by Noelle Adams
She stared at him. She wasn’t sure what she expected from him in this moment, but it wasn’t this kind of blunt, honest confession.
His lips curled wryly before he continued, “I’ve had casual sex all my life, and it’s never been difficult because I don’t usually see the women afterward. I try to leave things in a decent place, but our social circles rarely overlap the way yours and mine do. So it felt awkward to me. Uncomfortable. And I handled it the way I always do—by creating some distance. I told myself I was being mature and responsible about the whole thing, but I was mostly just taking the easy way out. So I’m sorry about that.”
His eyes dropped from her face to the stoop for a few seconds before they rose again. “The truth is I had an amazing time with you. And I think you’re... amazing overall. And the last thing I’d want to do is make you feel like I don’t appreciate you.” He cleared his throat and dropped his eyes again. “Because I do.”
She stared at him, frozen like she’d been when she first saw him out the window. Her mouth felt dry and her palms felt damp.
Her silence evidently lasted a little too long because he shifted from foot to foot and gave a half-hearted scowl. “Are you going to say anything?”
“Yes,” she burst out, finally finding her voice. “I was just shocked. I’m not used to getting such good apologies from guys.”
“Well, it was real. I meant it.” His shoulders relaxed visibly. “So it was a good apology?”
“Don’t get cocky about it,” she told him with an eye roll. “But yes. It was a nice one. And thank you for it. And I’m sorry for losing my temper. I shouldn’t have done it. It was a supreme overreaction to circumstances. If you want the truth, I was feeling weird about everything too. And then when it felt like you were avoiding me, I took it as an insult rather than thinking it through reasonably. I don’t normally lose my temper like that, so I’m not sure what got into me.”
“I deserved it.” There was the slightest glint in his eyes that made her want to smile.
“Oh dear.” She sighed. “I see the real Robert is showing himself again.”
“The asshole?”
“The man who’s a little bit of an asshole—but not a real one.”
He chuckled, looking almost unbearably attractive as he did. “I’ll take it. But look, I thought I’d make a suggestion. I know things were just casual between us—I know it was just the one time—but I’d like us to be on decent terms. So I wondered if you wanted to drive down to Hilton Head with me next weekend since we’re both going to that wedding.”
She froze again, her lips parted slightly.
“I’m driving down on Friday. I’m going to the rehearsal dinner too. I’m not a groomsman, but the wedding is so small that they invited everyone who’s attending to the rehearsal dinner, I think. We should be both going and coming at the same time, so we could ride together if you wanted.” He cocked his head to the right. “Save some money. And act like mature, civilized adults who can get past a one-night stand and still be friendly. What about it?”
She needed to respond. He was standing there, waiting for an answer. So she needed to give him one.
But she was suddenly terrified. In an emotional uproar.
Because she was hit with a very inconvenient truth as he stood in front of her.
She did want to be on good terms with him, and she did genuinely appreciate his apology. But she didn’t want to only be friendly with him. She didn’t want their night together to be the last one.
She wanted him again. In bed. Out of bed. All the way.
There was no way in the world she could tell him that, which meant she had no excuse for saying no to him.
So she heard herself saying instead, “O...kay. I guess that would be fine.”
“Yeah?” He was searching her face. He knew how to read her—she’d have to be very careful.
“Yeah.” She smiled. As sincerely as she could. “It’s a nice offer. It’s a good idea. Why not?”
“Excellent.” He was smiling too, and he looked warm and almost soft. “Thanks for not holding things against me.”
“It’s fine. It’s all fine.” She was telling herself as much as him. “I think it’s going to be fine. Thanks for coming over.”
“Of course.” He seemed to understand that the conversation was finished, which was a relief. “I’ll text you later to make plans for the trip.”
“Sounds good. I’ll talk to you then.”
He said goodbye and then started down her walk, turning once to wave and then again to look, as if assuring himself she was still there.
She stood at the door until he reached his car, which was parked in her driveway near the curb. When he started his SUV and put it in reverse, she went back inside.
Oh shit.
What had she done?
She’d agreed to be friends with a man she wanted a lot more than friendship with. She’d already lived through this once before with Dave, so how could she do it to herself again?
And then she’d agreed to be trapped in a car with him on a road trip next weekend.
This was not how she’d expected today to go.
AMANDA WORRIED AND stewed over the trip all week, but the drive down to Hilton Head wasn’t as bad as she’d imagined.
In fact, it wasn’t bad at all.
In truth, it was very, very good.
Robert wasn’t one of those people who believed that every moment needed to be filled with talk, so a lot of the trip was in comfortable silence while he drove and she putzed around on her phone. He let her pick the music, so she switched between a country station and millennial pop, partly because she liked a lot of the songs but mostly because she thought it might annoy him and she wanted to see his reaction.
As she hoped, he raised his eyebrows with each new song, the arch higher or lower depending on the degree of silly schmaltz.
She knew how to read his moods, however, so she could see he wasn’t really irritated. He was enjoying her teasing in his typical, sardonic way.
When they did talk, it varied between casual banter and deeper conversation. The deeper conversation usually came when Robert would ask her random questions that required some real introspection.
