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“Will you marry me?”

Four words I’ve waited my whole life to hear. Four words I was sure would change my life forever…and they did. Just not in the way I expected.

Finding out my extremely gorgeous rock star boyfriend was about to propose had the complete opposite effect I thought it would. Rather than catapult me into a future I’ve always wanted, it plunged me back to a past I tried to forget.

Now I can’t get him out of my head. I can’t help but wonder what could have been, how our lives would have ended up if he didn’t leave me behind, a shattered mess.

All these memories are dangerous. They’re bringing my past back to ruin my future. And worst of all, they’re taking me right back to him, my childhood sweetheart, my first love…my biggest regret.

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Excerpt:

Luckily, after a few drinks, the conversation was flowing much easier. We were slowly shaking off the awkwardness and becoming more ourselves. The knot in my chest had loosened, my mind was unwinding, even my body language looked more relaxed.
This was good, this was fun, this was what I wanted our reunion to be like.
“Oh my God,” he giggled, acting just like the school kid I remembered well. I couldn’t keep the beaming smile off my face as I stared at him. “Do you remember that night I tried to sneak into your bedroom window, just like the guy in that film...oh I can’t remember it’s name...”
“Oh and you fell. We thought that you’d broken your arm!” I was howling with joy at the happy memory, a time when things were really good between us. Just before the proposal we were both on cloud nine, high on love, feeling like our relationship was invincible. I missed that. I felt secure then, for a while, like nothing could wreck what we had.
Had I ever felt that safe since? I wasn’t totally sure.
“Yeah and I wasn’t sure how I was going to tell my mum...”
Shit, the memory of when we actually told Joe’s mum came flooding back hard. Deep down we both assumed that our families already knew and that the conversation would be more of a formality than anything else, but we were very wrong. We thought it would be a nice time, that they would all be happy for us, but we were in for a massive shock.
Joe’s mum went mental. She yelled at us for being careless and spending so much alone time together. She seemed to think that I was already pregnant and about to marry her precious son, leading him into a life of drudgery. Her immediate defence nature made me feel sick to my stomach, did she not know me at all? I had my own ambitions, thank you very much, I didn’t want to end up with nothing. Her reaction terrified the living hell out of us, and made us both reconsider everything, but then his dad and my mum were totally okay with it—happy even—which put everything right back on track. They reacted in the calm, pleasant way that we’d been expecting. It did make us both wonder why Joe’s mum hated the idea so much, but with at least some support behind us we kept on going, assuming that we were invincible.
Looking back, it seemed silly to put so much stock in the opinions of our parents—I certainly didn’t care what my mum thought of my boyfriend or life now—but we were so young, and we assumed back then that they knew better. Of course we were wrong to put so much faith into them, but that revelation didn’t come until later on.
“Another?” I asked, sticking to our unspoken plan, Every time we teetered into an area of conversation that had the potential to become explosive, we brought another drink. It had made us stick to our original idea of getting stinking drunk—I was far more wasted than I planned to be—but it felt okay. It was helping us to get through.
“Yeah, yeah, another.” There was something behind his eyes, a look that suggested he wasn’t going to be able to keep this wall up forever. It was crumbling down around him, which meant all kinds of terrible things could potentially come out. If I’d been sober I would have been freaking the hell out right about now, but any rationality had been numbed by the booze so I was ignoring it instead. We could do it, we didn’t have to deal with anything right now. The time for talking over the horrible parts of our lives could come much later. We would be in each other’s lives forever now...