“I was trying to be considerate,” he growled.
“No, you were trying to cover your ass,” she said. “And you don’t have to. I don’t care if you’ve filled out your entire Pokédex.”
“Except that youdocare, or you wouldn’t have brought it up in the first place!” he said heatedly.
He had her there. She inelegantly conceded the point, gathering up the pillow to her chest. “I thought Boyd was your boyfriend,” she admitted. She fell back on the bed. This wasn’t working. She was never going to sleep. She didn’t know how she’d sleep with Tom on the samecontinent.
Tom’s lips thinned. “I’m not a cheater, Rosie.”
“Okay,” she said. Nobody would dare cheat on one of the most famous movie stars in the world. She hadn’t thought that. She’d thought they had some kind of open relationship.
“Not just now, but ever. I’ve never cheated onanybody. Including you.”
“Okay,” Rose repeated, trying to scoot away from theconversation she now regretted starting. Wasn’t it past everyone’s bedtime now? Certainly hers.
“Do you believe me now?”
“Sure,” Rose said, just wanting the conversation to be over.
Tom scooted to the opposite side of the bed and raked an agitated hand through his thick, tousled hair. “Really? Because some of our friends—well, I guess the ones who turned out to beyourfriends—seemed to think I had. I heard about it a lot, in fact.”
His face was so righteously aggrieved that Rose felt her own anger rising. She’d had about enough of his subtle insinuations that he’d been so hurt and wronged when she threw him out. Fine. They were both awake now. Nobody was sleeping tonight. They were doing this now.
“I never told anyone you cheated on me.” That was one of the grounds for a contested divorce in New York, so she’d had the opportunity. “I just said that you’d basically stopped coming home, and I had no idea where you were or what you were doing for days at a time. Which was true. What was I supposed to think? Honestly.”
She groped around on the floor for her phone. She needed to get out of here.
“I never,everwould have cheated on you,” Tom said, and he was standing now, or trying to, but the ceiling was too low for that, so he was just looming uncomfortably. “If I was gone overnight, I was just passed out in the green room at La MaMa or on someone else’s floor because I didn’t want to come home drunk.”
Rose gave him a long look, wondering whether he might happen upon some realizations as those words emerged from his mouth. Ah, there were her socks.
“Okay, yes, I can see now that that was…not great,” he said, motioning as though he’d put that thought away to the side. His tone was only slightly less aggressive. “But I never cheated. The day you filed for divorce, I’d never been with anyone else. I neverlookedat anyone else. Why would you think that?”
Rose took note of the flag he planted—the day she filed for divorce, not the day a year later when he finally signed the papers—but it wasn’t as though she hadn’t been seeing other people by then too. So she took him up on his more important point.
“Oh, come on. You didn’t even notice whenwestopped having sex, and you like having sex more than anything except dramatic solo numbers. Of course I thought you were cheating on me.” She crawled toward the ladder.
Tom snorted incredulously. “Believe me, Inoticed. But you were working a hundred hours a week and managing both of our entire lives. Was I supposed to complain that you weren’t finding time to have sex with me too?”
Rose put her feet on the top rung as exhausted tears began to prickle in the inner corners of her eyes. “Complain? I couldn’t tell if you cared at all. And I—I couldn’t live like that. You stopped looking atme.”
That he was cheating on her had been the good story she’d told herself. A reason he didn’t notice how unhappy she’d been,because he was too guilty to look. She’d already decided to forgive him for cheating on her.
The bad story was that he’d just fallen out of love with her; she didn’t know how to forgive him for that.
Tom sucked in a surprised breath and held it. If Rose knew him, this was the moment he bolted. Tom wanted everything to be fun and easy and pleasant. Any sign of distress was to be immediately soothed away, and if it couldn’t be soothed, it was to be avoided.
That was why she had her feet on the ladder. Either he’d take himself out, or she’d leave.
Indeed, Tom looked at the door. Off he’d go, and then they’d never speak of it again, if they even spoke again. But then he set his jaw and met her eyes, and although his own were wide and scared, he held still.
“We should have had this fight,” he said.
Rose sighed and climbed down to the bottom of the ladder.
“Where are you going?” he called.
“I need to sleep,” she begged him.
