by Serena Bell
I laugh like he’s joking, although I’m not a hundred percent sure he is.
Also, it’s not the worst idea I’ve ever heard.
23
Brody
It takes a while for me to get Justin settled in the portacrib, but once he’s down, I text Rachel. Come over? I give her the address.
While I’m waiting for her, I tie flies, sitting on the couch in front of my coffee table. Beads, cord, feathers, yarn, hooks, spread out in front of me, my mind blissfully empty, as it often is when I tie.
This is my meditation, right here. One beaded nymph after another, while the sedges and midges I’ve already finished form small, neat, satisfying piles.
Tying flies also brings my father back to me, because fly fishing was something I usually did alone with him. Gabe never loved fishing the way I did. He liked hunting better. So when my dad and I went together, there was no Gabe to upstage or one-up me. There was just the river, the line, the fly, the fish—and me and my dad.
Wrap, wrap, wrap, wrap.
Rap, rap, rap.
When I open the door, she’s standing there, absolutely beautiful with her hair down and her I’m here if it’s no trouble smile. I want to pull her into my arms and make love to her all night. Fuck telling her this story. Fuck everything except the way she makes me feel. Instead, I hold the door open, and she steps inside.
She looks around my apartment, and smiles. “This is very you.”
My eyes follow hers, trying to see what she sees. I keep it simple: a comfortable couch, an equally comfortable recliner, a flat screen TV, a coffee table.
She steps to the wall, looking at the framed posters hanging there. One for A River Runs Through It, the 1992 movie that my dad made me watch as a kid for the fly fishing. If she’s ever seen it, it’s probably because someone told her Brad Pitt was hot in it.
She stops in front of my three national parks posters, side by side—Yellowstone, Zion, and Olympic National Park. “These are beautiful. My parents aren’t much for the outdoors, so I haven’t been to many parks.”
“We’ll have to fix that,” I say, before I can think better of it. Because who knows if Rachel and I will ever hang out together again once her visit home is over.
One of my hands closes into a fist.
“I’d like that,” she says, shyly, and I can’t decide if that makes it better or worse.
Just more confusing, maybe.
She runs her hands across the spines of the few books on my small shelf. Mostly mysteries and thrillers. “Loved this one,” she says, pointing to Tana French’s In the Woods.
“Me too.”
“I didn’t know you liked to read.”
“I’m slow,” I admit. “But I don’t mind when it’s not for school. When no one’s riding my ass about it.” I shrug. “Fly fishing’s slow, too. I like slow.”
She smiles in a way that makes me picture kissing her, leisurely and languid, while I move in her. Maybe she’s picturing it, too, because her cheeks pink up.
But before I can take a step towards her, she says, “Justin’s so cute.”
Right. We have things to talk about.
I offer her a seat on my couch and a cold beer. She settles on the couch but says she just wants water—“I drank way too much beer already today.”
We sit for a moment in awkward silence. And there’s no good segue, so I just jam the throttle: “Rachel. He’s not mine.”
Her mouth falls open.
“That’s why I said not to believe everything you hear.”
“But—you were—going to marry his mother?”
“I thought he was mine. I had no clue he wasn’t. God. I don’t know where to start.”
“Start at the beginning.”
That makes me laugh. She makes it sound so goddamn easy, but what is the beginning?
The night I hooked up with Zoë for the first time? The night the condom—from her stash—broke before I’d filled it? The day she told me she was pregnant and it was mine? Or the day Connor told me he’d seen her with someone else?
None of those, actually. The beginning of the end was the day I looked down into my son’s eyes and saw the truth.
“When Zoë told me she was pregnant, I was totally freaked out. But once I got used to the idea, I didn’t hate it. And I started manning up. I registered for a program to get my GED. I buckled down and started turning things around, doing more around the office, taking the business more seriously. I vowed not to fuck up with Gabe anymore. So I could be a good dad and a good husband. And then…”
I stop. My stomach flips, just like it did that day.
“I was in the middle of the fucking GED course. We were doing the genetics unit. The part where they use eye color to explain how genes are recessive or dominant, you know?
“I went home and I picked him up. He dangled there, kicking his little feet and grinning at me. And his eyes were brown.
“I mean, they’d been basically brown since he was born. Kind of a muddy color. Everyone kept saying they’d get lighter, but they didn’t. They were getting browner.”
She stares at me.
“Zoë has green eyes. I have green eyes.” I cross my arms. “And there it was, right in front of me. Justin’s eyes should be either green or blue.”
“Brody, I—”
“I asked Zoë about it. She probably could have bullshitted me. I think I wanted to be bullshitted. But I think she needed it off her chest. I think the lie was killing her. And she just kind of folded. Confessed everything. Two-timing both me and Len, getting pregnant, figuring out it had to be him. He’s married—to someone else—so the path of least resistance for her was to keep the whole thing with Len a secret, let me believe I was Justin’s dad, and put my name on his birth certificate.”
“Oh, Brody.” Her eyes are so tender. “I can’t even…”
I wish she’d stop looking at me like that, because it’s making me feel all the things I haven’t let myself feel, except in the smallest fits and starts.
