He might not have the right names and a few details may have been changed here and there, but he knows.
The man laughed so hard when I told him about the long-standing disagreement between the Dodgers and the Seahawks over oil rights—actually a feud between the Harpers and the Bryants about a creek on a property line—that I told him more.
And more.
And more.
All to hear him laugh and assure me that he’d store my gossip safely so I didn’t have to.
I wish telling him truly had left me without the memories too.
“Where’s the ice bucket?” I ask him. Have to make this believable.
“Tea stand, maybe?”
Tea stand. I’d call it the coffee stand. And why does calling it the tea stand make him even more adorable?
“Right. Got it.”
“I can’t believe I’m saying this, but I wish I could be ice enough for you so you’d come right back to bed.”
See?
He’s so funny. Who says stuff like that? “I’ll just be a minute.”
“I could give you an orgasm in a minute if you want to come back to bed before you get that ice.”
My overworked vagina clenches.
She believes him.
“I’m high-maintenance. I demand a bathtub orgasm next. After ice.”
And now my vagina has declared me the enemy.
Rightfully so.
She knows I’m lying.
After last night, the word orgasm should be what makes me say fuck it all and dive back into bed with him. Skip the plane ride home. Ignore the ugly reality waiting for me with Emma being mad and the café being sold and my entire future completely uncertain.
Who wouldn’t want to have another several hours of holy orgasms instead?
But it’s not the orgasms that have me desperately wanting to strip off the clothes that I don’t think I put on straight to climb back into bed with him.
It’s the simple kindness in his small gesture of patting the bed. “Let me get the ice.”
I don’t deserve that kindness.
Not when I know my best friend is hurting and it’s my fault.
I deserve that Chandler sold the family café, which is where I’ve always planned to spend my entire life. I deserve to worry that everything will change and I’ll never be able to talk the new owner into selling it back to me. I deserve to know I couldn’t afford it even if I could convince whoever it is to sell it to me.
I deserve for Emma to hate me forever.
I swallow another nauseous wave of guilt that I staved off overnight but is back in full force and even bigger this morning. “Stay. I’m getting the ice.”
“I have longer legs. I can do it faster.”
“Would you please let me have this?”
“If you give me your phone number.”
“You don’t want my phone number.”
“But I do.”
“You’re hungover and not thinking straight.”
“I’m stone-cold sober, and a morning person, and you fascinate me.”
Why?
Why?
If I were anywhere else, and my entire world hadn’t just imploded because of secrets and gossip, I would be crawling back into bed with this man and playing a game of I’ll give you my number one digit at a time after you earn it with sexual favors. Then we’d go to breakfast, I’d invite him home to walk my dog with me, and we’d see where this goes.
Which, for the record, is not normal for me.
I’m a casual hook-up type of woman. Spend your youth learning how to listen in and get the gossip, you hear things you don’t want to know.
And then you start to see things you don’t want to see.
Sometimes, before you know better, because you’re nine years old, you’re right in the thick of making relationships implode. And you don’t know it until you find yourself getting hustled back to the café kitchen where Grandma calls your mom to come get you before someone hurts you for repeating things you were never supposed to hear in the first place.
And you get a little older, still hearing the same things, but keeping them to yourself now. And you hear enough to realize that truly solid relationships with mutual love, respect, and appreciation are rare, and the pursuit of such a relationship ends with heartbreak more times than not.
Add in that I know the full and complete truth about my paternal lineage, and just how badly my mom and grandma were hurt by men, and I’m nope-ing right out.
Yes, Grandma ultimately got to spend her life with the very best of the best of men in my grandfather. And yes, my mom has no regrets about how her life turned out.