Booked for 2

Chapter One

I rolled my suitcase out of  the front door of my tiny apartment with me and took a last look before locking the door. The Uber was waiting for me as I made my way outside and loaded my luggage into the trunk.

I greeted the driver as we headed towards the airport. I checked my appearance with my phone camera one last time. I sighed as the evidence of almost no sleep was quite obvious on my face. Makeup did little to cover up the sadness I'd been experiencing for the past several months. But today was the day. My divorce from my first and only marriage was finalized. I didn't really know exactly how to feel about it. I was relieved that the whole ordeal was over, but devastated at the same time.

Forrest and I had known each other most of our lives and dated quite a huge chunk of it as well. He asked me out when we were 13 and we quickly fell in love. It was the story book kind of love. When he asked me to marry him at 18 before he deployed with the Army it was an obvious yes. We were good. Strong. We made it through the year long deployment to Iraq and married soon after. Our marriage was a bit stormy, though. We were so young and the stress of him being in the military took its toll on both of us. It forced us to spend way too much time apart, but regardless, it helped pay for my schooling and a beautiful little 1950's farm house on 23 acres in rural Pennsylvania. We worked on the house together in all of our free time. I had just finished my schooling and landed my first nursing job at 20 years old when I'd found out I was pregnant with our first child. A sweet baby boy. I had made it 20 weeks and was going in for an anatomy scan when the doctor had discovered the baby had no heartbeat. It broke me into pieces. I went into a deep depression after that for awhile. Barely had the energy to drag myself out of bed to go to work every day. On top of that, Forrest had reenlisted again for another 4 years and was notified of another deployment. This time to Afghanistan. We pushed through, but we were two broken stressed out kids ourselves and we started to take it out on each other. We'd officially separated at 21 but neither of us had the courage to go through with the divorce until I had finally done so at 22. I was already moved out and into my own apartment. I was in the grocery store parking lot when I'd seen Forrest with another woman outside of a bar, drinking and hanging all over each other. I went to get the paperwork the next morning.

Forrest pushed back hard. He showed up at my apartment often, begging me to reconsider and to try again. He called my phone hundreds of times. But I just didn't have the energy for the effort it took to repair what we'd once had. I was seeing a therapist and was on antidepressants that made me feel even worse and sluggish. I'd gained almost 30lbs and absolutely hated to look at myself in the mirror every day. At 23 Forrest had notified me of yet another deployment that he had volunteered for this time. He didn't have to go, but he wanted to because he, "had nothing to stay for."

I had a pretty intense mental breakdown that put me into the hospital and then into a therapy program in South Carolina where I'd worked on a horse farm for several months. I had a breakthrough and started to finally heal from my trauma instead of avoid it. When I came home, I started working intensely on myself and landed a job in a doctors office which was significantly less stressful than floor nursing in the hospital. I started focusing on my health and well- being. Started going to church, seeing friends and family again, going to the gym. Got off all medications.

I'd lost the 30lbs I'd gained and then some. I'd decided that it was time to take my divorce proceedings seriously and started that process again. This time it wasn't too difficult getting Forrest to cooperate. I think he'd finally been tired of the whole ordeal.

Now I had just turned 24 and received the final papers in the mail the day before notifying that I was no longer married. It affected me more than I'd expected it to. We'd been separated for years after all, but it was still an end to something that once meant everything to me, and it brought back a lot of not so good feelings. But instead of dwelling on them, I'd decided to take a trip somewhere nice. I decided on the beach of course, which was quite a challenge being that my trip was going to be over the 4th of July. Hotels were booked for weeks and what was available wasn't in my price range. I managed to find a little air B&B owned by a sweet old lady that lived a few steps from the ocean.