Making a Play

by Victoria Denault

  I nod. I grip the bike so tightly it makes my hands ache. My eyes remain on the deflated front tire. I can’t look up at him. If I do, I think I might cry—again. He shifts, his feet kicking up dust. “I know I’m the last person you want to help you, but I think you should let me anyway.”

  I don’t respond. He sighs loudly. “Fleur…”

  “Don’t call me that.”

  “Rose, at least let me call your sisters. They can come get you,” he suggests.

  I stare at my feet. They’re already aching. I stupidly wore flip-flops instead of real shoes. Not exactly the right footwear to walk miles in. So I nod but then it hits me. “Callie and Jessie won’t answer your call.”

  He’s pulling his cell out of his pocket and he freezes. “Right. They hate me.”

  “They do.”

  “I’ll call Jordan,” he replies and starts to dial. A minute later it’s clear Jordan isn’t answering. “I can call Cole or Leah? Or Donna or Wyatt?”

  I’m being a giant baby. It hits me hard. I know that any of those people would jump to help me but I also know I need to start helping myself—and part of that is dealing with this. With him.

  I finally look up. He looks horrible. His hair is tangled and greasy. His face is unshaven and he has bags under his eyes. He even looks thinner. He’s wearing a stained T-shirt and a pair of ripped jeans. It kind of startles me. I don’t let him see that, though. I don’t want him to see any emotion of any kind. I just can’t be vulnerable in front of him. I can’t.

  “If you can just drive me home, I’d really appreciate it.”

  His whole face lights up for a second, like that first big spark when you light a match. He nods and reaches for Esmeralda. I pull back so quickly, scared our hands might touch, that she crashes to the ground. The light on his face dims. “You go get in the truck. I’ll put her in the back.”

  I nod and walk away.

  I keep my mouth pressed tightly shut as he drives toward the farmhouse. Luc is silent too but I know it’s killing him. I know he wants to say something. He probably wants to say everything he can think of but none of it would make a difference. No words can un-etch from my mind what I saw in that bedroom.

  As he pulls to a stop at a red light he looks over at me. I try to force myself not to look back but I can’t stop my head from turning. Our eyes meet across the tiny space of the front seat of his truck. His brown eyes look dark and sad. His mouth is set in a tight, thin line.

  “Rose, I have to be able to make this up to you.”

  I turn back to stare out the front window. My eyes dart around trying to find something to focus on other than his beautiful, tragic face. The only thing in front of us is a Dunkin’ Donuts, so I stare at the flickering neon sign like my life depends on it.

  “I can’t tell you I didn’t do it,” he says, his voice gravelly. “But if I did, it was because I thought it was you. I would never touch her. Not knowingly. I swear on my life.”

  His words twist and turn inside my head. I can’t tell if the urgency in his tone is because he means what he’s saying or he really wants to me to believe what he’s saying. Maybe it’s both. But either way, does it matter?

  If he slept with her, do I care if he remembers it? If he was confused? Could he really have mistaken her body for mine? I can’t imagine thinking someone else was Luc. I know every inch of his body. The width of his shoulders, the rough touch of his calloused hands, the strong curve to his muscular backside. The undeniable length of his legs and his cock.

  I shake my head and push back against the headrest, snapping my eyes shut. Someone behind us honks and forces Luc to see the green light now in front of us. He starts to turn onto Route 3, which will take us to the edge of town, and my house.

  We’re silent until the farmhouse comes into view up ahead. Finally, I can’t keep myself from asking the question. “How could you think she was me?” It comes out in a weak, shaky voice. “How do you not know what I feel like?”

  “I do know,” he argues back quietly. “I know everything about you. I know how soft your skin is, how your lips feel on my skin, how your hips feel in my hands, how you taste—how every part of you tastes! I swear. I just.…”

  He pauses and lifts a hand from the wheel to run it through his disheveled hair. “I was drinking a lot and you know I don’t drink. I don’t know if I’m a drunk who confuses some random girl for his girlfriend.”

  “Why were you drinking?”

  “Because I was upset. I missed you. I hated having to be away from you,” he confesses. “I knew I’d hurt you earlier that day and I was so sick of pretending I wasn’t… that you weren’t mine. I was getting all this praise and saving my career by pretending you didn’t exist, and you’re my fucking world, Fleur.”

  “Do not call me that. Not now.” I turn and stare at him as he keeps his eyes on the road as we head down the dark, empty street. I could walk from here. If I made him pull over, I could walk home. It would only take ten minutes, but as much as I hate myself for it, something deep inside me wants to be in this space, next to him. Something sick and sad has missed him despite what he’s done to me.

  “So this is my fault? Because you missed me? Are those the excuses that worked on the supermodel?” I spit out and my bottom lip quivers. I can’t believe I’m on the verge of tears again. I had no idea any one person could cry this much and not die from dehydration.

  “No! It’s not your fault. I never should have asked you to be in a secret relationship,” he tells me, like that makes it all better. “I fucked up by trying to lie and hide us.”

