Friends Without Benefits

by Marci Bolden

“Oh, you know, he’s Dad of the Year and all that. He’s so concerned about Sam and our finances and helping me make ends meet. He’s just considerate like that.” She scoffed and rolled her head back to look at the ceiling. “He’s so very, very sorry for all he’s put me through.”

  Paul squeezed her hand. She looked miserable.

  “Sounds like you had a long weekend,” he said.

  “The house is available now if you want to have a look,” Annie said, pulling them from their conversation.

  Dianna looked at Paul. “Do you have time to look at my potential new residence?”

  “Yeah. I’d love to.”

  They all shuffled out and climbed into Annie’s car. Paul sat in the front and asked questions about any problems the property might have had. When Annie pulled into the driveway of the small house, Paul looked up at it. The red-stained siding, covered porch, and the tall maples in the front yard made it look like a cabin in the suburbs. The tiny home had been well cared for, and the upkeep showed in how it still appeared like a newer structure, despite its age.

  “The roof looks nice. How old is it?”

  “Less than five years,” Annie said.

  Dianna silently followed behind while Annie and Paul discussed plumbing and electrical while he looked at the hardwood floors that ran throughout and the newer appliances in the kitchen. The countertop had a few scratches but nothing terrible. The kitchen was clean and bright, and the window above the sink looked out over the long backyard that would be good for barbeques in the summer. The women stayed upstairs while he made a quick pass through the basement. The walls and floor were dry despite the melting snow outside. The space was open without any visible cracks in the structure.

  Walking to the bathroom on the first floor, he looked at the old linoleum. The room wasn’t in great condition, but maybe Dianna could get someone to come in to lay tiles. The two downstairs bedrooms had newer carpet in muted tones that could match just about any color she put on the walls. In the master, a half bath guaranteed she wouldn’t have to share a bathroom with her boys or guests.

  “This is a good deal?” Paul asked his sister.

  “I wouldn’t show her one that wasn’t.”

  He nodded. “Where’d she go?”

  “Upstairs. Paul,” she said quietly when he started past her. “What’s going on with you two? You seem…more.”

  Paul frowned. “More what?”

  She creased her brow. “You know what.”

  He ran his hand over his hair and looked toward the stairs. “Not now, Annie. In case you missed it, she’s pretty damned upset right now.”

  “No, I haven’t missed it. And I didn’t miss how you were hovering, either.”

  “Hovering?”

  “Hovering.”

  He shook his head and took the stairs two at a time. His heart saddened a bit when he found Dianna sitting on the window ledge, looking out over the yard.

  “So?” she asked when he stood beside her. “What do you think?”

  “It’s great. It has a lot of updates that you won’t have to take care of: roof, electrical, some plumbing work. The basement is in good condition. You could finish it eventually to get more space if you wanted. There’s a lot of character, too. Little details that make it unique.”

  “I like the yard.” She turned her attention to the window again. “I could do a lot of landscaping out there.”

  “It’s close to where you are now. Not too far from work.”

  She drew a breath and looked at him. “Yeah. That’s definitely a plus. I’m not crazy about the downstairs bath, though.”

  “It needs work, but that’s just cosmetic. Everything is functional.”

  She gnawed at her lip. “That could be expensive.”

  He squatted in front of her. “Is that your only hesitation?”

  She exhaled heavily and fisted her hands together. “As much as I can picture myself living here, I can’t imagine living anywhere but home.”

  “It’s hard. You’ve been there a long time. But you’ve said more than once it’s become a burden. Your life will be so much easier when you don’t have that mortgage payment weighing you down.”

  “I know.”

  “It’s still tough,” he whispered.

  She sat up straighter, took a long, slow breath, and then exhaled. “I’m okay.”

  “I know you are. And you’re going to keep being okay. This is just another thing you have to get through, but you will get through it.”

  She smiled faintly. “I’m glad you were able to see this place. I think… If the buyers accept my counter, I think I should make an offer on this one. I like it.”

