Do Over

by Serena Bell

  “Do you live in Revere Lake?” Cora asks me.

  “Not permanently. Gabe and I are staying with Jack until I can find another place in the city.”

  “Oh, yeah,” Lani says. “Jack told me that, right after you moved in. I ran into him hanging at O’Hannihans with Henry and Clark.”

  She’s talking about the night he stayed out crazy late, then told me he was hanging with the guys and playing darts. Not “the guys and a really hot black-haired woman named Lani.” Not that he’s required to report anything to me.

  That weird, hot feeling in the pit of my stomach—

  Pretty sure that’s jealousy.

  But fuck me, there’s no call for it. On the evening in question, Jack and I weren’t even sleeping together. We’d had those two lapses of reason, the one on his couch and the one in his mom’s kitchen, of course, but there was no interpretation under which we were together, even in the most rudimentary way.

  And even if she told me that he’d told her that last night while they were in bed together, I wouldn’t be within my rights to be jealous. Because I had no claim on Jack. We’d never said what we were doing was anything other than scratching an itch—an incredibly intense itch, to be fair, but an itch. We’d never even asked each other for exclusivity.

  Most important, I’ve known all along who Jack is. I’ve known there are probably twenty women like Lani in his life. And the whole reason I said I wanted a firm end date on sex with Jack was because of this exact scenario. These moments would never stop coming. There would be one Lani after another—women who could mean nothing to Jack, or something, or everything. I’d have no way of knowing. One time after another I’d feel this domino series of emotions—jealousy, shame, anger at myself for feeling any of this over a guy I made a promise to myself almost five years ago not to love.

  Death by a thousand cuts.

  And whether he’d actually slept with Lani—or whoever—wouldn’t even really matter. It was the fact that I believed he could have that would sink me.

  Because he’d cheated on me once before, and once a cheater…

  I could never live like this. With all the Lanis in the world just one casually uttered sentence away from breaking me.

  No, I’d been right to keep him at bay, and when that became impossible, to at least put an expiration stamp on him. That way I might walk away from this with my pride and a couple of friendships intact.

  “Maddie?”

  Sienna’s touching my sleeve.

  “Sorry,” I say. “I was…remembering something I forgot to tell Gabe’s sitter.”

  Lani tilts her head to one side. Boy, those green eyes can drill into a face. I think she might see right through me.

  “So, how’s the search for a new place going?” Cora asks.

  I tell them the whole story of my apartment travails, ending with the fact that the landlord from the Ballard place I’d wanted hadn’t returned any of my five calls. I also told them I’d seen a few more places yesterday.

  I don’t say that I’d seen a place that wasn’t too terrible but hadn’t quite been able to make myself put in an application for. Because every time I tried to fill it out, I thought about how if it were accepted, it would mean never having sex with Jack again. Never feeling his mouth on mine, on my body, never putting mine on his, never feeling him inside me. That it would mean no more teasing, no joking, no talking dirty, no significant looks over Gabe’s head. I wasn’t quite ready, yesterday, to sign on the dotted line and give it all up.

  “What’s the story with your old apartment?” Sienna asks. “Jack hinted there was some drama.”

  I freeze.

  “Bad story?” Lani asks, her eyes wise. I get the feeling she’s got some bad stories of her own.

  “Yeah, you could say that.”

  “Oh, damn, sorry—should have kept my mouth shut.” Sienna wrinkles her face. “Don’t feel like you have to tell us.”

  Cora and Lani are leaning on the table, faces sympathetic. And I think it’s because they’re not pushing me to spill that I tell them what happened.

  “Je-sus,” Lani says, when I’m done. “I hope you kicked him in the balls.”

  Sienna pushes her drink one way, then the other. “I didn’t—Wow, Maddie.” When she raises her eyes to mine, they’re full of apology, but I shake my head. She hadn’t made me tell. I’d wanted to.

  “I walked in on my boyfriend and a guy,” Cora says.

  I stare at her.

