The Bad Boy's Forever (TBBG Series #3) NOW PUBLISHED

Epilogue

       

Epilogue

Five Years Later

    If there's one thing I could tell my high school self, it'd be that life never turns out to be how you think it will when you're seventeen years old. I mean I would literally hang myself by a ceiling fan if I were married to my childhood crush right now, totally no offence to Jay or Leila. I'm sure he's a great husband to her but me? We'd have the compatibility of drying wall paint. I also want to shake myself, thinking about all the time I wasted trying to plot my revenge against Nicole Bishop, former best friend and current casual acquaintance because I could've spent all the time and energy doing much more productive things with my life. When you leave high school or even college for that matter, you leave that world behind you and it's after that, that your real life truly starts and it's got no room for unnecessary drama or angst, mean girls and boy's too dense to think beyond their next protein shake. None of that matters and I would've only benefited from knowing that as a teenage girl with a penchant for drama who felt like her life was ending every single time something remotely embarrassing happened. I'm a pro at embarrassment now, just the other day I walked into work with baby vomit on my suit and it only took me getting through two meetings to notice. Mattie had a good laugh about that one but hey I'd only been briefly mortified and something like this would've killed me back in the day.

    See that's the difference between then and now. This year it will be ten years since we graduated high school and everyone' starting to talk about a reunion when we're all home. Do I really want to go back and relive every bad memory I have of that place? Because there've been some real bad ones too.But on the flip side, I've had moments that changed the course of entire life there as well. I let go of a really toxic friendship and an infatuation that was the product of mostly low self-esteem and found two best friends who are more like sisters, one of them who did eventually become a part of my family and who's demon child aka my beloved nephew I stayed up the entire night babysitting hence the baby throw up. I developed a better relationship with my parents, one I couldn't imagine having when I'd been younger and actually in need of some parental concern and attention. Now though, I can see that they were both in no place to fully raise two children not when they were stuck in an unhappy marriage with seemingly no way out. At twenty-eight, I can see what I was blind to then and that is the fact that you can't have a happy, peaceful home if the two people running it aren't in love and completely devoted to each other. Because that's what it takes to make it work, not just love but devotion to the other person. Love changes constantly, it becomes stronger but also more challenging. It's different to be in love when you're eighteen and your biggest worry is the Chemistry test you didn't study for, different at twenty-one when you're in college, becoming this whole new person at the end of four very transformative years and trying to come to terms with going out into the 'real' world for the first time. It'll be different again at twenty-five when you're both so busy trying to get ahead in your careers and coming out on top in the rat race that you often forget to spend the time with each other that you used to.

In high school, I met my future husband an in high school I fell hopelessly in love with a bad boy whose heart seems to have been carved out of gold. I'll go to the reunion if ever there is one because I know he'll be there right by my side, remembering all those times together. I laugh to myself as I remember how much I'd tried to fight it in the beginning and how misled Cole had been in his efforts to impress me in the beginning. I'm sure he'll tell our son in the future that the way to a girl's heart is not through pranks or hair pulling but literally just be honest with her, that's it.

That's what worked for me at least, when Cole stopped putting on an act and exposed me to his deepest, most vulnerable self and that's what has got me hooked, addicted to him till this date.