“I got a DNA test, and, yeah, he’s not mine. So I left. Moved out. Quit the GED course. Starting missing work again, calling in sick, bailing out on charters, like nothing had changed. Like Justin had never been—”
I cut myself off before my voice can break.
“Brody.”
I wave her off. “It’s okay, Rachel.”
She shakes her head. “It’s not okay.”
“But what am I supposed to do about it?” I ask, with a bitter laugh. “I have to let it go.”
“It’s so unfair.” Outrage tightens her voice. “You were trying so hard to be a better person, and you got punished for it.”
“Yeah, well, that’s how it goes sometimes.”
She looks away, staring at the River Runs Through It poster blankly. Then turns back.
“Connor knows?”
I nod. “He’s the only one who knows the whole story. Connor’s always had faith in me, even when pretty much no one else did. From the minute I dropped out he tried to convince me to get my GED. He was convinced if I did, I could join him at college. He tried so hard to talk me into it. I kept telling him I didn’t have what it took, and he kept telling me I was full of it.”
“And with your dad gone and your mom so sick when you were in high school, it probably felt like no one at home cared.”
“Gabe was taking care of my mom and trying to save the business. And I was the fuckup who made it harder on both of them. I can’t tell you how many times one of them had to bail me out of my own shit.”
Her face darkens. “You were a hurting fourteen-year-old boy. What teenager who’d just lost his dad wouldn’t be a mess?”
She says it so vehemently, I almost believe it. But then I remember my dad asking Gabe to run the business and take care of the family. Gabe asking Clark to run the business if he had to move to Boston.
Zoë saying she and Justin would be better off with Len after he left his wife because he was a hardworking guy with
a real job.
“I get it,” Rachel says quietly. “Why you value your friendship with Connor so much. If he’s the one guy who’s ever seen you for the man you really are.”
It feels like she’s smacked me in the middle of the chest. In a good way, but also—it hurts.
“And I understand if you don’t feel like you can, um, do this,” she says. She makes a gesture that loops in both of us. “I haven’t been fair, asking you to go behind Connor’s back and risk that friendship.”
I watch her quietly. The way her eyes take me in. Seeing me.
The man you really are.
I have to close my eyes for a second. When I open them again, she’s still looking at me. And I make a decision.
I cross my arms. “Being with you does put my friendship with Connor at risk.”
Her shoulders slump. She straightens right away, but I see it. And that gives me even more courage. She wants this, too.
“But to loosely quote an amazing woman I know—” I reach behind her and gently tug the elastic out of her hair so I can thread my fingers through it— “I don’t fucking care.”
I lean in and kiss her.
24
Rachel
When Amanda first sends out the invitations for girls’ night, it’s at her house, but at the last minute she emails everyone—including me—to change the venue to Rush Creek Bakery. No explanation. I mean, not that she needs one. Nan’s baked goods have been a Rush Creek treat since before I was born. I’m not surprised when she pulls a tray of hot chocolate chip cookies out of the oven just for us.
But once the vibrators have made their appearance and we’re passing them around, Amanda explains herself.
“You guys know from the e-vite that it was originally supposed to be at my house?”
Lots of nods. Hanna’s here, and Lucy, along with a passel of Amanda’s other friends, mostly youngish moms who keep making not-exactly-jokes about how long it’s been since they had sex and how unlikely it is that that will change any time soon.
“Two days ago, I found out Heath had to work late. And I just kept picturing one of the kids waking up or not being able to sleep and running down the stairs and popping into the living room while there were toys spread out everywhere. And how would I explain this?”
She holds up one of the most popular toys, a rabbit vibrator. This is the original—like the one Miranda famously hips Charlotte to on Sex and the City. On this model, the part that juts out to provide clitoral stimulation looks like an actual bunny, even though the more modern rabbit designs only vaguely hint at floppy ears and hopping.
Amanda brandishes the rabbit. “One of the kids would totally grab it and be like, Mommy! It’s a bunny! How does it work? Oh, look, it’s a vibrating bunny! Can I take it to school for show and tell? Is it a kid toy? It has beads inside!” She bounces up and down, mimicking kid excitement, then drops abruptly back to adult tones. “I was like, no way we’re doing this at my house.”
Laughter bounces around the circle, and the moms all echo their fervent agreement. And then the stories start to fly.
“I’ve got one for you. My fifteen-year-old, who has gotten very self-sufficient lately and doesn’t usually want anything to do with me, came into the bedroom about a month ago when I was reading in bed, threw himself down on the floor next to the bed and started chatting with me about life, school, and everything. And then after we’ve been talking for a few minutes, he gets this weird look on his face, reaches under the bed, surfaces with my Magic Wand in hand, and says, ‘What’s this?’ And instead of being all cool and saying, ‘Oh, that’s a muscle massager,’ or using it as an opportunity to talk about masturbation and toys, I freak out and yell, ‘Put that down!’ He drops it like a hot potato. And obviously, that was the last mother-son bonding time we’ve had since. I’m still mad at myself.”