They’d been driving about four hours when he asked without warning, “So was I right about Dave?”
She grew very still for a moment—more surprise than indignation. “What about Dave?”
He glanced over and gave her face a brief, searching scan. “About it not being love. About it being a fantasy and not reality. Was I right or were you really heartbroken?” His tone and expression maintained a pretense of relaxed indifference. As if the question wasn’t a significant one.
But something about the way he kept glancing over made her wonder if he was as casual as he was pretending.
She frowned, thinking through the question and trying to figure out how to answer it.
“Too personal?” he prompted after a minute, his mouth twitching in a dead giveaway that he was trying to provoke her. “I thought we were friends now.”
She rolled her eyes. “Friends don’t purposefully try to make their friends mad.”
“Sometimes they do.”
She tried, but she couldn’t hold back a laugh at the glint in his eyes. “Maybe. But honestly it wasn’t that I was trying not to answer the question. I was just trying to figure out the answer.”
“So you don’t know if you’re heartbroken or not?”
“I don’t know. I mean, in some ways I feel heartbroken. Or I did. Not so much now, but even still occasionally. Like I’d lost something really important. But I’m not sure that what I lost is Dave himself.” She sighed and turned her phone in her hands. “That probably doesn’t even make sense.”
“It might make sense. Say more about it.”
She flashed him a brief scowl just to prove she wasn’t overlooking his presumption, but it did feel better to try to put this into words, so she didn’t hold back the way she might o
therwise have. “This sounds terrible, but I actually don’t miss Dave as much as I think I should. I mean, I still love him. I always will. He’s been a part of my life for a really long time, and I feel connected to him the way I do to family. But... I don’t miss hanging out with him the way I used to. I don’t wish he were with me all the time... or even sometimes. I don’t miss him. But I miss... It feels like I lost...”
He waited for a minute after she trailed off, turning his eyes from the road once or twice to check her face. Then he finally prompted, “What did you lose?”
She shrugged and stared down at her phone since his dark eyes were too observant, too penetrating. “I lost the dream. The hope. I lost the me I used to be. The one who loved him.”
Robert was silent when she finished. So silent she got nervous and looked over to see him staring at the road. He gave his lips a quick lick as if they were suddenly dry.
“Aren’t you going to say anything?” she demanded, self-conscious that she’d bared so much of her soul and he hadn’t even responded.
“I was thinking about what you said.”
“And what are your thoughts about it?”
“I’m not sure you’ll like my thoughts.”
“When has that ever stopped you? You say things I don’t like all the time. It never seemed to bother you before.”
He chuckled, his eyes warming and his posture relaxing. “That’s true, I suppose. The thing is, I wonder if the you that you used to be—the you who thought she loved him—was the real you.”
Her back stiffened. “I think I’m a better judge of who I really am than you are.”
“See, I told you that you wouldn’t like it.”
Momentarily torn between arguing with his obnoxiousness and getting more information, she ended up choosing the latter. “Why wouldn’t that be the real me?”
“Because I just can’t see you with him. Dave. He’s a decent guy. He really is. I have absolutely nothing against him except he’s kind of predictable, but that’s hardly a black mark on someone’s character. But he’s too soft for you. You’re too strong. He’d never challenge you, and you’d be bored and listless before the first year with him was up.”
It didn’t make sense, but she was more gratified by his assessment than offended by it. She’d never really thought about herself as particularly strong, but his words still rang true.
She could suddenly picture a life she might have had with Dave, and it would be boring. It wouldn’t excite her. She’d never feel stimulated—brought to life—the way she did right now.
She didn’t tell Robert any of that, of course. “I’m not sure if that’s right.”
“It is right. He’s not a bad guy, but he doesn’t make his own way. He goes with the flow. He’d go with your flow, and you’d end up turning him into the man you thought you wanted because you’re capable of doing that. But then you’d be bored to death with him. I still think he made the wrong choice, but it was probably the better choice for who he is. Stacey will always look to him to lead her, so he’ll have to step up. He’ll have to take some real initiative, which he never would have had to do with you. He’d never have stepped up with you because you’re not looking for a leader.”
“What am I looking for?” If she could have heard herself from a distance, she might have thought it was a strange and inappropriate question, but Amanda didn’t know how else to put it.
And Robert evidently understood. “A partner?” His tone lifted slightly at the end, making it into a question.
She nodded. “Yes. I guess that’s right.” After reflecting on that for a minute, she turned her head to give him a half-hearted scowl. “You’ve never been in relationships yourself, so how did you get so smart about things like that?”
He shrugged, looking like he was trying not to smile. “That’s what comes from spending decades watching from the sidelines but never getting involved.”
“I guess so. I suppose you keeping your distance can make you smart. But can it make you happy?”
He narrowed his eyes but didn’t look at her and didn’t answer.
“I’ve answered all your questions, even the invasive ones.”
“Yes,” he admitted. “You have. And the answer to your question is no. You can be safe. You can be fine. You can get through life and do okay. But you can’t really be happy if you keep your distance from everything and everyone.”
