Her gaze was just a little bit too knowing. And as the elevator stopped and the doors slid open, leaving them standing there in a way that, at least right now, was empty, he couldn’t give her a lie.
“Oh, I wouldn’t have cared about your marriage vows. I would’ve made it clear to you that if you wanted, you could’ve had me.”
“But you would’ve been my boss, and my husband would’ve been working for you.”
“If my morals would’ve held firm where you were concerned, I wouldn’t have touched you once. I know for a fact, for ashamefulfact, that I would’ve wanted you just as much if you had come with a wedding ring on your finger and a husband attached to your side as I do now. I know for a fact that I am who I am, no matter how hard I’ve tried to outrun it. This has made things very clear.”
She looked away from him and stepped out of the elevator. “I don’t think I like the idea that I’m evidence of your corrupt nature.”
“It’s good,” he said. “It’s clarifying.”
“Could it be something else?”
“Yes. It can be. It just means that I want you more than I want to be good. I think we all have that limit.”
She looked up at him, and he could see that she was tired. There were circles underneath her eyes, and the smile that she gave him was just a little bit sad. “I don’t know if I would’ve kept my marriage vows, Cody. Because I don’t have anythingto compare this to. If I would’ve met you when I was younger… I might’ve been my parents.”
He chuckled. “What makes you say that?”
“Well, the thing that I’ve been outrunning is making decisions based on passion. All my life. I connected to anger. Punching holes in the wall and all those things my mother used to do, drinking to drown out the intensity because you have to, like my father did, but… I’m not sure that I’ve ever experienced emotions I couldn’t control, and I thought that it meant I was winning. I thought it made me better. But then I met you. And it’s something. Something bigger than me. Bigger than I can control. Or maybe just bigger than I want to control. I think I just want you because it’s exhilarating. Because I feel alive when you touch me. In a way that I never have before.”
She took a deep breath and continued. “It’s showing me why some people don’t play it safe. Why they don’t do the things that I’ve done for years, making everything as stable as possible, because they know that there’s a high out there, they can feel that… It’s more fun than stability. And I bet it’s addictive. I can feel it. I guess I’m losing my superiority, too.”
“So glad I could drag you down into the gutter with me.”
“I don’t think of it as a gutter,” she said, walking ahead of him down the hallway toward her room.
He let out a slow breath. “I want to know everything,” he said.
“What in general?”
“About you. Listening to you talk to my brother tonight made me realize I didn’t know as much as I wanted.”
“You know that I’m from Vermont. You know that I started dating Aiden in high school. That Cara is my sister-in-law and that their parents are dead, that my family is dysfunctional.”
“Yeah. That’s a nice biography. When you met Aiden, what made you think that you should stay with him?”
“I want to. I wanted to believe that I’d found the person who was stable and easy.” She stuck her key in the lock and turned it. Then she pushed the door open. “Probably kind of silly to keep it locked today. But it’s a habit.”
The apartment was much more lived in than the last time he’d seen it. It just felt like her. Smelled like her. And it made his heart start beating faster.
“Anyway. I can’t overstate the fact that I have always been afraid that I was going to be like my parents. And to me, that just meant messy. Messy and raw and all of these things that made my life so difficult. When I think of my childhood, I just think of lying in my bedroom, on a mattress on the floor, listening to them scream at each other. But then, after she left, it was just quiet. My dad would sit in his recliner in front of the TV, just spacing out. And sometimes he had a job, but a lot of the time he drank too much to keep it. He drank because his body hurt. He drank because his heart hurt. He drank because it was the only thing that helped him manage himself, I guess. And it killed him. But I was the one who had to be responsible. Because if I didn’t, then everything would fall apart. If I didn’t, then who was going to make sure that he was okay? Who was going to make sure that I was okay? Maybe that’s part of why finding a husband felt important. A partner. So that I had somebody else who was taking care of things. But the bar was so low for that in my life that…”
“He wasn’t taking care of as much as he should have.”
“No. And I didn’t notice it. I didn’t… he wasn’t just staring catatonically at a television screen, so it felt like an improvement.”
He wanted to take care of her. That was the most intense, driving need in him right now.
Of course he did. That was who he was.
He had always taken care of people. If she had been part of his little cohort, she would’ve been provided for.
There would’ve been a lot of things wrong, because of course their lives hadn’t been perfect, but he had made sure that everyone was okay. She was just there by herself, hanging on as best she could, trying to keep going.
“Did you have friends? It must’ve been hard to have people over.”
“No. I didn’t have friends. Did you?”
