Book 1: Echoes Of The Past

Chapter 24 - Home Truths

Attn: I know this chapter is VERY long. I wanted to finish it to write another Shannon's POV as the next chapter.
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Deciding to make a coffee to try and wake herself up a bit, Ivy found herself sitting at her kitchen island, nursing it until she realised it had gone cold and she'd wasted another cup that morning.

She finally took a sip and burst into tears. Not knowing if it was the situation, or the fact that the coffee was his coffee from his shop, that had finally exacerbated the situation. She eventually got up and dumped the whole mug down the sink.

Hoping that a warm, comforting shower would help things, Ivy padded into her bedroom, but the room smelt of Shannon and reminded her of the memories made just the evening before.

Why did she have to open her mouth and say such a snarky thing to him? He'd finally declared that he loved her last night and she could tell how hard it had been for him, so there had been absolutely no need for her to have said what she did to him.

She'd hurt him. Badly. And she knew it, but her pride was too much to pick up her phone and call him, and she didn't want to seem too desperate; he had barely only been gone 5 minutes.

Pushing her thoughts to the back of her mind, she stepped into the bathroom and slowly shed herself of her clothes. As she waited for the water to the shower to warm up, she looked at herself in the bathroom mirror and noticed the marks Shannon had left on her body from last night.

Lightly running her fingers over the marks on her neck, she recalled Shannon's lips as they had grazed over her skin. How he had nipped at her skin, marking and claiming it as his own.

She remembered his touch, his scent and realised she missed him. She missed his presence, his voice, his taste.

Taking a deep breath she slid back the door to her shower and climbed in, almost sad that she would be washing away every last trace of him, not knowing when on earth she would ever get to see him again.

Once she had climbed out and dried herself, she decided on what to do for the day. She wouldn't be meeting Jess and Emma until the evening, and she didn't want to waste away the whole day by moping over Shannon.

Eventually, she decided on texting Jared, seeing if he was free, which she assumed he wasn't, but she still felt bad about blowing him off yesterday when he'd offered to take her for a drink after filming.

In all honesty, she wasn't expecting him to reply as she knew how busy his schedule was, so she set her phone down whilst she loaded up the dishwasher to set the cycle going.

It had only been a few minutes, but she heard her phone ping to announce the arrival of a new text. Drying her hands on a towel, she crossed over to the kitchen island and picked up her phone and saw that she had a new text from Jared.

"Hey. I'm just about to jump onto a Zoom call, but I should be free from about 12.

Would you fancy going on a hike with me? There's a beautiful trail near mine. Let me know and I'll get my driver to come pick you up and bring you to mine."

Ivy thought about things. She wasn't usually all that much of an outdoorsy person, but she had nothing else planned for the day, and it beat moping about her apartment, thinking about Shannon. She doubted that he was even thinking about her right now anyway.

It would also be good to hang out with Jared and reacquaint themselves with one another, she did miss his company a lot.

She decided to reply back to him telling him that she would love to go for a hike with him.