Her stomach twisted at the wry confession. “So maybe the you that you think you are—the you who always keeps his distance—isn’t the real you after all.”
“Now you’re pushing it, sunshine,” he muttered, a growl in his voice.
“It’s only fair for you to take what you dish out.” Then she giggled. “And also I don’t know how someone can make an endearment sound like a threat, but you sure have a knack for doing it.”
“You know exactly how it’s done. You have the best I’m-pretending-to-be-sweet-but-you’re-in-danger-of-being-murdered smile I’ve ever seen in my life.”
“That’s my pageant smile. I was in beauty pageants from six years old to thirteen. I know how to fake a smile.”
Robert shot her a surprised look. “You did beauty pageants when you were six years old?”
“Yeah, I did. Didn’t you know that?”
“Why would I know that?”
“I don’t know. I guess you wouldn’t. I’m just used to everyone knowing. Most of my friends have known me since school, so they lived through the whole ordeal with me. But yes, my mom put me in those terrible glitz pageants for kids. I got saddled with all the ridiculous trappings. Sparkly cupcake dresses. Big hair, tons of makeup, fake teeth. Everything.”
“Fake teeth?” Robert’s eyes were as wide as she’d ever seen them.
She was about to answer, pleased that she’d shaken him so completely even if it was only because of one of her childhood miseries. But just then a lot of things happened all at once.
There was a lot of traffic on the interstate today. Robert wasn’t going very fast—just over the speed limit—and he was mostly staying in the right lane, so she’d been relaxed despite the traffic.
But the line of cars passing them was going very fast. And a tractor trailer was beside them as the road took a deep curve down a hill. The truck couldn’t stay in its lane and veered over into the right lane. Right on top of Robert.
He slowed down and moved onto the shoulder in an attempt to avoid it, the rumble strips beside the road making the SUV shake. He also blew his horn to let the trucker know he was there.
But the truck had picked up too much speed and couldn’t pull out of the curve and back into its own lane. The shoulder wasn’t wide enough to give them somewhere to go, so the last thing Amanda processed clearly was that they were going to end up in the ditch.
“AMANDA.”
Amanda heard the voice. Was vaguely aware of it. But she was confused and disoriented and didn’t know where the sound was coming from.
“Amanda! Talk to me. Are you okay?” The voice was clearer now. Very close. Familiar. And it sounded so, so scared.
She tried to answer. She didn’t like for the voice to be so worried. She tried to say “I’m okay,” but it came out as a croak.
“Shit, sunshine. Are you hurt?” There were hands touching her now. They matched the urgency of the voice as they moved over her face and down to her shoulders and arms. “Talk to me. Please. Are you hurt?”
The voice and the hands were almost panicked now. It was enough to push the daze in her mind into focus.
“What happened?” she managed to ask.
“Oh, thank God,” the voice mumbled. “I was seriously about to lose my mind over here. Don’t do that to me again.”
“I’ll try not to. What happened?” She liked the sound of the voice now. Desperately relieved. But she was aware enough to realize she hadn’t gotten an answer.
“Damn truck ran us off the road, and the airbags came out.”
“Oh.” She blinked several
times, her vision clearing. She hadn’t been unconscious or anything. Just dazed and shaken up and confused. “That’s annoying.”
His laugh sounded kind of choked. “Yes. It really is.”
Robert. That was who it was. Robert was in the car beside her. She managed to turn her head to look at him. “Are you okay?”
“Yeah. Feels like I sprained a wrist from the steering wheel, but that’s it. Are you injured at all?”
It felt like her whole body hurt, but she could think more clearly now. It was just from being jarred. No one part felt more painful than the rest. “I don’t think so.”
She could see his face clearly now. She gasped when she saw the left side of his face was bloodied. “Your face! Robert. Oh no! You are hurt!” She reached out to touch his jaw.
“It’s just scratched up from the airbag,” he told her. “Nothing to worry about. I promise I’m not really hurt. Are you sure you’re all right?”
Amanda didn’t really know. It felt like the whole world had been rattled to the core and nothing was quite stable anymore. She wanted to cry. And throw up. And hit something. And then cry some more.
But she said the only thing left to be said in such situations. “I’m fine.”
IT WAS VERY LATE IN the evening when Robert got out of the shower in the bathroom of his hotel room in Hilton Head.
The day felt like it had lasted a thousand years.
He’d stayed in the hot shower for a long time, so the mirror was fogged up when he finally turned off the water. He opened the bathroom door to let cool air in as he finished drying himself off, and then he rubbed his hair with the towel to get as much of the moisture out as he could.
By the time he’d pulled on a pair of light cotton pajama pants, the mirror was cleared enough to see his reflection.
He barely recognized himself. And it wasn’t because of the shallow scratches on the left side of his face.
It had taken hours reporting the accident and getting checked out at the emergency room of the closest hospital. He wouldn’t have bothered at all for himself since he’d been sure his only injury besides minor bruises and scratches was a sprained wrist. But Amanda was really shook-up, and he wasn’t positive she didn’t have a concussion. Since he wasn’t going to take any risks with her, they’d gone after all and waited hour after frustrating hour until they were discharged with a clean bill of health.
