"You… had the cupcake," I repeated. That pissed me off even more, considering I'd had to leave my own bite half-finished when Darren came stomping into the auditorium like the world’s biggest cock-blocker.
"I had the entire cupcake, Ben. Wrapper and all." He dragged a hand down his jaw. "And here's the thing. She felt guilty about it. Apparently, since the retreat, you've both taken a bite out of the cupcake too. She'd gotten it into her head that we'd all sat down and talked about it, that there was some standing arrangement and everybody knew where everybody stood." He blew out a breath. "I didn't know she'd had sex with the both of you since we got back. For the record. I'm not exactly throwing a parade about it. But we did hand her that test-drive status back at the lake. So when she's sitting there about to come apart over it, what was I going to do? I told her we share everything. I told her we were all good with it."
I hadn't slept with her since we all did at the lake, courtesy of Darren stomping into that auditorium at the worst possible moment of my life, but I sure as shit wasn't going to let these two assholes know that. The bus hit a pothole and I felt it go straight up my spine. Nobody spoke for a second.
"You had her," Cole said. He didn’t yell but I could tell he wanted to. A vein in his neck was throbbing out a Morse code I was pretty sure translated to I will bite the head off of any man who looks at her.
"You're going to act surprised." Luke finally looked at him. "Like you haven't. Like Ben hasn't. Neither of you have ownership on her."
My stomach was suddenly doing flip-flops.
"Look, the cupcakes frosting was about to melt off," Luke said. "You both know how she gets. She was apologizing, she thought she'd done something wrong, and she hasn't done one single thing wrong. So I told her what she needed to hear so she could stop hating herself for ten seconds."
"Since when do you speak for me," I was pissed, even though I would have said exactly the same thing to her.
Luke blinked. "I wasn't trying to. It wasn't like that."
"You told her we were all good with it. You decided that. For all three of us." I wasn't even sure where the heat was coming from. This was Luke, one of the two people on the planet I trusted most, and here I was ready to grab a fistful of his collar over a situation I'd signed up for with my eyes wide open and my pants already off. "What if I'm not good with it? What if I don't want to split the cupcake three ways?"
"You think I want to share the cupcake?" Cole let out a short breath. "I told myself this was simple. One night, nobody catches feelings, everybody drives home a little sore and very satisfied. And then I spent the night on her terrible couch fishing a butterknife out of the cushions at two in the morning, and somewhere between that and her telling me about her deadbeat ex I realized I'd happily commit a felony for this woman. So no. I'm not feeling real generous about sharing the cupcake either."
"So what are we saying," Luke said quietly. "That it stops being three of us. That it becomes one of us. The best man wins?"
None of us answered, which was exactly the problem. We all wanted to give Callie the world. We all wanted to give each other the world, but sharing her felt worse than licking the floor of the school bus.
Up front, Callie was holding a juice box up to the light, squinting at the straw hole like it had personally betrayed her.
"We were idiots to think it'd stay simple," I said. I tried to make it a joke. It didn't come out like one. "It was never going to be a test drive forever. Somebody was always going to want to keep the car."
"Don't," Cole said. "Don't make this another joke."
"It's me, Cole. It's always going to be a joke. You knew that when you signed up for this bro-mance dickhead."
Luke almost smiled. "So we figure it out then. Like adults instead of man-children crying over a cupcake. We talk to her and we work out-"
"We don't," Cole said. "Not yet. Not until we know what we're even offering her." He looked out the window. "She's got enough coming at her without three grown men cornering her with an ultimatum next to a petting zoo."
Cole was right, so we shut up. We let the bus fill back up with the sound of twenty-two screaming kids and one woman we couldn’t keep our minds off of, and the three of us sat in the back row pretending we hadn't just turned a perfectly good friendship into a deranged love triangle.
Then Oliver, who I'd have sworn was three hundred pages deep in his cinder block, spoke up from one row ahead without turning around.
"If you're fighting over a cupcake," he said, "you should just share it. My mom says there's always enough to go around if people stop being greedy. She says that about snacks." He turned a page. "It's usually about snacks."
There was a beat of stunned silence.
"Out of the mouths of babes," I said shaking my head.
Cole put his face in his hands. Luke made a noise like he'd taken a paintball to the sternum. And I sat there thinking that an eight-year-old was smarter than any of us.
I went back to watching her. She'd gotten the juice box open and was looking very proud of herself about it. She caught me staring and gave me a little wave. I waved back and decided, that if it came down to one of us, it was going to be me. I figured the other two were thinking the exact same thing.
39
Callie
There is a place forty minutes outside of town called Serenity Hollow Holistic Animal Sanctuary, and for the low, low price of one field trip permission slip and the last shred of my professional dignity, twenty-two second-graders and I were going to do yoga with goats there.
I want to be clear that I did not pick this. The PTA picked this. Samantha Green, specifically, picked this, after reading an article about how "agricultural mindfulness" boosts standardized test scores, which is not a real sentence but try telling Samantha that. I'd read the brochure in the parking lot while the bus unloaded, and the brochure promised that the goats were "certified emotional support livestock" and that I would leave "rebalanced." I had not, in all my years of teaching, ever once left anything rebalanced. I left things sticky, or messy, or on fire. But never rebalanced.
