HOLD THE FOREVERS

Prologue I’m in love with two men. But I can only marry one. It should have been simple to choose one over the other. To make my life with only one of them in it. But it isn’t. And it never has been. Not when fate spun us together. An infinite wheel that none of us could ever escape. Just kept spinning and spinning. One of us took a left turn instead of a right. We stepped off for a cycle as if that would let us leave. Let us continue on into a normal, ordinary life. Whatever normal and ordinary could possibly mean. But then the next rotation would come around, as it always inevitably did, and then we stepped back on. The three of us. In perpetuity. I tried my turn at the wheel. Tried to pull free from fate’s death grip on my life. It was barely a moment. It was an eternity. For that time, I should have been happier. Without them. Without the drama and the heartache and the constant way my life went up in flames and reduced me to cinders. I wasn’t a phoenix; I didn’t rise from the ashes. Still, I wasn’t happier. The shattered bits of my heart sliced through me at every turn that I avoided them. That I tried to move on. And when the wheel tugged me back into its trappings, I let it. I hung there, suspended, caught in a spiderweb, thick and viscous and unrelenting. I made my choice. Stay on the wheel. Embrace that this was where I always belonged. And slowly, the million pieces of me were put back together, one by one. Not all of them, of course. Not without them both. But I can only have one. I’ve always known it and tried to accept it. It’s still hard to believe that it’s happening though. Me and Cole and Ash. A trio that never was. Because I’m in love with two men. I can only marry one. And today is my wedding day. Wedding Day