“We should have had this out,” he said. “Baby, please. Tell me what you wanted me to do. I didn’t know what you wanted me to do.”
Maybe he was right and maybe he wasn’t. They’d never know because they hadn’t fought about this. Or, rather, they’d hadonefight, and then Tom never came home again.
“Rosie,” he called down when he saw her gathering her clothes. “Seriously, where are you going?”
“I’m going to sleep in the car,” she said.
Tom turned around and slid down the ladder like a fireman, just hands and insteps on the poles. It was physically impressive, but for the first time since that morning, he wasn’t trying to show off.
“Come on,” he said when he turned around, face still wounded. “You think you’re better off not knowing I was going to be faithful for the rest of my life, and I never get to hear you say what I did wrong?”
Rose curled her hands into tight fists, arms rigid at her side.
“You can’t have it both ways,” she said. “You can’t tell meBaby, I’ve changedwhile you’re still trying to prove things should have worked out a decade ago. They didn’t work out! We got divorced! You broke my heart into tiny little pieces, and thathappened, even if you think it didn’t have to.”
Tom’s mouth pressed into a thin, flat line as he considered that.
“Just come back to bed,” he finally offered. “I’ll stop.”
Rose shook her head. “No. You’re either the guy who broke my heart, or you’re someone I just met. And I don’t sleep with either of those guys.”
He took a deep breath and let it out. He was disappointed, but not dejected.
“Okay,” he said. “I’ll go, then.” He stooped for his pants, which he’d conveniently left in the middle of the floor.
“I’m not trying to be mean,” Rose said. “I’ll fit in the back seat. You won’t.”
“Nah,” Tom said, one corner of his mouth curving up. “I’ll go across the street to one of the clean-ish rooms. I got the lights on and the bees corralled in the suite.”
“What?” Rose looked around their stolen little pink cottage. Not that she was sure she would have left it if she’d known. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
He shrugged apologetically, shoved his bare feet into his shoes. He took his coat off the hook where she’d hung it. “Why do you think? You were over here.” He gave her a tired smile. “And I wanted to be over here with you.”
11
It was overcast the next day, with a steady drizzle threatening to turn to snow. Tom was fuzzy-headed from lack of sleep. Even dousing his room in Febreze had failed to completely cover the musty odor that pervaded the inn, but it was his urgent, itchy sense of things left undone that had kept him up.
His only real sense of time wasnowandlater, and he’d learned thatlaterusually meantnever, so when something absolutely had to be done, he wanted to do itnow. He wanted to finish having it out with Rosienow, tease out everything else he’d done wrongnow, start fixing thingsnow.
I stopped inviting you to come out with me because you always had to work and I felt like I was rubbing it in your face that I got to have a social life. Bad call?
I know you were dating that douchebag Brent from our geology seminar before our divorce was finalized because when you dumped him he fucking texted me about it like he wantedto form a sad little club. Nevertheless, I forgive you, because you apparently dumped him in a Duane Reade.
In the future, if you are overworked and unhappy and I have, for example, just watched you shred an entire rotisserie chicken with your bare hands like it said something nasty about your mother, would you prefer that I offer to have vigorous, life-affirming sex with you amid the wreckage of its carcass instead of slinking out the door so that you can finish your meal-planning in peace? It’s no trouble.
His body felt driven like a motor, and it took all his restraint to channel that into productive work at the inn rather than lurk around the pink cottage he’d rather be in. Rosie didn’t appear until midmorning, wearing a long, puffy black parka over a red knit dress, which made her look like a little round songbird. She looked calmer this morning, back in order.
“I have really appalling news,” she said, shuffling her feet until she stood right in front of him, peering up through curling eyelashes. “I slept and ate, and now I feel better.” Tom let out a relieved breath because he hadn’t been sure what her temperature on him was going to be that morning. Her little rosebud mouth tilted up, and she gathered his hands loosely in hers. He relaxed at her touch like he’d shed the weight of entire continents.
“I hate it when that happens,” Tom deadpanned, squeezing her hands back.
Her eyes flicked up toward his face and away. And it was sweet, the way she did that, but it tore his heart in two directions. He wanted to kiss the hesitation off her mouth.
“How’s the inn this morning?” she asked, looking around the foyer.
“Um, I’ve been working on the bee situation,” he said, not sure if she was checking on his progress. He’d learned that his options for dealing with the bees were, one, allowing an exterminator to pump the walls full of a poison gas that had also been employed in several Geneva convention violations or, two, contracting with a painfully earnest white woman whose Instagram portrayed her scooping bees out of car trunks with her bare hands to a soundtrack of early Taylor Swift anthems. Neither could commit to an arrival window narrower than eight a.m. to eight p.m. the next day.
Rosie frowned in concern, eyes tracking the multiple problems visible even in this room, which had no storm damage. Her shoulders bunched.
