He Loved My Drunk Driver Chapter 2

The next morning, Simon took a phone call, hastily threw on his coat, and rushed toward the door.

"I made reservations for tonight," he called out. "Don't forget, it's our anniversary."

He didn't go to the university. He drove straight to a boutique pottery studio across town.

Through the glass window, I saw Brianna. She was wearing heavy, youthful makeup and an over-the-top, frilly cottagecore dress—the exact aesthetic Simon used to mercilessly mock as childish and ridiculous.

Yet now, looking at her, there wasn't a trace of judgment in his eyes. When they walked up the steps, he actually bent down to lift the hem of her ridiculous dress so she wouldn't trip.

Inside, Brianna was clumsily smearing clay all over the worktable, her hands a mess. Simon, a man who demanded absolute perfection in his lab, wasn't annoyed in the slightest. He stood behind her, enveloping her hands with his own, patiently guiding her fingers. He leaned down and pressed a tender kiss to her temple.

He was a man in his late thirties, grinning like a love-struck teenager.

I stood rooted to the pavement outside, the cold seeping into my bones.

It wasn't that he had forgotten how to love. He just didn't love me that way anymore.

Driven by a morbid, masochistic curiosity, I pulled my baseball cap low, slipped on a medical mask, and walked into the shop, taking a seat in the far corner.

Memories of our past flickered behind my eyes like a dying film reel.

The shop owner noticed me staring at them and ambled over, leaning in with a conspiratorial smile.

"Cute, right? I practically watched that girl wear him down. He used to be so cold and guarded, but she completely won him over. They come in at least once a week now."

At least once a week.

During the most agonizing phase of my physical therapy, I had begged Simon to come to the rehab center with me just once. He told me the faculty board was breathing down his neck and he simply couldn't spare the time.

He had time. It just didn't belong to me.

The owner pulled out her phone and tilted the screen toward me. "Look at this. He stayed up for three nights straight rendering this AI animation for her birthday."

On the screen, a cartoon version of Simon stood in the pouring rain, holding an umbrella over Brianna's head, waiting in an endless line to buy her favorite boba tea.

I had known Simon for twenty years, and I had never seen that version of him.

My vision blurred with hot tears.

A few feet away, Brianna leaned back against his chest, her voice a sickly-sweet whine. "Can you please stay with me tonight? Don't go home."

Simon didn't even hesitate. "Okay."

"But isn't it your anniversary? Won't your... one-armed bandit get mad?"

She was laughing. She was mocking my mutilation, and Simon just smiled, fondly tapping her nose.

"She depends on me to survive," he said softly. "She'd never dare throw a temper tantrum."

Brianna sighed, burying her face in his neck. "I'm so sorry, Professor. If I hadn't been drinking that night, I wouldn't have almost hit your mom. Thank God your wife stepped in..."

I clamped my left hand clamped over my mouth, biting down hard on my own fingers to stop the sob from tearing out of my throat.

So it was true. She had been driving drunk.

Simon, a man who prided himself on absolute moral integrity, had buried the truth to protect her.

When I was first trying to re-enter the world after the amputation, I couldn't find a job anywhere. Desperate, I had swallowed my pride and begged Simon to pull some strings, just to get me a low-level administrative role in the university's back office.

He had frowned, his expression stern and disappointed. "Catherine, there are procedures for these things. You know I play by the rules."

But his sacred rules instantly disintegrated the moment Brianna needed him.

"Don't carry that guilt, Brianna," Simon murmured, kissing her hair. "Maybe it was just Catherine's fate. It has nothing to do with you."

He said it so casually. As if he were comforting her over a failed pop quiz, not the destruction of my entire life.

Thinking of the nights I had laid on the bathroom tiles, bleeding out from my own wrists, I couldn't take it anymore. I shot up from my seat.

My chair tipped backward, crashing against the floor with a deafening clatter.

From behind me, Simon's voice called out, "Wait a second."

A spike of pure terror shot through me. I wasn't ready to face him. I didn't know how to play this. Was I supposed to scream? Cry? Play the martyr and give them my blessing?

Footsteps approached. A hand reached out into my peripheral vision, holding a silver chain.

"Miss, you dropped your necklace."

He didn't recognize me behind the mask. He didn't even recognize the necklace, which held the diamond wedding band I could no longer wear on my right hand.

I looked down. On the hand extending my wedding ring to me, Simon was wearing a misshapen, brightly painted clay ring made by Brianna.

My phone vibrated in my pocket. A text from him.

[Catherine, emergency faculty meeting came up. Going to have to cancel dinner tonight. I'm sorry.]

In that split second, the shattered remains of my heart calcified into pure, unadulterated rage.

I walked out of the shop, pulled out my phone, and dialed the university's ethics hotline.

"I need to report an inappropriate relationship between Professor Simon Hayes and his graduate student, Brianna Davis."