“Yes.”
“And you beat people up and break their ribs?”
“I know. I know. I sound terrible.”
“You do.” I shook my head at him.
“And yet here we are,” he said.
I nodded and echoed his words. “Yup. Here we are.”
“Anything else you want to know, Sera? I promise I’m going to be completely honest with you from now on.”
Something bubbled up inside me. A question that I had been wanting to ask so badly, but hadn’t had the courage to yet. What the hell. There was no time like the present “You kind of avoided the question last time, so I’ll ask it again. Did you really sleep with all the women in your previous office?”
“Mmm.” He looked cautious for a while. “It’s an exaggeration, but yes, I did sort of sleep with a few.”
“Sort of? You can’t reallysort ofhave sex, can you? Unless I’m missing something here? Maybe I didn’t learn about thissort of sexthing in biology.” I leaned in and whispered that, what with all the kids running around.
He ran his hands through his hair. “I definitely used sex as a way of . . .” he looked like he was thinking carefully for the next words, “. . . forgetting. I was in a pretty bad way for a while after Li went, and I wasn’t that well behaved.”
“Well behaved? That’s an interesting choice of words.” I felt sick to my stomach thinking about this. I wasn’t sure that I wanted this level of candid honesty, even if I’d asked for it.
“And when we . . . that night in the car,” I asked, “how long had it been since you—”
Ben suddenly reached across the table and took my hands, but I pulled them away quickly. “I’m not going to lie to you,” he said. He looked me in the eye . . . and he looked serious.
Shit, here it comes.He was going to tell me something like he’d had sex with someone the night before, or a few hours before or—
“Eight months,” he said in a deadpan tone.
“Eight months?”
“Eight months,” he repeated, and it still sounded like he was being serious.
“You hadn’t had sex in eight months?”
He nodded. “I kind of realized that if I was ever going to get Li back, I needed to start being more responsible, so I started making some changes in my life and eight months ago I stopped sleeping aro—” He cut himself off.
“Around!” I finished his sentence. “Sleeping around.” I studied his face for any telltale signs of deceit, but there were none.
“You’re being serious.”
He nodded. “Please don’t hate me, Sera. That’s all in the past. I’m not like that anymore.”
I laughed. “God, I actually wish I could. I wish I could hate you and never want to see you again. It would make this all so much simpler.” I snapped my head up and looked at him again. “And don’t come with your ‘life ain’t simple’ thing or ‘the best things in life are complicated’ or—”
“You took the words right out of my mouth.” He cut me off with a smile. Our eyes met again and I started to feel the pull once more. The dangerous pull that was so hard to resist. Luckily, loud children’s laughter made us both turn. Li was climbing up a tree now and laughing with her new friends. I turned back and looked at Ben, his eyes were glowing.
“She’s adorable,” I said.
“I’d do anything for her.”
I nodded. “I know.” You could see he would throw himself in front of a bus for her without a second thought.
“You don’t know what love feels like until you have a child.” He suddenly looked at me—his look was packed with meaning and subtext and it scared the hell out of me. I shuffled nervously in my seat. “And you? Do you want kids one day?” His meaningful look continued and it was making me very uncomfortable. I fiddled with my hands in my lap.
“Like you said, life isn’t simple. And mine is just too complicated,” I replied.
