My Asexual Husband Slept with His Best Friend for 8 Years Chapter 08

My Asexual Husband Slept with His Best Friend for 8 Years Chapter 08 Belong in the Past

Three months later.

Jack walked into my office holding an envelope, his face uneasy.

“This came for you.”

He set it on my desk. “From a Westbrxxk prison.”

The return address was blank.

Just my name and the company address scrawled across the front in handwriting that looked like a doctor’s scribble-or like someone who could barely hold a pen anymore.

Even through the mess, I knew that handwriting.

Sebastian’s.

I picked up the envelope. Didn’t open it.

Jack took the hint and backed out of the room, closing the door with a soft click.

The office went quiet. Just me, the radiator hissing in the corner, and this thing in my hands.

I should throw it away. I should burn it. Instead, I opened it. The paper inside was the kind they use for grocery lists. Cheap. Yellowed. The edges were wrinkled and stained, like someone had cried over it before mailing it. It looked like he’d written it with a hand that barely worked.

“Hi, Chloe-

By the time you read this, I’ll probably be dead.

For me, that’s the only release I’ll ever get.

Three months locked up with nothing but my own thoughts. I’ve been thinking.

About what I’ve done. Who I’ve hurt. And the one I owe everything to.

It’s you. It was always you.

Chloe, the best thing I ever did was marrying you.

The worst thing I ever did was wasting every single day after that.

I don’t have the right to tell you any of this. I know you moved on years ago.

But I need to say it anyway.

When I told you I was asexual-that wasn’t a lie.

I just left out the part that it was only with you.

I don’t know why.

Every time you reached for me, I froze. Like my body just shut down.

But with her? Nothing. No resistance. Just disgust. Self-hatred.

The therapist I saw-back when I still thought I could fix this-he said it was psychological.

That I put you on this pedestal. So I kept you at arm’s length and let her destroy me instead.

Pathetic, right?

The woman I loved most-I couldn’t let her touch me.

The woman I didn’t care about-I let her do whatever she wanted.

If I could do it over, I’d say yes the very first time you reached for me.

Even just once.

At least then you’d know-I didn’t refuse because I didn’t want you. I refused because I was terrified.

One more thing.

I never got Serena pregnant.

That was a lie. I said it because I wanted to hurt you.

I’m so sorry.”

I got through half the letter, then I just balled it up and threw it in the trash. The paper crinkled on the way down. Like a small surrender.

He thought prison made him a better man. It didn’t. It just made him more time to think about what he’d done. And what he’d done was still unforgivable.

He broke me. Slowly, methodically. And now he wanted me to feel sorry for him because he was broken

too?

No. I was done carrying his pain. I was done carrying mine.

When you stopped loving someone, the hurt stopped too. The anger. The what-ifs.

Some people belonged in the past.

I turned back to my computer. There was a proposal due by the end of the day, and Pxris didn’t stop for anyone’s trauma.

And my future was too bright to waste looking back.