  He drives slowly now, decelerating almost to a crawl, and I know he’s trying to prolong our time together. Then, just at the bottom of the drive, he comes to a stop. I reach for the door handle to escape before he even turns the engine off, but he grabs my arm.

  “Don’t touch me.” I’m trying to sound furious but it comes out as a whimper. I’m begging him.

  “Rosie, please.” He unclips his seat belt and slides closer to me, gently tugging me back toward him. “Please let me fix this. Tell me how to fix this. I can’t lose you.”

  I feel his breath against my skin as his lips graze my cheekbone and he lifts the hand not holding my wrist to run through my hair, pushing it behind my shoulder.

  “I don’t know how…” I whisper.

  I yank my arm away and throw the door open. As I slam it shut I glance back and see his head bent over the steering wheel and his shoulders shake. He may be crying. I want to care but I don’t. I don’t feel anything toward him right now. I’m just numb.

  As I run up the driveway toward the house, leaving Esmeralda in Claudette, I hear his truck start up again and turn to see him driving up the driveway. I don’t want to talk about this anymore, so I take the porch steps two at a time and fling open the front door.

  Leah, Callie and Jessie are gathered around a laptop on the kitchen table. Their heads all spin toward me and the commotion I make as I enter. I know instantly they can tell I’ve been crying again. None of them look all that surprised. I guess this is my new “normal” face and they’re used to it.

  “What are you doing?” I ask, because I just want to focus on something other than my pain. I am so sick of focusing on that.

  “The wedding photos came in,” Leah explains and points to the computer, where I can see a bunch of photos. My eyes instantly go to a group shot of the wedding party and I find myself, smiling like the happiest person in the world, with Luc right behind me, a similar grin on his face.

  Callie looks past me as Luc’s headlights shimmer through the kitchen window curtains. She stands up. “Is that the French Disaster?”

  I nod and sniff. “Esmeralda got another flat and he saw me trying to lug her home, so he dropped me off.”

  “Good. I’ve been meaning to give him something,” Callie says matter-of-factly. I watch her march past me to the front door, where she picks up her rolled-up yoga mat and throws open the front door.

&n
bsp; My muddled brain takes more time than it should to realize what’s going on. It’s not until she steps onto the porch and I see her lift the yoga mat like a baseball bat that I realize what’s about to happen.

  “Callie, stop!” I scream but it’s too late.

  We all start to chase after her. Luc is placing Esmeralda against the porch as Callie bursts onto it. He looks up at her and like a deer in headlights he’s too stunned to react in time. She lifts the yoga mat, leans over the porch railing and whacks him on the head with it.

  “What the fuck!” he hollers, lifting his arms to block the second blow.

  “You stupid, horny jackass!” Callie hollers as both Jessie and I scream at her to stop and Leah tries to take the yoga mat from her.

  Jordan and Devin come running out of the barn. “Callie! Stop!”

  Devin hollers and she hesitates, giving Luc a chance to jump back into Claudette. Callie charges off the porch steps, still wielding the yoga mat, and begins to run after the reversing truck. Devin jumps in front of her, scoops her up like a fireman rescuing someone from a burning building and carries her off toward the barn.

  Jordan calls out to Luc, then jumps in the passenger side of Claudette before Luc barrels down the driveway and out of sight.

  I take a shaky breath and look at Jessie and Leah, who both suddenly burst into laughter. For some reason, even though I feel as miserable as ever, I can’t help but join them. We all head back into the kitchen in hysterical giggles with tears streaming down our faces.

  I jump up and sit on the counter next to the sink, while Jessie and Leah collapse into the chairs they vacated moments ago. Leah is the first to regain her composure. She wipes the tears from her cheeks and smiles. “Callie would fight a freaking bear for you two.”

  “She’s always been the violent one.” Jessie giggles. “One day it’s going to land her in jail.”

  “Luc deserved it, though. Just like Jordan did back in high school,” Leah replies and glances up at me. I’m wiping the tears from my face for the millionth time this week. “What are you going to do, Rosie?”

  “About Callie?”

  Leah gives me a small smile. “About you and Luc.”

  I take a deep, ragged breath. “I don’t know what to do. What should I do?”

  I’ve asked that question to Callie, Jessie and even Jordan but no one has given me an answer. I don’t expect one from Leah either, so I’m shocked when she stands up, walks over to me, takes my hands in hers and gives me an answer.

  “Rosie.” She looks me straight in the eye. “Forgive him.”

  That blunt, simple advice feels like a slap across the face. I pull back from her and blink. “What?”

  “You said you don’t know what to do and so I’m telling you,” Leah explains calmly and grabs my hands again. “Forgive him. It’s the only thing you can do.”

  “But…” I shake my head. “How?”

  That’s the big question. I squeeze Leah’s hands, suddenly desperate for her to give me an easy answer to that question. Some simple solution that will make what I saw—what I think happened—easy to forget.

  “He was naked and she…” I swallow and give Leah a pleading look. “I don’t know how I can stop seeing them together. Tell me how to block that from my brain.”

  “Don’t block it,” Leah replies and lets go of my hands. “Replay it in your head over and over until it wears itself out. