“Delightful women,” he drawls.
“And my boyfriend.” I pause on the word. “I mean ex-boyfriend.” I brace myself with a deep inhale. “And the woman I found out he’s been cheating on me with for the past two years.” I get physically ill thinking about it. “That’s why I came here.”
He doesn’t say a word for a few seconds before voicing his opinion.
“What a piece of garbage.” He leans back in the chair. “Do you want him gone? I have a military contractor on retainer.”
I burst out laughing. “Do you offer this kind of service to every scorned woman you meet?”
“I can add the home-wrecker to the hit list,” he says with the air of someone taking down your lunch order.
“Caroline”—her name tastes like ash—“is their friend. We got close after a while. I thought she was my friend too, especially after she helped Jared land a job in her department.” He’s a natural, charming, sweet talker. It was perfect for him. “They had to travel to business fairs with the sales department. I guess that’s how it started.”
Fidgeting with my cup is a better idea than making eye contact.
“They had these inside jokes after a while, and they’d laugh without letting me in on it. It was always, ‘You wouldn’t get it’ or ‘You had to be there’.” I make a poor attempt at mimicking Jared and Caroline.
“Didn’t it piss you off?” Carter asks, confused. Of course, he’d go scorched-earth and annihilate anyone messing with him.
But I don’t know how to answer. An uncomfortable sensation roiled through me every time they did that. Same as the indigestion I get if I eat something too spicy. It was quickly replaced by guilt about my reaction. Being angry meant something was wrong with our relationship, that it was damaged, and I couldn’t let that thought poison my day-to-day life.
“I thought she had a thing for a high school classmate of his.” I change the conversation not too smoothly, but Carter doesn’t comment on it. “I encouraged her to go for it.”
A humorless laugh escapes me.
“And you had no idea about their affair.”
“Obviously.” Defensiveness masked as outrage pinches my voice. “I was blind, not in denial.” That’s stretching the truth. “Or maybe I was and don’t want to admit I was so focused on not ending up alone, that I completely missed the signs.”
“Being single is not the end of the world. It gives you control over your life, your time.”
He doesn’t understand what I mean when I tell him I don’t want to be alone. He at least has a mother and probably other family. I don’t want to tell him what it means to me.
Instead, I grab the opportunity to find out more about him, since he’s surprisingly open today.
“It sounds lonely. Not having somebody to consider in your plans, in your life. Somebody to miss you when you’re not with them.”
“I’m not alone when I don’t want to be,” he says, the innuendo more than clear, and I remember the women in the articles.
“I’m talking more about emotional connection and security than casual sex. I want someone I’m safe with, somebody I can build a family with.”
His smirk is condescending, “You mean marriage and kids and the white picket fence?”
“Yes, kids are part of my perfect future, either by blood or not, but more than that…” How can I explain this visceral hunger for belonging and intimacy, so haunting it becomes an ache sometimes?
Even after eight years, the ache never subsided. I knew in my bones that Jared wasn’t my safe space, my forever home.
The swaying trees outside catch my eye and the soothing dance of the branches quiets my mind enough to articulate the messy emotion hiding behind the surface.
“I’m far from perfect. Inside or out. I want to be able to be my whole self with somebody. A man who’d take it all and love me because of it. I know now that Jared didn’t allow it and I had to hide who I am. To look the way he liked, to act the way our friends expected me to.”
Carter doesn’t say anything, and I realize I might have shared too much and rest the already cold teacup against my reddening cheek. I wanted to be completely honest for a change. It’s hard to open my soul to people who knew about my past and would look at me with pity. Who already think I’m fragile. The stranger before me is the closest thing to sending my thoughts into the void.
“Sorry, TMI from the crazy woman in the woods,” I joke, but he’s still as a statue, his Adam’s apple bobbing and his eyes burning with an intensity I don’t know how to decipher.
“What if it never happens, the way you want it?” The slight waver in his voice lodges in my airways.
The question comes off as loaded, with a lot of missing pieces, but I don’t have the courage to ask him about it. This thread of connection is too fragile.