  “Good. Should we get out of here? At least until we move you in?”

  “Yeah. Let’s go get something to eat.”

  He pushed himself up and pulled her to her feet, but instead of stepping away, he gripped her hands and held her gaze. “I know this is hard, but it’s a great house. This place would be perfect for you. It really would.”

  “Yeah, I know.” She inhaled deeply and nodded. “Come on. I’m starving.”

  “Think we should invite Annie?”

  “I don’t know. Did you see the way she was watching us in the office?”

  He laughed. “She accused me of hovering.”

  Di giggled. “Well, you do. Just a little. But I don’t mind.”

  “One more thing,” he said before they started down the stairs. “What’s going on with Mitch?”

  She screwed up her face, as if she were disgusted. “He’s feeling guilty and wants me to absolve him. Too bad for him that’s not going to happen. Not anytime soon anyway. He’ll stop coming around as soon as he gets bored. That’s what he does.”

  “Are you okay with that?”

  “He needs to fix things with Sam, Paul. I don’t want my kids to go the rest of their lives angry with their father. I can tolerate him as long as he’s there for Sam.”

  “Is he?”

  She shrugged. “If he isn’t, he’s wasting his time. I’m not ready to forgive him yet.”

  Some weight lifted off his shoulders, but there was still a nagging deep in his gut. Paul didn’t like Mitch sniffing around when Dianna was feeling so vulnerable. He didn’t like it one bit.

  Dianna shook her head as she parked next to Mitch’s truck. “What the hell?” As soon as she opened the front door, she was welcomed by the scent of steaks cooking. Angry as she’d been, the smell distracted her until she walked into the kitchen.

  “What the hell?” This time, instead of feeling exasperated, she was furious. There wasn’t an inch of counter space that wasn’t covered in flour or sauce or some other spilled food product.

  Mitch turned from the oven and smiled. “Hey. Have a seat and relax. I’m making dinner.”

  “Are you kidding me? Look at this mess.”

  He lifted his hands, which were covered in floral-print oven mitts. “I know. I don’t have your finesse, but it’s going to be delicious. Steaks, potatoes, and baked apples. All your favorites.”

  She wasn’t impressed. “Don’t you dare leave this for me to clean up.”

  She ignored his plea for her to wait and marched to the den, where she suspected she’d find Sam playing video games. There he was, without a care in the world.

  “Your father is in there making a disaster out of my kitchen, and you’re just letting him?”

  “He wanted to make dinner. Who am I to argue with my parental unit?”

  “Right. If your dad wants to cook you dinner, why the hell isn’t he doing it at his house?”

  Sam looked over at her and grinned. “I think he’s planning to dump Michelle.”

  Dianna’s heart flipped in a strange way she didn’t quite grasp. “Then why isn’t he making you dinner at Grandma’s?”

  Sam shrugged.

  “We got an offer on the house today,” she said more gently.

  That got his attention. He sat up and actually looked at her. “Seriously?”
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  “I countered the offer. We haven’t heard anything yet, but if they accept, we’ll have to be gone in about a month.”

  “Great.” He slouched down and un-paused his game.

  “You remember the house I showed you online? I looked at it again today. I really like it. If you want to look—”

  “It’s not like I have to live there very long anyway.”

  She frowned at the angry tone in his voice. “Don’t give me a hard time, Sam. I don’t need it.”

  Dianna left him to his game when he didn’t respond. She returned to the kitchen, where Mitch was pulling a casserole dish out of the oven. She was going to have to deal with his sudden appearance in her kitchen eventually. She might as well do so now. “What are you doing here?”

  “I already told you. I’m making dinner. It’s almost ready.”

  “What are you doing here?” She enunciated each word this time.

  Mitch set aside the dish of apples he’d just pulled from the oven and took off Dianna’s old oven mitts. “Can you stop looking so angry?” He set the mitts aside, not noticing that he knocked a dusting of flour to the floor. “I’ll clean up the kitchen.”

