I forced a chuckle. Tim was a little… scary. I was desperate to change the subject so I could quit picturing Tim throwing a wrapped-up carpet containing my dead body into the quarry. “You look nice tonight.” She looked gorgeous, but I felt like I’d be coming on too strong if I said that. She was wearing a simple black and white dress, but on her it looked stunning.
“Thanks.” She smiled. “You look nice, too.” Her eyes flitted over me, and by the way her cheeks turned a little pink I could tell she still found me attractive. It gave me hope. Hope for what, exactly, I wasn’t quite sure.
The night went on. We made it through the rehearsal and then were seated next to each other at the dinner. The conversation between Sadie and me had been fairly relaxed.There was always an undercurrent between us. Attraction, history, knowledge, heartbreak, betrayal—it was athickundercurrent.
Things turned awkward towards the end of the evening, though, and I couldn’t put my finger on why.
Sadie kept trying to say something to me, but she kept getting cut off by friends and family standing up to toast the happy couple. Melinda and Drake had told us to save our speeches for the wedding reception the next evening, so there was no pressure on us to perform at least. But I was getting irritated by how many people were getting up to say something.
I wanted to hear what Sadie had to say.
Finally, I couldn’t take it any longer. I leaned in during one of Melinda’s great aunt’s speeches, which turned out to be surprisingly inappropriate, and whispered, “What are you trying to say to me?” in her ear.
She gave me a tight smile. “I… I was, um, wondering if we could talk after the dinner is over.”
“Sure. Of course.” I was excited until I saw the nervous look on her face. Then a sense of unease came over me. My therapist had recently asked if Sadie had ever wanted to know details of me cheating. He said it was normal for the injured party to want to know exactly what had happened, how many times, how long the affair had gone on, what caused it, whether they did something wrong, and so on. He said it was often difficult, but that it sometimes led to healing.
“I thought we could sit out on a bench on the river walk.” She gestured to the beautifully lit path that bordered the river that ran through town.
“Okay.”
“I’ll grab a bottle of wine and a couple of glasses and meet you out there in ten minutes,” she said.
“Oh. So, you mean right now.” It made sense. Dessert had already been cleared away and people were leaving. It was just that suddenly I was interested in delaying this conversation. My hands were sweating.
“Yeah.”
“I’ll meet you there in a minute.”
***
I sat on the bench, legs spread and leaning forward with my arms resting on my thighs. I was staring down at the water and waiting on Sadie to come out. I finally heard her heels clicking down the stairs from the country club.
I turned to watch her approach, watching as the light breeze blew her thick, blonde hair over her shoulders. She was so fucking pretty, with her beautiful face and perfect body. Once again, I was struck with just how big of a fool I’d been at nineteen years old. Sadie and I could be married by now. We might even have two or three children running around like Blair and her husband had.
But I’d had to go and fuck it all up. I had a feeling I was about to have to talk about that time in detail.
I stood up to help Sadie with everything she was carrying. She had one of the gift baskets of gourmet foods Melinda and Drake were giving to out of town guests. She had two bottles of wine, a corkscrew, and two glasses as well.
“Wow. How long are you planning for this talk to take?”
She looked at me with steel in her pretty blue eyes. “As long as it takes.”
Okay, then. I took one of the bottles, uncorked it, and poured us each a glass of wine. I handed hers to her. “What do you want to know?”
“Everything.”
I blew out a breath, nerves getting the best of me. “Okay. I guess the first thing I want to say is that the cheating wasn’tabout anything you did or didn’t do. I know it got out of hand because of the videos going viral and all the horrible comments… but it wasn’t anything to do with you. You were perfect, Sadie.”
She made a face. “That’s a copout. I couldn’t have been perfect, or you wouldn’t have cheated.”
“No, you were. I’m serious. The person who wasn’t perfect was me. I went from a nobody on campus to an instant celebrity after the starting quarterback got hurt and Coach put me in. That was the third game of the season, and it just got more and more crazy after that. It was like I could do no wrong on campus. Girls threw themselves at me constantly, professors gave me extra time on assignments, I was signing autographs, my fraternity treated me like I was some sort of god, and the list goes on. I let it go to my head.”
“I saw that happening. It wasn’t pretty,” she admitted. “I can remember being embarrassed when you thought it was your right to cut to the front of every line.”
I winced. “Yeah. Not my best days, that’s for sure.” I looked down, not wanting to get to the next part but knowing I had to. “And then there was Aubrey.” I met her eyes. “You were right, of course, about her wanting to get close to me and break us up. But it took me too long to see it. At first, I really did just think she was my friend. But as time went on, she became… really sexual with me. And she was always encouraging me to cheat. She talked about how ridiculous it was that I was this amazing athlete that every girl wanted to fuck, but that I was stuck in a relationship.”
Sadie winced and drank half her glass of wine.
