It feels so good to be able to laugh about stuff like this. I’ve spent so many years crying about it. Or trying to pretend I’m okay when I’m not.
“And she and Kate took me out drinking, and at some point after a few too many White Russians—”
“Uh-oh. Your Achilles cocktail.”
“—Deena convinced me that I couldn’t keep sleeping in the same bed we had when we were married.Too many memories of too much great sex.”
“I’m not going to argue with that.” He grins.
“So we got home and decided that the best, most cleansing way to rid myself of said memories was to burn it.The bed.” I pause. “I set fire to our bed.”
His mouth drops open. “Shit, are you serious? I don’t know whether to be impressed or horrified.”
I cringe. “Well, it turns out our mattress was semi-flame resistant. So Deena suggested we pour lighter fluid on it—”
“Okay, I’m going with horrified. Were you all right?”
“Um, yeah. I mean, it scared the shit out of all of us, how big the fire got. And while Kate called the fire department, Deena and I tried to put it out with the fire extinguisher, but we were really drunk, and by the time the firemen showed up, half of my bedroom was gone and Deena and I looked like we’d been wrestling in whipped cream onGirls Gone Wild.”
“Oh my god,” Blake says, his eyes wide. “You set fire to our bed while it was stillin your bedroom? How on earth did I not hear about this? How on earth did the whole world not hear about this?”
This is a question I have wondered many times over the years. “Well, you had the kids that night. And I guess we got lucky by getting the world’s most discreet firemen.” I pause, and then sigh.This is part I really don’t want to share, but it’s kind of important for the full story, so I blurt the rest out. “And then after the fire was put out, I may have really openly hit on one of the firemen and invited him to stay over and everyone else left and then we, um . . . yeah.”
Blake chuckles, but it’s strained. “Wow. A firefighter, huh?”
I get how he’s feeling. I hate thinking about all the girls—all the gorgeous, gorgeous women—he’s slept with in those years we were apart. Before, it was because of how much it hurt knowing he’d gotten over me so fast. Now it’s this sense of sorrow—that it should never have happened, because we should never have been apart to begin with.
“I hardly remember anything about him, really,” I say, though I’m not sure that helps much. “But the point is, he must have had some kind of furniture-sales gig on the side, because he referred me to this website where I could get these ‘really classy, upscale bedroom sets,’ I think he called them. And so after he left, while still drunk, I must have ordered the monstrosity that currently dominates my bedroom. Because it arrived a week later—the ‘Luxury of the Orient’ it is named.” I shake my head in deep regret.
“Wow,” Blake says again, and I’m not sure if he’s referring to the story itself, or if his brain is still caught on my drunken firefighter sex. “Um, so—”
“Why is it still there five and half years later?” I ask, and he nods. “Because this thing is huge and weighs a thousand pounds, and requires multiple burly men to move anywhere. And I figured that somehow I’d been fortunate enough to avoid the tabloids finding out about the whole bed-pyre, let alone the incident with the firefighter, and I didn’t need any more potential witnesses willing to sell a story about Kim Watterson’s giant racially-insensitive bed.”
“Yeah, that makes sense.” He takes a sip of orange juice. “What culture is it even supposed to be? Is it, like, some harem bed? Because it’s definitely big enough. And tacky enough.”
I laugh. “Roger used to joke that if we ever had a flood we could load the animals into it two by two.”
Blake’s smile slips a little.
“God, I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have mentioned Roger.”
“No, it’s not that, not really.” Blake shrugs with one shoulder. “I mean, you were with him for three years. He was a big part of your life. I don’t think it’s fair—or even right—that you never talk about him.”
I chew on the inside of my cheek. He’s right, of course. And I’m definitely well over Roger—the main problem with Roger being that I was never actually in love with him to begin with.
But it still feels kind of shitty to bring up that part of my life to Blake.To make him picture me with someone else, all those pieces of a shared life that he wasn’t part of. A shared life that, had we both not been idiots, never would have been with anyone but him.
“It’s just . . .” Blake starts, then squints up at the sky. “This is stupid. But I hate thinking of him having a sense of humor. Or making you laugh like I did.” He gives me a side-eye look. “Honestly, I like thinking of him as this super-boring, balding guy with a flabby stomach.”
I’ve just taken a sip of my orange juice and nearly choke on it in an attempt to keep from spitting it all over our brunch. “Have you ever actuallyseena picture of Roger?” I can’t help but say, when I can speak again. Because, yeah, he’s no Blake Pless, but he’s a pretty far cry from the Hunchback of Notre Dame.
Blake wrinkles his nose. “A few hundred, maybe.”
I know what he means. I couldn’t avoid seeing pics of him and Portia, or him and Simone, or even him and that bimbo he was seen with about a year after the divorce—even though according to her outspoken (and admittedly kind of hilarious) comments on a survival reality show, they only went on two dates and he never slept with her. She claimed she wasn’t sure if he was gay, still sad about the divorce, or bloated from eating too much dairy at dinner.
I’d felt pretty certain it wasn’t any of those things—um, particularly the first—but I believed the rest of it. Even before I knew that Blake’s type was actuallyme, I could tell that his type, in addition to being hot and blond, was also women who can carry on a conversation that isn’t about hair care products orTori Spelling.
He gives me a self-conscious smile. “But yeah, I might have imagined Roger with a few extra flaws—and pounds—on him for my own sanity. And it really kills me to think he might have actually been”—here he winces—“funny.”
