by Hazel Parker
I slipped out the door to the sounds of his half-hearted protests. I moved quickly down the hall and onto the elevator. Tears threatened to break through as the look of distress in Jack’s eyes flashed in front of me again. I swiped at the errant tear that fell. I just needed to make it back to my car. Back to my life where I could keep pretending that everything was all right.
*****
I rolled over and stared at the clock. 2:53. It had been less than 12 hours since I left Jack’s hotel suite. I groaned and flopped onto my back again. I would have to get up in a few short hours and try to keep it all together. And really, what would be different? Life would be the same as it usually was. Except that my son would never know his father. Except that Jack would never be in my life again. Except I would have to face the truth that for three years I had been telling Meg that I didn’t care if that happened, when deep inside I was hopeful that it one day would.
I could still feel the empty ache he left inside me. I squeezed my thighs together, slowing the burn. Today had given me one more memory to add to my collection, but it didn’t seem like enough anymore. Seeing Jack had dredged up a lot of other memories for me—the intense draw of me to him, the easy conversation, parts of our lives that we had once shared. And the passion we bore burned a lot clearer in my mind now too. It was easy to see why I had loved him.
Despite all that, what I couldn’t get past was the fallout from Jack finding out about Will. Prepping myself to go see him, I didn’t know what to expect, but I guess it was more than what he gave me. I didn’t disillusion myself by thinking he would fall to his knees and weep with joy, but I thought he would maybe have the means of forming a full sentence at least. It hurt, knowing now that the man I had held in such high regard was no better than anyone else. I had loved him. Respected him. I had him on a pedestal thinking I was admiring him, but instead I just made it so that it hurt a lot more watching him fall.
I guess hearing that your mistress had your baby would floor most people. Because when it came down to it, that’s all I was. In my own head our relationship may have been more than that, but today I learned that the reality was that I was nothing more than a fling. And up until I told him the truth, he had treated me exactly like that. Like nothing had changed. He was my boss and I was his hidden love affair. He offered me a job, even. Back to my position as his official bed warmer, I guess.
I tossed on the bed and remembered how much I had loved what we had. It felt good to be with him, and it felt like I had found a lifelong partner. I guess it was just a misconception that if he would have stuck around, we would have made a real go of things. I was such a fool to sacrifice so much for his benefit. I was such a fool to pretend for so long that I was happy with how things were. The hurt of that stung my eyes and I cursed myself for being so stupid.
And now, in the aftermath, I had to carry on. I had been doing a good job of leading a new, semi-fulfilling life without him, creating all kinds of ideas of being a great martyr. Now I had to face the idea that maybe he was just another man who liked sleeping with a woman who liked letting him be in control.
I snuggled deeper into the bed, willing myself to fall asleep so I wouldn’t have to think about Jack Lawson anymore.
*****
Morning came, despite sleep eluding me. At some point during the night, just before the sun dusted my room in light, my disappointment and guilt turned to anger, making it impossible to get my thoughts to settle down. I may have made a mistake sleeping with Jack and not telling him about Will, but Jack had no right to make me feel bad about my decisions and my life. Will was my life and I had learned to be happy, and he had no right to take that away from me.
I hit the alarm, rolled out of bed, and got ready for work in a dull haze. I dropped Will off at daycare a few minutes early, giving me some time to walk to the coffee shop down the street from work. The coffee we made at Vinny’s only looked like coffee, but it tasted like dirty dish water. That wasn’t going to cut it today.
I sipped the strong, hot coffee as I walked at a slow pace down the block. It was quiet, and a little cool this morning. I used that to gain a bit of clarity when everything seemed murky at the moment. Arriving at the front door of the restaurant, I paused outside to finish my drink, not quite ready to face the noise and chaos within.
When I could no longer put it off, I walked through the door to the sound of the bell jingling. Grabbing my apron from a hook in the back I passed by the kitchen. From beyond, Vinny yelled out,
“You’re five minutes late. And you got a customer waiting.”
I rolled my eyes, knowing that to Vinny, being five minutes early is the equivalent of being five minutes late. I finished tying the apron strings and grabbed a couple of menus. Looking over to my section of the floor ,I spotted the lone customer sitting with his back to me in a booth. Jack. My heart raced in my chest and adrenalin pumped through me. I didn’t expect to see him any time soon. If ever I was to experience a fight or flight response, it was now.
My head was telling me to run, that nothing good would come from a confrontation. But my body, fueled by my renewed anger, was drawn down the aisle towards him. Each step felt heavy, like I was walking towards disaster. By the time I reached his table, I was already too nervous and angry and damn near ready to explode. I slammed the menu down on the table, satisfied when Jack startled. He looked up at me, eyes rimmed red. If his face was showing that much stress, I didn’t want to know what mine showed.
“What do you need, Jack?” I bit out.
