted to repeat.

She’d lost track of the number of boyfriends she’d been through since then, Joey not included. She suffered through many breakups, but none of them had taxed her coping skills like the one with that pilot. He had been her first sexual experience, and her last, until that night with Joey five weeks ago.

All in all, Danielle’s adventurous spirit with clothes, hair, and even in some ways, her career, didn’t cross over into her world of relationships.

She dated. A lot. But she rarely crossed that line. With Joey, she’d still been young and vulnerable when their relationship started. She couldn’t explain why she’d kept going back to him.

But just because she’d slept with him, didn’t mean she couldn’t let him go.

Over. With.

She was over Joey.

Somehow the process of being over her long-time on-off boyfriend had led to her needing to take a break from all men.

She hadn’t decided how long this self-imposed hiatus was going to last. There was currently no expiration date.

So here she was, vulnerable from her breakup with Joey, when Samuel waltzed in with his innocent sweetness.

Such was the story of her life. Joey had waltzed in when she was vulnerable from her brush with suicide, and Samuel waltzed in after her discontinuation of what she now knew was a toxic relationship with Joey.

Only this time, she was better at coping. If she just didn’t have this cold. Or virus. Or whatever it was that was making her sick. She’d felt off since that morning nearly six weeks ago. She’d gotten up while Joey was still asleep, gotten dressed, and while it was still dark outside, slipped outside and taken an Uber to her apartment.

She’d not more than pulled up to her apartment, when she realized she’d left her keys lying on his counter. She had the driver turn around take her back to Joey’s. The whole trip took no more than forty-five minutes.

After letting herself inside, she’d calmly walked past Joey and his new girlfriend to empty the contents of the one dresser drawer Joey had shared with her. As she tossed her pajamas and sweats and underwear into her overnight bag and lugged it to the bathroom to gather up her toothbrush, hair dryer, and cosmetic bag, they had become aware of her.

As they scrambled for clothing, she’d calmly taken the key Joey had given her out of her pocket and laid it on the kitchen counter as she walked out.

She hadn’t looked back. She had gotten into the Uber that waited for her and gone straight back to her apartment. On the drive back, she’d blocked Joey’s number, then on second thought, deleted his number from her phone.

Danielle woke the next morning on the couch and reached for her cell phone on the coffee table. She blinked against the sunlight streaming in through the patio doors. Since she was on the tenth floor of her apartment building, she didn’t bother closing the blinds at night. She liked the view of the city lights below.

It was eight o’clock. She’d been asleep for nearly fifteen hours. Samuel would be there to pick her up at eleven. She needed to shower and get herself together. Sitting up, she groaned. It was never a good idea to sleep on the couch. Every muscle ached from sleeping so long on the uncomfortable couch.

Fifteen hours! How was that even possible? She stumbled to the bathroom to take a shower. The hot water on her aching muscles helped. After stepping out of the shower, she tied the towel around her and walked to the kitchen where she had left the package of saltine crackers Samuel had given her.

Her doctor’s appointment was at one o’clock. That gave them time for a quick lunch.

Unfortunately, right now, the very thought of food left her feeling ill.