“You know what I mean,” he said, picking up the cheeseburger, which looked comedically small in his large hand. He took a bite and nearly demolished half the sandwich. It brought back memories of him being a lanky teenage boy who was clearly not getting enough food. The family they’d lived with had been about the nicest ones Nora had ever lived with, and they’d tried to keep up with feeding growing teenage boys. Even though it was expensive and difficult to do.
There had been an endless pot of rice and beans for him to carb-load on. She smiled, just a little bit. Those memories were painful, but also, sometimes they felt warm. Sometimes it was nice to sit withsomeone who did know. Someone who didn’t need her to pretend to be anything other than what she was.
Not that Ben needed her to pretend. That wasn’t right. It was just that they had different lives, and he didn’t see the point of going over and over her past.
That was the point of her escaping it, after all.
“Do you miss him?”
“What kind of question is that?” She picked up a french fry and stabbed it into a puddle of ketchup before taking a bite.
“I’m just wondering if you miss him.”
“Of course I do. I ... I miss him. I wish that I had any idea what he was planning to do next, and I ...”
“You keep playing it down, but I feel like you’re actually worried.”
“Of course I’m worried, Sam,” she snapped. “I’m trying to be mature. I’m trying to understand. I’m trying to figure out why he couldn’t talk to me. I think it’s my fault. I think it’s because I don’t know how to talk to anybody. Not really. Because of the way we grew up. I mean, you and I have shared my issues with him. But you and I know how the dynamic in our marriage is. I love this about Ben, I love it for him. He’s had it easy. I think sometimes when he tries to share his struggles with me, I’m not that sympathetic. I’ve had to worry about where I was going to sleep at night, and his primary concern in high school was getting the grade point average he needed to go to the college he wanted to go to. Which he didn’t get into. I think that was a big deal for him. I kind of ruined him being able to confide in me, because he can tell I don’t really see that as a problem. So I tried. I try really hard. I tried to be the wife that he needs me to be.”
He let out a slow breath. “I’m going to be honest with you, Nora. He’s a shithead. He always has been.”
“He’s myhusband.”
“And I don’t like him. I never have, not from the minute you married him.”
“Is that why you didn’t go to my wedding?”
They didn’t talk about this. They hadn’t actually kept in great contact for a couple of years after she married Ben. They hadn’t spoken about why. He had acted like it was so not a big deal that he didn’t come to the wedding, but it had felt like such a big deal to her.
He gave her a half-savage-looking grin, then took another bite of the cheeseburger. “Not exactly.”
She needed to shift this conversation. “I feel bad. I feel like maybe I haven’t been what he needs. I don’t know how to be that.”
“Here’s my perspective as your best friend. As your best, single friend who clearly doesn’t know anything about love. Hell, I’m a stray. Feral, really. But it seems to me that if you marry somebody, and you have problems, you figure them out together. You don’t go off to find yourself in South America, or anywhere, and leave your partner sitting at home by themselves wondering what the hell they did wrong. That’s the problem I have with it. Because, yes, he played the whole game where he tried to tell you that it’s all him and he has to find himself. But he also made you feel bad. He said just enough about you to make you feel like it might actually be you, and I have an issue with that, Nora.”
It did spark a little bit of anger in her chest. Because he was making sense. What he was saying sounded reasonable. It sounded genuinely like it might be the correct take, and she didn’t think that was just because she was hungry for something, anything other than the recriminations she had been heaping on herself.
“When he gets back, I’m going to talk to him about it. Because, yeah, you’re right. It is ... wrong. He doesn’t accept my past, so that makes all of it hard. So maybe I do make him feel like his problems aren’t valid, but he makes me feel like I have to be ashamed of parts of myself.” She thought about their pristine house, her goblincore office. “I just really don’t want my life to fall apart.” She laughed. “Of course I don’t. But you know, it happened enough times growing up.”
He nodded slowly. “I don’t want that for you.” This was the kind of evening they would’ve had during normal times. While Ben was at home gaming or something. Yet it felt so different knowing Ben wasn’tat home waiting for her. For just a moment, she was captivated by Sam. By the way he was listening to her. By the way that he looked. By the memory of the back muscles she had noticed, even though she hadn’t wanted to.
Sam.
She cleared her throat and stuffed the rest of her fries into her face before tearing into the burger. “What’s going on with your job?” she asked, talking around a mouthful of cheeseburger.
“Do you want me to talk electricity to you?”
Lord, no, she didn’t want to think about electricity. Not when she’d also recently pondered his back muscles. This wasn’t her. She was on the fritz because she was so ... angry. She was angry at Ben for doing this to her. It was abandonment. Just like her mom, and he did know. He knew. Maybe it wasn’t totally unreasonable for him to want to go away and do some work on himself, but given everything she’d been through, the way that people would leave and not come back, it ... it was a whole lot less fair than she had told herself it was.
Sam had pulled his phone out of his pocket and was looking at it.
“Are you on Tinder while we’re out to dinner?”
“And if I was?” He looked up at her, his electric-blue eyes particularly bright.
Her mouth went dry. “I would judge you.”
He stared at her blandly. “Oh no. Not the harsh judgment of my childhood friend.”