“You left yesterday before we had a chance to talk.” His voice was irritatingly calm.
“I’m working. And I already said everything I needed to yesterday.”
“Don’t you think you owe me more than that?”
“That’s just the point. I don’t owe you anything, and vice versa. I simply came to your hotel to give you some information I thought you needed, which I did. Besides, if you wanted to discuss anything further, you could have done it then, instead of standing there like a zombie.”
“Can you blame me?” He looked at my through sad eyes. The unwavering politician in him was nowhere to be found.
I didn’t answer. I couldn’t let him hear the guilt that was sure to come through. My pride was far too wounded to give any more of myself away.
“Can’t you take a break or something?” he pleaded. “I would really like to talk to you. I need to.”
His voice was still quiet, so reasonable and calm, making it hard for me to be angry.
“I just came on shift; I can’t take a break now.” I looked around the restaurant. There was no one else in my section, and only an elderly couple in the section on the other side. I conceded.
“It’s slow. I can probably sit for a minute.” I sat and he gave me a wary smile. It was sad, and it made that guilt eat at me all the more. My anger was fading fast. “What do you want to know?”
“Did you know you were pregnant before I left?” His question was immediate, rapid fire, like it had been on his lips the whole time.
“No. I found out a couple of weeks after.”
“But you didn’t you tell me?”
“No.”
“Why?”
“Because I didn’t think you would have wanted to know.”
He screwed up his face. “How could you think that? I made him too. He’s part of me too. More importantly, he’s part of us.”
“But there was no us. I didn’t want to become your responsibility. I thought we would hold you back.”
“You don’t get to choose that for me. Maybe I wanted to be there. Maybe I wanted there to be an us.”
I searched his eyes and I saw the hurt. The hurt I had put there.
“But you left,” I said softly.
Jack rested his elbows on the table and ran his hand through his hair. He let a moment pass, considering the scarred tabletop. When he looked back to me, his eyes were full of regret.
“Leaving you was hard, Marie. But when the
opportunity to move up came along, I took it without thinking you wouldn’t want to come with me. Then when I couldn’t convince you to come, I realized I had no right to ask. I had no claim to you.”
“And I didn’t have one to you. We weren’t even dating, not really anyways. We had to hide our relationship from everyone. How was I supposed to justify moving for you when for all I knew I was just a fling? I would have been a fool.”
His mouth smiled, but his eyes didn’t. “Life has a way of kicking you in the ass, doesn’t it? Maybe if I would have stuck around a little while longer, one of us would have worked up the courage to admit what we felt. Things could have been a lot different for us. But as it turned out, I didn’t and then you cut off all contact with me. I guess now I know why.”
“I didn’t want to force you into my life, so I guess I forced you out instead.”
“When you came to my room yesterday, I was excited that you wanted to see me again. That I was going to have a chance to get to know you again. Then when I put the pieces together that you had a baby, my baby, I panicked. You have to know that my reaction was only because I was surprised. I can’t even tell you everything that ran through may head.”
“Dread?”
“Yeah, a little of that. But a lot more than that too.” He studied me for a minute before asking, “Was it just your obligation to tell me because I was back? Would you have ever told me even if I hadn’t?”
I picked at the worn edges of the menu sitting between us. The emotions he was dredging up were raw and I wasn’t sure if I was ready to expose them, but I owed it to him to try. My voice came out in barely a whisper. “I don’t think so. I didn’t tell you because I had loved you. That hadn’t changed. But when I was faced with the idea of being close to you again, it wasn’t just an obligation to tell you. I didn’t feel right to keep him from you anymore. I realized how unfair that was to you.”
Jack just nodded and turned his head away to look out the window. His expression was blank, his eyes unseeing. I wasn’t sure if he would ever be able to forgive me for that decision, but even if he held it against me for the rest of my life, I couldn’t blame him.
The restaurant was starting to fill up, the breakfast crowd bustling noisily around us, but I couldn’t bring myself to leave this table. Finally, Jack turned back to me.
“Who does he look like?”
“You,” I smiled. “He looks just like you.” I pulled out my phone and found a good picture. I held it out to him and Jack took it from me, hesitant. When he looked at the screen, though, the corner of his lips pulled up into a small smile.
“Does he know about me?” he asked, still looking at the picture.
“No.”
Jack glanced up at me, pain in his eyes. But then he nodded and looked back to the phone, thumbing through more of them. After a moment, he sat back against the red, vinyl booth and looked at me.
“So what now? Can I meet him?”
“Of course. You’re his dad; you can see him whenever you want.”
“I’m his dad,” Jack repeated with a shake of his head. “That’s going to take some getting used to. And us?”
“What about us?”
“Let’s not beat around the bush. We already established that we wanted more from our relationship before it ended. I think we proved yesterday that things still work between us. Plus, you’ve already admitted that you love me.”
“For the record, I said I had loved you. Past tense.”
