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jaw. His constant suspicion and distrust were among the countless nails we’d driven into this coffin. Thank God we were finally going to bury the fucking thing.
    “Look, I may be frustrated,” I said. “But I do love you, Alec. I wouldn’t cheat on you.”
    “But you’ll leave me?”
    “Yes.” The word came so easily, so unflinchingly. “Yes. I need to.”
    “You know what? Fine.” He glared at me again. “I’ll go, and you can have all the crazy, freakish sex you want. Mark my words, though. In a few months, after you’ve had a little fun and realize how sick it all is, you’ll regret this.”
    “Somehow I doubt that.” Our lackluster sex life was the wedge we’d used to finally cleave our relationship apart, but if it had failed to do so, we had plenty more that would have done the job.
    “We’ll see, won’t we?” He shifted his weight. “I don’t suppose you’ll let me take my stuff before you kick me out?”
    I nodded down the hall. “Go right ahead.”
    With a sharp huff, he stormed past me. I followed him into my bedroom.
    Now that he was moving, now that he was doing something besides standing there talking to me, his fury escalated, just as it always did. He jerked open the closet door and went about ripping shirts and a coat off hangers and throwing them onto the bed he’d probably expected to share with me tonight.
    “I can’t believe you, Kristen,” he said over his shoulder. “You’re really willing to let all of this go because I won’t be a freak like whatshisname.”
    “No. The sex is only part of it.”
    He slammed a pair of shoes down and kicked the closet door shut. “Really? So what else is there?”
    “Well, this.” I gestured at him. “Every time you get mad, you start throwing shit around, slamming doors, yelling at me—”
    “Oh, so now I’m not allowed to get angry?” He spun on his heel and faced me. “Am I just supposed to sit here like a good little boy and let you tell me I’ve just wasted four years of my fucking life?”
    I drew back, folding my arms to keep my hands from shaking. “There’s a happy medium between that and flipping out at—”
    “I’m not fucking flipping out at you, Kristen,” he snarled, closing the gap between us. “You can’t expect to say this kind of shit and—”
    “And what?” I stepped toward him, and to my great satisfaction, he shrank back slightly. “Am I tied to you for the rest of my life? Am I not allowed to move on if I’m not happy anymore?”
    “After all this time, the least you could do is put some effort into fixing it instead of running away.”
    I flipped my hands out, palms up. “I’m not going to argue anymore, Alec. I want out, I want you out, so just get your stuff and leave.”
    He said nothing, but the rage in his eyes almost made me step back myself. At the very edges of my peripheral vision, he clenched and unclenched his fists. For the first time in four years, I wondered if he might just raise a hand to me, and I could neither draw nor release a breath until he muttered a curse and turned back to gathering his belongings.
    On his way out, he stopped at the hall closet to yank his jacket off the hanger and put it over his arm. Then he jerked his key off the ring and tossed it on the table by the door.
    “Looks like that’s everything.” He opened the front door. “Unless you had anything else you needed to say?”
    I shook my head.
    He sneered at me. “Not even good-bye?”
    “I think we’ve already said that, don’t you?”
    Cursing under his breath, he left, slamming the door behind him. I turned the deadbolt and went back into my bedroom, where I dropped onto the bed and released a long breath. The conversation had been unpleasant, but it had needed to happen for a long, long time. We’d both made our mistakes over the last few years. We’d both caused our fair share of problems in this relationship. At least now, it was over. Thank God, it was over .
    With another long