After My Boyfriend

Dakota Stelter and I tumbled down that steep ravine together. I lay there bleeding and broken, only to watch my boyfriend scoop her into his arms and walk away without a backward glance. He left me. In that moment, in every way that mattered. While everyone fussed over Dakota's scratches, no one even checked if I was still breathing. When I was finally rescued and recovering at the hospital, my boyfriend didn't even visit. I was hurt. So I moved on. Piece by piece, I rebuilt myself without him. But then he became distraught. Suddenly, he was sobbing, telling me he had always loved me.

The love that I knew wasn't like the ones written in a book. It wasn't beautiful and magical. It doesn't bring butterflies in my stomach and it doesn't make me feel special. It doesn't feel like home, I do not feel secure. It does not make me feel safe and worthy. The love that I experience doesn't feel like love. I'm not really sure if it is love because it made me doubt, insecure and made me feel unloved. And all I experienced was pain. No it was torture. To see him love someone else when all I could do is to love him and let him love her. Now I don't know if I could ever love someone else, after him.

Nova knows exactly what her relationship is. Liam is charming, unfaithful, and has never once let her family go without. She knows about the girls — she's catalogued them, named them, perfected her glossy eyes for the aftermath. It's an arrangement. She's not stupid. She went in with her eyes open and she made her peace with it a long time ago. What she never had was love. She knew how to give it. She just never learned what it felt like to receive it. She never expected to find it working for her boyfriend's brother. Rhett Holt is cold, estranged from his family, and universally feared by everyone on the eleventh floor of Holt Industries. He doesn't want a new PA. He doesn't want his brother's girlfriend anywhere near his office. He hires her anyway, and immediately makes her life significantly more difficult. Nova tells herself she can handle him. She's handled worse. What she isn't prepared for is falling for Rhett. In the middle of all the arguments and the late nights and everything she couldn't explain, it just happened. A man she had no business looking at twice — except that he was beautiful and impossible and infuriating, and he looked at her like she was the only thing in the room worth seeing. And Rhett fell harder. *My Boyfriend's Brother* is a serialized romance about two people who should never have happened — a woman who finally learns what it feels like to be chosen, and a man who never planned to choose anyone at all.

My boyfriend suddenly posted something on his Instagram. [I’ve offered my body and soul to the country.] I was about to ask what he meant when he sent me a plane ticket to the northwest. He explained that the mission was confidential and that he could not be in contact with me during this time. Ten months passed. He was supposed to be away, but he came home unexpectedly and caught me at a prenatal checkup. When he saw my eight-month-pregnant belly, his face turned pale with anger. “I’ve been gone for ten months. How are you pregnant?” I shrugged and said, “Weren’t you supposed to be gone for three years? Why are you back after just ten months?”

On the day I died, my boyfriend was with another woman. He was a man I had rescued from the clutches of rich women. My condition was for him to be my boyfriend for three years, and he agreed. I showered him with money, resources, and connections, single-handedly making him famous. Yet, while he told me we could not date publicly, he casually engaged in fake romance rumors with others for publicity. One of his rumored girlfriends even came to me with a voice message. "If it weren’t for using her as a stepping stone, who would bother with someone so dull and boring?" But after I died, why did he go mad?

My boyfriend of three years had a secret true love: my vicious best friend. For her, he swallowed my family business whole, froze every cent I had, and crushed my dignity into the dirt. When my father lay dying from a brain hemorrhage, I begged him for $50,000 to save his life. He refused cold-heartedly. At the exact moment my father died on the operating table, he was busy spending millions on rare jewelry for her. I didn't show up to our engagement party. Instead, I sent a "gift" that played on the big screen. That arrogant man went completely insane in front of the whole world.