Just like me.
“It just sucked to watch,” Waylon continues. “But it wasn’t like he was all bad. I couldn’t point to anything inherently wrong about their relationship. It seemed like he treated her well when I saw them together. He made her laugh. I figured that if he made her happy … I don’t know. I should just stay out of it.”
“Relationships are complicated,” I say, blowing on my coffee to give myself something to do.
“Yeah, but that’s the thing,” he says, shifting in his chair. “I was nine when we met. Allison and I were seven years apart, so I didn’t know what a healthy relationship looked like. But as I got older—as we both got older—Ben and I started growing into two completely different kinds of guys. And I realized that whatever a healthy relationship was … that wasn’t it.”
I’m quiet. I decide to let Waylon keep talking, let him tell me what he knows, before I chime in again.
“Anyway, the years went by, and Allison kept shrinking. She tried to talk to him a few times about going to law school, getting her own thing going, and he would guilt trip her out of it every single time. It was like she was just this thing meant to check a box in his own life and not even live her own.”
I remember that night, when I had decided to go back to work. The touch of unease as I had brought it up, like I knew I was flirting with fire. The way Ben had taken Mason from me afterward, like a punishment. A warning of what was to come.
“Whatever makes you happy.”
I did it anyway. I went to North Carolina, I wrote the story. I started working again, part-time, traveling once or twice a month. It ignited a spark in me that I knew I needed—I knew I couldn’t be a good person, a good mother, without first being good to myself—but now I wonder if it had ignited something in Ben, too. Something dangerous. I had made him a father when he never wanted to be one in the first place, and then I started leaving him alone with Mason for days at a time. It was as if all those small little acts of defiance had lit some kind of fuse, and we had been inching closer and closer toward the explosion without me even realizing.
“One night, I was in town visiting family,” he continues. “I decided to go into the city for a drink, so I walked into this bar and saw Ben sitting there by himself. It was late, a couple hours after he should have been done with work. I figured Allison was there with him, maybe in the bathroom or something, but just as I was walking over to say hi, another woman sat down next to him.”
I feel the heat crawl up my neck. I already know where this is going. All of those late nights together, nursing drinks for longer than necessary because neither one of us wanted to walk away. Waylon is looking at me now like he’s seeing me again for the very first time. Like he’s remembering the way I had sauntered back to that table, my fingers grazing Ben’s shoulders, touching the bare skin of his neck and pretending it was an accident. The way I would willfully ignore his left hand, the gold band he would always fidget with, spinning it around his finger, like if he wore it down enough, it might just dissolve. Disappear on its own.
“It was you.”
“Waylon, I’m sorry.” I push my hands into my neck, trying to cool it down, but the warmth from the coffee only makes it worse. I can feel my cheeks burning, physical proof of the shame I feel radiating out from my every pore. “I promise you, though, we didn’t do anything. Nothing happened—”
“It’s not that,” he interrupts, waving his hand. “I watched you, though, for the entire night. I watched you interacting. And he treated you the exact same way he treated Allison—the way he touched your arm, the way he leaned over his beer when you were talking. I could tell he made you feel special, just like how he made her feel. It was like you were interchangeable to him. You even looked the same.”
I glance across the café, trying to find something to fix my gaze on to keep myself from crying. I remember that picture I had seen on Waylon’s computer now—Ben and I, sitting close at that bar, caught on camera unaware.
I have never felt more naive, more foolish, than I do right now.
I remember thinking that we were different—Ben and I, we were different from them—but that’s just not true. We were the same. Allison and I were the same to him. Interchangeable.
“There’s no way you could have known,” Waylon says now, reading my mind again. He reaches across the table and touches my hand. “It’s not your fault.”