  She tore her attention from the linoleum where the powder had landed and crossed her arms as she leaned against the doorframe. “Sam thinks you plan on leaving your fiancée.”

  He looked down for a few seconds and then lifted his gaze to hers again. The plea on his face was pathetic and made her cringe inside. He took several hesitant steps toward her. “Somewhere along the way, we got off track. We stopped appreciating each other. We stopped valuing each other and our family, but it’s not too late. We can fix this.”

  Her stomach knotted around itself so tightly she couldn’t breathe. “What?”

  “I know it’s going to take time. I don’t expect you to just forgive me overnight, but”—he put his hands on her shoulders—“I miss you. I miss us. I want to come home.”

  She lifted her brows and smacked his hands off her. “You don’t get to just come home whenever you feel like it.”

  “I know that—”

  “I don’t think you do. I don’t care if you want to come home. This isn’t your home anymore. I’m not your wife anymore. You divorced me, Mitch. You divorced me.”

  “I got caught up in something that wasn’t real.”

  She laughed bitterly. “It looked pretty goddamned real to me when I caught you fucking her.”

  He at least had the sense to look ashamed of himself. “I’ll never forgive myself for that. I saw how deeply I’d cut you, and I’ll never forget it. But that’s the thing that will keep me strong. That’s the thing that will remind me how much I don’t want to hurt you again.”

  “You know what? It’s also the thing that keeps me strong, too. Because no matter what you say or do, I will never forget seeing you with her. I will never forget how you told me you were in love with her and that you were leaving me for her.”

  “I made a mistake, Dianna.”

  She shook her head. “You were all set to marry her three weeks ago.”

  “But I didn’t.”

  “Because nobody showed up!”

  “Because I realized it wasn’t what I wanted. Come on, Di. After twenty-two years of marriage, I deserve a second chance.”

  “And I deserve to be with someone who wants to be with me.”

  “I do want to be with you.”

  “Because it didn’t work out with her!”

  “Because I love you. I love you. Don’t you miss us? What we were together?”

  “You destroyed what we were together.”

  “We can fix it.” He smiled as he put his hands on her cheeks. “Honey, we can fix it.”

  She pulled his hands away from her. “There’s nothing left to fix.” She sighed when he ignored the sound of the timer beeping. Stepping around him, she grabbed a mitt and pulled a pan of rolls from the oven. She dropped the baking sheet on the stovetop and looked at the dinner he’d prepared.

  Was she supposed to be so easily convinced? He cooked her dinner, and she should forget all the pain he’d caused her? She took a breath. “I’d like to you leave.”

  “Dianna.”

  “Leave. Please. Go.”

  “You wouldn’t have to sell the house,” he said quietly. “You wouldn’t have to worry about money or how you’re going to take care of the boys. You wouldn’t have to work unless you wanted to. Things could go back to the way they were.”

  “They can’t.”

  He put his hands on her shoulders and gently squeezed them. “They can.”

  Dianna shook his hands off her and faced him.

  “Honey, they can. All those things we said we were going to do after the boys were gone, we can do them. We can add that sun-room you’ve wanted, like we’ve been talking about for so long. We can spend our mornings out there, drinking coffee and planning vacations. Just the two of us, like we said we would.”

  She ground her teeth together as he reminded her of the life she’d been looking forward to. The one she no longer had. “I got an offer on the house today.” Her voice was tight with emotions she didn’t want him to know she was feeling.

  His face sagged for a moment, but then he forced his lips back up into a smile. “You don’t have to accept it. You can turn it down.”

  “And do what? Continue juggling bills, hoping nothing gets shut off or repossessed? No, thanks. I’ve had enough of that to last the rest of my life. Look, I’m sorry things didn’t work out with Michelle—”

  “This isn’t about Michelle.”

  “Isn’t about Michelle?” She stepped around him, almost afraid that if she continued to stand so close to him she’d hit him. “You left me because of Michelle. You divorced me because of Michelle. I lost my husband, my security, my kids lost their lives as they knew them because of Michelle. I hate to break it to you, Mitch, but everything in my life right now is about Michelle.”