  “Shit, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean that in a one-up way.”

  I shake my head. “Not taken that way. I think getting cheated on is more a misery-loves-company thing.”

  “Tell her what happened,” Lani commands.

  Cora looks from her to Sienna, who nods.

  “I came home from a book club and my boyfriend was on his knees in our living room, blowing the guy. I don’t think he even saw me. The guy did, though. His eyes were huge. And then I just walked out. Lani and Sienna went back and picked up my stuff for me.”

  She beams at them, and Sienna touches her hand. “Damn straight we did.”

  It makes me smile.

  “Sometimes when I tell that story, people are like, ‘It’s so great that he figured out who he really is,’ ” Cora says. “And sure, of course I’m glad he’s out of the closet now. But cheating is cheating, you know? I bet he cheated on that blow-job guy, too…Once a cheater, always a cheater.”

  I think I flinch. I look up to find Sienna watching me. She looks away before I can.

  “Ain’t that the truth,” Lani says. She turns to me. “Let us know if we can help with the apartment hunt.” Then, in an echo of Sienna’s gesture to Cora, she touches my hand. Just a brush, the barest gesture of support, but I feel about thirty seconds away from tears.

  I like her. I like all of them. I’d like them to be my friends.

  I don’t want to be jealous of the women in my life. I don’t want to see each of them as a potential competitor, to wonder if someday I’ll walk in to find one of them on her knees in my living room.

  I can’t be with a guy I can’t trust.

  I need to move out of Jack’s house. Like, yesterday.

  Chapter 28

  We drop off Lani, then Cora. Sienna and I are left in the car alone as she turns toward Jack’s house. Stripes of light from the streetlights carve across our faces and laps. She’s taking the back route, off the main drag.

  “Thank you again for including me. I had a great time. I loved the musical. But I also really loved your friends.”

  Both had hugged me tight as we said goodbye, and Lani had said, “Let’s hang out again soon, okay?”

  “I could tell they loved you, too,” Sienna says lightly, but it doesn’t feel light. It feels like a lot of bounty, something big to be grateful for. I’ll never be glad for what Harris and Mia did, but I bet someday I’ll look back at it as one of my life’s best reminders that spring always comes after winter.

  “Maddie?”

  Sienna’s tone is serious, and without knowing exactly what she’s about to say, I feel myself hunkering down.

  “I know it’s none of my business…”

  I clear my throat.

  “And I know that’s what people say when it’s really none of their business…”

  I’m quiet, unwilling to let her off the hook, but not quite ready to shut her down, either.

  “What’s going on with you and my brother?”

  I think about saying, nothing, but can’t, not quite. It’s too big of a lie.

  “It’s just…” Sienna continues. “I see the way he looks at you. I’ve never seen him look that way at anyone. And I saw your face when Lani was talking about him. Maddie, you’ve got to know there’s nothing between them.”

  “Nothing?” I challenge.

  Sienna sighs. “I mean, they’ve gone a round or two. Or, I don’t know, twenty.”

  My gut goes sours with jealousy. And Sienna takes her eyes off the road at that exact
moment and catches the expression on my face.

  “My point,” she says quietly. “But, Maddie, it’s just convenience sex with them. They’d both tell you that straight out if you asked.”

  I hunch my shoulders. Maybe it’s the words convenience sex, which I know she means to make me feel better, but—

  How different is that from what he’s doing with me? I mean, how much more convenient does it get than having your fuck buddy live in your house?

  “I probably—I don’t think I should be talking about this with you.” She puts a gentle hand on my arm. “I like to think I know my brother better than anyone. I like to think I understand what he’s gone through and what matters to him. And—you can’t tell him I told you this, Maddie.”

  For a split second I’m sure she’s going to say, He’s never going to be the guy you want him to be.

  Instead, she says, “I think he’s in love with you.”

  Something inside me, rusty with disuse, tries to grind to life. And that little flare of hope scares me so much that I declare, “It’s lust.”

