“I’m fine,” he said.
“Oh, good. I… so, my lawyer served Aiden his divorce papers.”
“Did he?”
She was looking at him expectantly. He knew that she wanted a particular sort of response out of this, and he didn’t know quite which one to give.
“So what’s next?”
“If he signs them, then we can likely just proceed and dissolve the marriage, without even having to do anything in person, or even anything on Zoom. Because we don’t own anything, it’s really simple.”
“What about the money for the car?”
“I’ve decided I’m not actually going to die on that hill. Because if that money is going to be the thing that makes it take longer, I’m just not going to fight for it.”
“Why not?”
“I just want to be done. I want to move on. Move forward. I want to be here, fully, not litigating the remains of my marriage.”
He snorted. “Sorry, you’ll have to forgive me, I’m unfamiliar with what it looks like when people move on.”
He hadn’t meant for that to come out quite so hard-edged.
Marlowe frowned. “Is this about your mom?”
“What?”
“You seem very…on edge. Is something up?”
“No. Nothing… Nothing is going on.”
“Okay. Then I guess this is as good a time as any to tell you that…” She paused and screwed up her face, her eyes glittering. “Cody… I know that you said you didn’t want to get married, and I know that you said you didn’t want to have kids. But I fell in love with you anyway. And I would like those things. Eventually. It doesn’t have to be tomorrow. It doesn’t even have to be in three years. But I don’t want to walk away from you. I don’t want to walk away from this.”
He couldn’t believe that he was hearing her correctly. Because it felt like what she was saying was impossible.
She loved him?
Why? It didn’t make any sense. Yes, they had amazing sex, but sex wasn’t love, and he felt like Marlowe was smart enough to know that.
“Don’t,” he said.
“What?”
“You don’t love me. It’s impossible. You’ve known me for a couple of months.”
“No, I do love you, though. And I am really familiar with what love is, just so you’re clear.”
“Yeah, because you were in love with Aiden five seconds ago, and now you think you’re in love with me?”
She drew back, startled, as though he had struck her. “That was a fucked-up thing to say.”
“It’s honest. It doesn’t make any sense to me that you could’ve come here, brokenhearted, still married to him, and then suddenly you’ve decided that you’re in love with me?”
“You know, as strange as it is for me to say right now, you’re actually a very easy man to love, Cody.”
“No. I’m not. And what you’re after is more roots. Because that’s what you want. You like the idea of being withme because then you’ll feel safe. You’ll feel like you’ve got this place permanently.”
He was really messing this up. Beyond. He was taking information she had given to him and turning around and using it as a weapon, and even while he did it, he felt like the lowest form of life ever.