  “I made a mistake.”

  “No! You made a choice.”

  “You’re still angry. I understand that. But you’ll see. Once you calm down, you’ll see that we belong together, and you’ll know it’s time for us to put this behind us.”

  “This? This? You say it so casually, like this is nothing. You didn’t leave the toilet seat up, Mitch. You ended our marriage.” She sighed and shook her head. “Just go. Go home to her.”

  “Let me clean up the kitchen.”

  “Leave it.”

  “It’s my mess.”

  She glared at him. “I’ve gotten pretty damned good at cleaning up your messes.”

  He hesitated another moment and then walked out. She looked around at the counters and scoffed at the symbolism. The disaster was a very good representation of the emotions he’d just churned inside her. She wet a dishrag and went to work on cleaning the flour from the counters.

  Paul turned down his car radio as he pressed the speaker on his phone to answer Dianna’s call. “Hey, I was just thinking about you,” he said. “Did you hear back on your counteroffer?”

  “Not yet. But that’s not why I’m calling.”

  He didn’t like the stress in her voice. “What’s wrong?”

  “Mitch was here when I got home.”

  Paul was quiet for several heartbeats. “What did he want?”

  She was quiet. Too quiet. For too long. Finally, she said, “He’s leaving Michelle. He wants to come home.”

  Paul’s heart dropped. He wasn’t exactly surprised by the man’s change of heart, but he didn’t think it would happen quite so fast. If Paul knew his ex-wife—and unfortunately he did—she’d been making Mitch’s life hell for the last few weeks. He was likely fed up with her bitching and whining about the canceled wedding.

  “Paul?”

  He cleared his throat. “Are you okay?”

  Again, she was silent for too long. “Angry. Frustrated.”

  Confused. She didn’t say it, but her tone did.

  His gut tightened.
“Want me to come over?”

  “Dinner will still be warm if you hurry.”

  “I’ll be there in a few.” He drove to her house, thinking of the last few weeks. How things had changed between them. They had crossed a line New Year’s Eve. He’d thought he’d been doing the right thing by stopping them before they’d made love, but maybe he shouldn’t have. Maybe he should have taken her, loved her, let her know how much she meant to him. Maybe he should have told her he cared about her more than he should. Maybe he should have put himself out there.

  But he was so damned terrified of being hurt again.

  Paul parked in her driveway and looked up at the house. It suddenly didn’t seem so welcoming. Even so, he rushed through the snow up the sidewalk and pushed the door open. “Hello?”

  “In the kitchen,” Dianna answered.

  He kicked off his shoes, hung his coat, and then headed for the kitchen. “Smells delicious.”

  “Thank my ex-husband. He was trying to butter me up.”

  “Doesn’t sound like it worked.”

  She shook her head and filled a plate. “I’m furious. And I’m— Damn it,” she seethed when she burned her hand on a casserole dish.

  Paul pulled her to the sink and ran cold water over her fingers. Her lip trembled, and he exhaled slowly. He turned the water off then patted her fingers dry.

  “He said he could come home and I could keep the house and I wouldn’t have to work and life would just be fantastic, like his little indiscretion had never even happened. I pointed out that he was going to marry her, and he just shrugged it off like that was nothing. Like our divorce was nothing—just a little break he took from being my husband.”

  Paul set the towel on the counter and leaned back. He hadn’t seen her this upset in some time. He wanted to hug her, but he didn’t. He somehow didn’t feel like he had the right.

  Dianna closed her eyes. “He doesn’t have a clue how much he hurt me, and no matter how I try to explain it, he’ll never understand because all he thinks about is himself.”

  “Didn’t he always?”

  She nodded. “I suppose.”

  She lifted her gaze to his. He recognized the pain there as something that only Mitch could bring out in her. Her heart was breaking. Over him. Paul looked down and sighed.