  I say it so flatly that it comes out harsh, so I try to soften it: “It’s crazy-good sex—”

  She puts a hand to her temple like she’s blocking me out.

  “Sorry. But you asked!”

  “I did. Which I might live to regret. But I can’t watch two people I care about—three, counting Gabe—dance around each other and go spinning off in different directions. So I will put on the big-girl pants and let you talk to me about my brother’s sex life. ‘Crazy-good sex.’ ” She winces, visibly. “And so you think it’s just lust.”

  “I know it is. It’s—” It’s almost painful to say it, but I do. “Just ‘convenience sex.’ ”

  “For you?”

  “For both of us. It’ll burn itself out, like last time.”

  She turns onto Jack’s street. Pulls up in front of his house. Parks the car and half turns in her seat to look at me. Her gaze is sharp, knowing. “Last time?”

  “None of your business,” I mutter. I reach for the car door.

  “It isn’t. I get that.” Her voice is gentle.

  I pull my hand back. And sit there, staring straight through the windshield, seeing nothing.

  “What happened?” she asks quietly.

  —

  My period was five days late, and I peed on a stick and a small pink plus sign appeared. It was that simple. There was no denial, no days of delay while I lied to myself about why I was so nauseous or tired or my breasts were swollen or I was peeing all the time. I stared at the white plastic stick numbly for a few minutes, and then went and lay down on my bed and fell asleep. Not because I was so tired, but because I couldn’t face reality. Not yet.

  I was going back to school in two days, and that was bad enough. It was bad because I was in love with Jack Parker and I hadn’t found a way to tell him. And I was pretty sure that even if I did tell him, it wouldn’t matter. Two nights before I took the pregnancy test, after he turned my world upside down for the umpteenth time, while I was still lying next to him trying to recover my breath and my equilibrium, while I was thinking, This. This is how it’s supposed to be, he’d said, “I am going to miss this after you’re gone.”

  Not, “I’m going to miss you so much.”

  Not, “I’m going to miss this until I get a free weekend and can drive down to Eugene so we can do it again.”

  Not even, “I’m going to miss this until you get home to visit and we can knock boots like old times.”

  Just, “I’m going to miss this after you’re gone.”

  So even before the stick showed me its little pink secret, it was going to be one of the hardest things I’d ever had to do, telling Jack the truth. Going to him and saying, “For me, this isn’t just sex. This is about feeling like when I’m with you, I’m completely safe and happy and exactly where I’m supposed to be. It’s about feeling like we fit together. Like I see the best in you and you see the best in me. Like being together makes us both better people than we could ever be alone.”

  But I was going to do it. I was going to say it because I couldn’t imagine having to live with not saying it. With never knowing if he felt the same way.

  Once the stick betrayed me, though, it became a whole different truth I was going to have to tell. And I knew exactly how Jack Parker felt about fatherhood because he’d told me, after we’d run into a high school friend of his who was about to become a father.

  “That poor fucker,” he’d said, after the guy left.

  “He seems happy about it,” I hazarded. He’d been talking about shopping for a stroller with the same passion other guys talked about cars.

  “He’s too young.”

  “And that’s what bothers you?”

  “I just don’t see him—he’s not ready to give this up.”

  He indicated O’Hannihans around us, the sex-drenched scene, seeming to encompass me, even us, in his gesture.

  “Are you sure you’re not just projecting?” I teased.

  “Yeah, well, that,” he said, grinning at me.

  “So—no fatherhood in your future plans?”

  I asked it as casually as I could.

  “Might be for some guys, but it’s not for me. Not the way I was raised, not with my dad. Just seems like shitty odds I’d be any better at it than he was.”

  I’d left it at that. If I felt a twinge of grief, I shrugged it off because, after all, there wasn’t anything at stake.

  And now here I was, on my way to his apartment with information he didn’t want, poised to shit all over his happy bachelor life, and without even any assurance from him that I was worth the five-hour drive to Eugene, Oregon, let alone a life sacrifice of epic proportions.

