Chapter 60: Chapter 60: A Scrupulous Devil
Ray POV
[Song Recommendation: Frank Sinatra - The World We Knew (Over and Over).]
The air of silence was the only thing I noticed as I walked into the living room. Claudia’s room was sealed shut, and I had no intention of talking to her right now, knowing that she must be crying her head off, wailing over the fact that Miles didn’t want her.
Besides, facing Claudia while she was crying was my bane. It was a weakness that I had just recently discovered, so I decided to let her be rather than lose my rationality in front of her.
"Tsk, what a pathetic woman."
That was all I could say as I headed into my home office.
The office had been cleaned after my outrage last night. I had specifically told Jane to contact the building manager so that my office would look brand new once I returned.
Much of the furniture had been replaced with new ones, and the management seemed to be trying their best to make sure they didn’t look too different from the previous ones.
But fortunately, there were two things that I didn’t break last night: a small CD player that was connected to the high-quality speakers around the office, and a small safe right next to the CD player.
I walked to them and opened the disc slot to check the CD. It was an old disc with a name written using a permanent marker.
’Claudia & Ray’s Love Mixtape.’
My lips curled as I thought the name was overly sappy and embarrassing. It always made me laugh thinking of when Claudia handed me this CD more than a decade ago. She looked so shy, but also so proud, as if she had done something meaningful after burning a CD and filling it with fifty romantic songs from the past and the ’present’ of the early 2000s.
Whenever I recalled that moment, I got this strange, funny feeling in my stomach, which I guessed was just me laughing at her stupidity.
But she was truly an idiot when she was in love, which was why I hated how she also turned into an idiot for that bastard Miles Hoffman.
I put the CD back into the disc slot and then played the list of songs that she had compiled over a decade ago. At this point, I had memorized all the songs and their order.
And the first song that she put on was...
’Over and over I keep going over the world we knew~’
I hummed the song along the way as I opened the small safe right next to the CD player.
There were a few useless knick-knacks that Claudia gave me when we were still dating, but what I took out was a small notebook filled with all the stupid ideas that Claudia had for dates.
When I first knew her, she seemed to be an airhead with only romance inside her small brain. She was academically smart, but other than studying, all she wanted to do with me was go on dates, and she even compiled all the date spots she wanted to visit and everything we should do together.
Some of them were just silly, like holding hands while walking in the park, but others were downright impossible, such as:
Date number 78:
We are going to the local church. You will wear a black suit that makes you look even more handsome, and I’ll wear a long, flowing white dress that’s like... a designer-made dress tailored only for me!
We’ve made it at this point as a neurosurgeon and a psychiatrist! Then, we will exchange our sacred vows and become Mr. and Mrs. Gatlin!
The curl of my lips widened as I stopped reading and chuckled. "Of course that’s impossible. Who would marry a woman like you, Claudia Reed?"
You would think the date list would stop after that, but no—she even planned all of the dates we would take after getting married and having children.
She also looked shy, yet proud while handing me this date list, just like with the mixtape. She acted like a teenage girl in love back then, before she suddenly did a 180 and spewed curses and insults at me after only one year of dating.
"Heh, good thing that I cannot feel love for her, or else I’d be too heartbroken to move on," I muttered before taking a pen from my desk. "As expected, you cannot trust a woman’s desire. She’s so flippant that it makes me sick thinking of how easily she switched her ’love’."
Then, I opened the page where she wrote about the park date in the list.
Date number 13:
Let’s go on a park date, shall we? We’ll walk during the warm season, like early autumn, holding hands together.
You’ll feed me ice cream under a lush tree as we stare into the lake!
Oh, I also want to try the pedal boat! Don’t you think it looks cute and romantic? I cannot swim though, so you have to save me in case something happens, hehe.
I scoffed as I ticked a checkmark at the bottom. This would be the first checkmark inside this small book, and there were still at least a hundred fifty more that needed to be ticked.
Yes, I planned to complete everything inside this book.
Why?
Because I fucking hate her.
So I wanted to fill everything until she realized that I had made her dream dates come true, and once she recalled every sweet moment we had...
I wanted her to regret her choice of dumping me. I wanted her to think of the unreachable life we could’ve had together. Not that I wanted it in the first place, because marrying her for the sake of ’love’ didn’t exist in my dictionary.
I sang along as I put the date list back into the small safe. I made sure that every small knick-knack inside the safe was not broken, because it would be difficult to replace them, knowing their cheap quality.
’But the dream was too much for you to hold,
Now over and over I keep going over the world we knew,
Days when you used to love me~.’