“Same thing.” He waved his hand dismissively in the air. “And furthermore, I can’t see you every day and think only pure thoughts. It’ll drive me mad. If we’re in each other’s lives, it’s going to have to be full time.”
“Don’t you think that’s a little extreme? We haven’t seen each other in three years. You can’t just storm around and make a decision like that.”
“Well, I’m sure as hell not going to leave any more of our decisions up to you. This time I get to decide for the three of us, and my decision stands.”
I smiled at Jack. No use arguing with a politician.
THE END
College Affair
“Now, Zoe, please be good for me while I get us all packed up and ready for the road trip. Mommy has work to do, unfortunately.”
I smiled to my cooing, six-month-old baby girl as she rolled around happily on her blanket. Zoe was the center of my world, a world that had once been focused on nothing but getting onto the tenure track in academics. Looking down at my gurgling ball of happiness, I couldn’t believe how narrow my world had once been. From staying up late searching for the perfect sentence for an essay, to being up all night warming bottles and settling cries.
After finishing college, I had moved to a small town ninety minutes away from where I had studied, which had houses cheap enough for my modest inheritance from my late parents. I moved after finding out I was pregnant. A small group of local moms had helped me out with some baby items, along with a few traditional women who most certainly did not.
I sighed at the task ahead of preparing us for a road trip and looked around our happy, little home. I was proud of what I had achieved on my own with limited means. The house was a wooden home with a green roof, white paint, and a little garden that I tried to tend (and failed at most days), and a bright interior of soft yellows and creams. Despite struggling budget wise, one luxury I never scrimped on was fresh flowers from the local market; it was difficult being a single mom and sometimes I just needed cheering up. When spending the careful five dollars for a bunch, I told myself a happy mom is a good mom.
Zoe and I were packing for her to go and stay for the evening with my old college roommate, now a mom of her own who hadn’t gone the grad student route but married after our undergraduate years. I was getting ready to attend a conference at my old college, Harwood University.
In between everything that had been going on in my life, I had managed to write a published essay in a Slider Magazine on my former studies material, consumer fashion, and I had been invited to a conference on the topic of consumer behavior and fashion. People from the academic world and the fashion industry were flying in and it was big moment for me to be invited, given how small the audience for Slider Magazine was and for my article.
I had spent the last six months juggling between being a single mom, trying to breastfeed, failing miserably, grappling with the mommy wars, and all the while trying to retain some semblance of my former career and past life, and tonight was my night to revel in it all. I felt in Zoe’s case, seeing her mom make something of herself was the best present I could give my daughter. Especially seeing as her father couldn’t be in the picture to provide that while I stayed home all day with her, which some days I seriously wanted to do forever. Well, until my brain craved adult conversation.
My passion to continue with my career was what was leading me to the conference tonight. I may have had to disappear after grad school and give my future academic career away temporarily, but I hadn’t given up on it completely. Creative consumer fashion and developing theories, ideas, case studies, and more on how to see fashion companies produce clothing in a better way was my driving dream.
One I had given away, to some extent, when I had Zoe, but Zoe as a name meant life, and to me life meant more than just being a mom: it meant being a person who was a mom and that person, to me, is someone who believes where there is a will there is a way—a way to have a career and be a mom.
I had been really lucky to have studied under the notorious Professor Ben Arbour, former luxury fashion company CEO turned rebel against the whole industry. He held a position at our small, liberal arts college lecturing and researching in consumer affairs and fashion while making a big noise in a small place.
His op-eds were on everything from exploitation of models to the notions around “Paris Thin” to sweatshops and had been featured everywhere from the New York Times to CNN. That he had left behind a career that had made him rich, celebrated, and cool to come to
a college town to comment on it all from an academic perspective made him the ultimate former insider turned outsider. On campus, it also certainly helped he still loved fashion—just not some parts of the industry—and he still dressed like the male model he ruefully admitted to having been in his younger days.
Ben Arbour. I looked down at Zoe gurgling on the blanket as I tickled her tummy. Zoe Callister, my daughter. Zoe Arbour. Our daughter. Ben and I had had one, ill-thought-out fling, but Zoe, my life, was anything but ill thought out in being there in my sunny living room with its comfy, second-hand couches and hand-me-down, blue rug from my parents, a rug I had dragged from one dorm to another, to one shared apartment to the next.
Ben. Six foot, rakish, dark hair, lean, muscular build gone a bit more Dad bod in his late thirties, clear, blue eyes that hide what they are thinking when they don’t want to be expressive. Eyes that are expressive when they want to be in a way that keeps you captive and looking at them. Eyes that pleaded with me not to leave when I said I couldn’t possibly take up a position on his research team after finishing grad school. Because I was having his baby. Not that I could tell him that. Eyes that now firmly looked up at me from my baby on the rug—Ben’s eyes in our daughter.