  But I was doing it. I was going.

  I parked my car in one of the visitor spaces and looked up at the balcony that contained his door. I was gathering my courage and still trying to figure out how to get it all out in an order that made sense. Would I tell him first how I felt about him, and then present the fact that I was pregnant? Or should I lead with the big news? Maybe this seems incredibly obvious to you, but even now, five years later, I don’t really know the answer. Either way, it felt like an ambush.

  As I hesitated, the door to Jack’s apartment opened and someone stepped out. It was a woman. I didn’t recognize her. She had shoulder-length glossy blond hair and wore a short, emerald-green A-line dress. She was made up in a showy but not cheap way, and she was carrying something in one hand.

  I observed all these details dispassionately, one at a time, just the way I’ve reported them.

  Despite the glossiness of her hair, a bit of it had gone askew and was clinging, staticky, to her cheek. The makeup under one eye bore a smudge.

  The item in her hand was her high-heeled sandals. And something else.

  She came down the steps along the side of the building and crossed not too far from to my car. Close enough that I could see what the other thing was that she held in her hand.

  It was her bra, balled up but not fully contained by her fist. I could see one strap with its unmistakable metal slides, and a bit of emerald lace.

  My breath stopped for a moment. I think my heart might have paused, as if it, too, were waiting to see what would happen next. And then the world and all the implications of what I’d just seen rushed in like water into a collapsing levee, and I almost choked on it.

  I took a breath—shallow but sufficient—and shored up the levee with all the emotional sandbags I had at my disposal.

  Then I started my car and pulled out of my parking spot.

  Chapter 29

  “So, that was it? You just drove away?”

  Sienna sounds angry.

  “I wanted to,” I admit. “I never wanted to talk to him again, let alone have the conversation I needed to have with him. But I couldn’t do it. The same thing that made me go there in the first place, knowing I wouldn’t be able to live with myself if I didn’t give him a ch
ance to—”

  I couldn’t quite finish. I couldn’t quite name what it was I’d wanted Jack to do. Claim me. Claim us.

  Even that afternoon, Gabe was there with me. I didn’t know his name yet. I hadn’t felt the softness of his skin or the clutch of his little mouth at my breast, I hadn’t giggled at his twisted syntax or cried because his case of the stomach flu hurt me, but he was already on board and part of how I thought of myself and my life. And even if I could have walked away from Jack and the sight of that scrap of emerald lace betrayal, I couldn’t deprive Jack and Gabe of each other without at least trying.

  “I made it as far as the street and then I pulled back into the parking lot and got out of my car. I went upstairs and knocked on the door. He opened it. I was trying not to cry, and I guess that and my body language told him what he needed to know. He said, ‘You—saw her—leaving?’

  “I nodded. And then I said, ‘Look, Jack, you don’t owe me anything. We didn’t promise each other anything. But I should tell you. I’m pregnant.”

  “He said, ‘Shit.’ ”

  It still felt like a body blow. I might have even winced in the retelling.

  “That’s what he said?” Sienna screeches. “Oh, that—” She throws her arms up. “Jesus, Jack.”

  “So I said, ‘I get that this isn’t in your plans. I get that fatherhood isn’t your thing.’

  “ ‘If you didn’t believe me about that before, you should now,’ he said.

  “I was having trouble talking by that point. I just wanted to get out of there. I said, ‘I just want you to know, I’m going to have the baby. And if you want—you’re welcome to be involved if you want. To whatever extent.’ ”

  I have to pause to steady my breath. “He shrugged.”

  Sienna closes her eyes.

  “He said he’d give it some thought. Those were his exact words. ‘I’ll give it some thought.’ ”

  It’s so quiet I can hear both of us breathing, my breath ragged from emotion.

  “But—” Sienna opens her eyes. “You didn’t tell him you were in love with him. You didn’t tell him all those things about how you fit together and made each other better people—you didn’t say any of that.”