Season Of Love (gxg) | ✍︎︎

3. New Beginnings.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
| SEASON OF LOVE |
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Sunday.
18 November 2018.
Riverlin, Michigan.

After a very long few months of dental school, Noelle was finally getting a break due to it being the week of Thanksgiving. And the break was well needed because balancing dental school and clinical in hopes of one day becoming a doctor of dental surgery and operating her own dental practice has not been easy on her.

And not only have clinical and school been stressful for her, but Noelle is also dealing with the heartbreak that comes with a two-year breakup. Except in this case, she wasn't the one that was heartbroken. Not even a little bit. Her ex-fiancé, however, he's been a mess ever since Noelle called off the engagement and announced that their dream winter wedding would not be happening.

She felt terrible about it because even though she did truly love him, she just didn't love him the way he loves her. She was never in love with him. And some mornings, even though it's been over a month since Noelle moved out of the home she was sharing with her fiancé, she still wakes up to text messages from him telling her how much he loves her and begging for her to take him back.

She wasn't going to take him back though, for very obvious reasons. She wasn't in love with him and simply never would be. Not in the way a woman should love the person she's marrying that is. And it's not because of any other reason than she didn't feel that same type of spark she once felt for one person in particular. The spark she still sometimes feels for the first and only person she's ever truly been in love with.

That's another thing she felt terrible about- the fact that she's still lying to everyone she loves and cares about. Noelle has yet to come out to her family and friends as bisexual. At first it didn't matter because she was too busy with school and work during undergrad to worry about anything relationship related. She never came out because there was no need to. That, and she never felt quite ready.

Then she met Tayden and that changed everything. Tayden was her first real relationship, outside of the very short lived one she had with Hope in high school. He was as close to perfect as it gets. Tayden is tall, handsome, comes from a good family, and treated Noelle like she was a queen. He was all of the things Noelle knew she wanted in a life partner, which is why she said yes when he asked her to marry him.

But no matter what, it never felt like what she had with Hope. Even if she was only seventeen at the time, it didn't matter. She really loved her. She was in love with her. And almost a decade later, she still can't forgive herself for how things ended between them.

"Good morning Riley," Noelle's very hoarse morning voice spoke for the first time that morning.

She was woken up by the seven year old jumping onto her bed, just like he's does every other weekend morning since she's been occupying the guest room.

"Morning Aunt Elle. Daddy told me to come wake you up for breakfast. He's almost done cooking."

"I'll be down in a second," she fully sat up in the bed to keep herself from going back to sleep the second the little boy left.

After taking a shower so hot that it turned parts of her brown skin red, Noelle looked at her naked body in the mirror, pointing out every single thing she saw wrong instead of admiring the things she loved. It's easier to do that it seems like. Naming off the things you hate about your own body is easy, but learning to love them despite not being perfect is the hard part. That's the part Noelle isn't so great at. Accepting herself, all of herself. She was never the most confident or outspoken girl growing up, and all these years later, it's still something she struggles with.