Murmurs of sympathy.
“Yeah, so, under the bed? Not the best hiding place.”
“Have to agree with that—my We-Vibe charging cable got mangled in the vacuum. While it was being run under the bed by our cleaning service. I came home to find it on my bed: vibe, mangled cord, apology note.”
“Did they come back? The cleaning crew?”
“Yeah. And I’ve never been able to be home when they have, since. I can’t face them.”
Laughter.
“Have you ever been walked in on?”
A moment of silence, and then a burst of simultaneous starts:
“Oh, my God, I have to tell you—”
“Oh, it was the worst, the worst!”
Amanda’s friend Susie:
“We were doing it in the bathroom because the door locks, except we were so sleep deprived that my wife unlocked the door instead of locking it, and my three-year-old walked in.”
Peals of laughter.
Kiona: “We were in bed in the dark, and I started to get that ‘you’re being watched’ feeling and I realized my four-year-old was standing by the side of the bed. Literally no idea how long he’d been there.”
Groans of dismay.
Jem: “They’re all going to end up in the therapy for all the ways we messed them up anyway, right?”
Whole-hearted agreement.
“What about you, Amanda, any horror stories?”
For whatever reason, my eyes happen to be on Amanda’s face when the question gets asked, so I can see her expression change. It goes studiously blank, a blankness I recognize because I saw a version of it on Brody’s face the other day when the subject of Justin came up. It’s Wilder for, “There be dragons.”
Then she smiles, an easy, practiced social smile. “You’d have to actually have sex to get walked in on, wouldn’t you? Double income, two workaholics, three kids under ten, you do the math,” Amanda says, with a shrug.
She gets more laughter and a round of amens, and the “easy” smile stays on her face, but she’s not fooling me.
And she’s not fooling Lucy, who’s watching her friend and frowning.
Huh, I think. And Amanda’s life seems so perfect.
Perfect.
There’s that word again.
25
Brody
“Hey.”
Gabe stands a few feet away from the trailered small boat, leaning against a tree, his dog Buck at his side. I’ve just finished checking the plugs and fuel filter. It’s deja vu from our fight over the reviews.
He climbs up beside me. “You want some help?”
Startled, I say, “Sure.”
That’s how Gabe and I come to be working side by side, me quietly checking the fuses and wiring while he hooks up the trickle charger. Buck noses around the inside of the boat, hopping down from time to time, then back up again.
I catch myself humming. Humming!
I’m not a guy who hums when he works.
Or ever.
But I’m in such a good mood.
Getting some will do that to a guy, I tell myself, but I know it’s more than that. First of all, Rachel and I still haven’t officially had the kind of sex that involves me burying myself balls deep in her—
Gah.
But we have been spending a lot of time together the last week and a half, since the night when I told her what happened with Zoë and Justin. We’ve done a couple of parties, but we’ve also spent time talking and kissing and making each other feel really, really good. Telling her about Justin changed things between us. Some of it was the relief of telling someone. Anyone. But some of it was how carefully she listened. And what she said afterwards.
I get it. Why you value your friendship with Connor so much. If he’s the one guy who’s ever seen you for the man you really are.
Gabe clears his throat, drawing my eyes up from where I’m working. “I just wanted to say I appreciate the money you’ve been bringing in.”
I try not to keel over from sheer shock. Even when I was trying to turn over a new leaf with Gabe, when Zoë was first pregnant with Justin, he never outright praised me.
>
I almost tell him that, but then I think better of it. “Thanks.”
“Can I ask a question?”
My normal response: You’re going to do it anyway, so is there really any point to your asking me?
But today I say, “Sure.”
Gabe’s eyebrows go up. He wasn’t expecting that. He was expecting the usual snark from me.
“All the money coming in from you. That’s not all Real Romance parties, is it?”
It’s not really a question.
I never told Gabe about my plan, and I never updated Lucy on where it stood.
“No,” I say. “Not all Real Romance.”
I tell him about the new parties with my game store, book store, and spa partners. I explain that I started doing the sessions… and they’ve been working. The partners and I are making money. The clients—mostly women, but sometimes also couples—love them.
And best of all, I’ve been upselling the other trips at the end of each session, and getting signups.
Gabe nods. “I wondered where the random new signups were coming from. There were a bunch we couldn’t account for from any other funnel.”
I nod.
“I need you to keep me in the loop,” Gabe says in his boss/dad/asshole voice.
Two weeks ago, that would have sent me to the moon on a rage-rocket. But for whatever reason, today, I get it.
I’ve been a pain in Gabe’s ass. As a kid, I made him pick me up, staggering drunk or stoned out of my mind, from parties all over the Five Rivers region. He had to phone in my fake school excuses, show up at the principal’s office to pick me up for suspensions. He called my employers to beg them to give me back jobs I’d done everything I could to lose. He bailed me out of the drunk tank, cleaned me up after fights, gave me work when I couldn’t—or really, more accurately, wouldn’t—hold down another job.
And when he did, I rewarded him by bucking his authority, snarking at him, and generally giving him shit.
