Wooing The Ex-Wife novel Chapter 23

Liza and Jonathan sat in silence as Jonathan gathered back his strength to speak bit by bit. Liza hadn't seen Jonathan like this in the time she had been with him. Even he was apologizing he had an air of collectedness around him but at that moment Jonathan looked nothing less than a mess. Liza wondered how long it will take to get out of the small room they were locked in, it was becoming increasingly suffocating for her especially with the heavy air surrounding them. "It's my turn, right?" Jonathan asked, his voice was rough as if he had screamed at the top of his lungs and had got a sore throat from that. And even though it was silent in that stuffy and dim room, it seemed to be deafening to Liza. Liza nodded as a gesture for Jonathan to go ahead and ask her, his question.

The moment he had decided to challenge Liza to twenty questions, he had known that it wouldn't be a simple game, but he hadn't realized either that it will feel like walking on edge of a knife. Jonathan assessed Liza carefully as he asked her "Why didn't you ever tell me that you knew about Stacy, even when I blamed you?" Jonathan asked, cringing at Stacy's name. He watched as Liza let out a breath and leaned back against the dusty wall. She closed her eyes before opening them. Jonathan was getting more anxious with every passing second. He had spent many nights wondering why Liza had never confronted him. Why hadn't she thrown it back at him when he had accused her and more importantly why she hadn't defended herself?

Liza could feel anxiousness mixed with curiosity rolling of Jonathan. She opened her mouth to speak and immediately Jonathan's back straightened. "In the beginning, I didn't confront you because I didn't want to lose you," Liza said. "I thought that if you knew that I was aware of Stacy, you would leave me to be with her. So I pretended to be a fool. Besides that, I didn't want to believe that you would ever cheat on me. I tried so hard to convince myself that it wasn't real, that it was just a misunderstanding. I tried to come up with so many excuses, so many scenarios in which you would come out to be innocent. Looking back at myself now, I feel so pathetic and naïve. I foolishly believed in happily ever after's and that love could overcome everything. I thought that if I showed how much I loved you, you would stop meeting her, stop loving her, stop bringing little souvenirs in form of lipstick marks ad hickeys from the time you spent with her. But you never stopped." Liz stopped to stop herself from crumbling down in front of Jonathan as the painful memories came rushing down to her.

Jonathan watched as she took a deep breath in before continuing again, she never opened her eyes while speaking "All those times I tried to do something special for you, have a romantic dinner, go out on a date or simply make love, everything just zoomed past you and you continued to walk down that path with me trailing behind trying to catch your attention." Liza said as she remembered those days she had spent trying to get her Jonathan back.

"I wish I could go back to my old self and tell her to stop wasting time, to stop causing hurt to her own heart by seeing you again and again. I may have seemed desperate back then but at that time all I wanted was to make you see what we had, to stop our relationship from crumbling down, in the end, it didn't matter anyway. We parted and I think that it was the best choice I made. I would still be living in our suffocating relationship, you would still be with Stacy and I would have still died little by little every day. When you accused me that day, all my whims about true love shattered and I realized that maybe what we had wasn't love anymore. Love is based on trust, respect, and faith. The moment you accused me, I realized that you had neither of them and without those three things love was nothing but a hollow word. I stopped fighting for you, for our relationship and for the love we once shared because it wasn't worth it anymore. I was just holding onto the remnants of a relationship that had turned to ashes a long time ago. So I let you go. Confronting you or throwing your affair with Stacy would have been useless, it wouldn't have mattered if you had apologized at that time. Defending myself would have been also a waste because you didn't even have a minimal amount of trust in me and what would I achieve by living with someone who could blame me without even asking me what it was about. So I didn't bother with either of them and just left." Liza said.

Her voice was soft but speculative. It was as if she was assessing her past self and clucking at her mistakes. Liza ad grown up a lot, she had become more mature, less fanciful, and more grounded. She now left the idea of finding a perfect love for the romance novels and had satisfied herself with the love she got from her family. She went out on dates but she was never really into the people she went out with. There was always a hot man or a smart man or even someone who gave her butterflies but never someone who made her heart thump. She was sure that she would meet someone someday who would make her heart thump but this time she was in no hurry, she was satisfied and patient and she would take time before falling for someone because she already had injuries from the last time she had fallen and she wanted to be careful. Her scars were enough to last her a lifetime and she didn't want more.

Jonathan sat straight, listening to every word that came out from Liza's out. The more he listened, the more he realized what Liza had gone through. The letters Liza had written seemed like a daydream in front of the nightmare Liza's words were painting before him. He could hear the disapproval for her actions and pain due to his sins in Liza's voice and as he sat there with his back towards the wall and his eyes hoping to catch Liza's, to get a look inside her mind, he wondered if he would ever be able to make up for the crime he had committed.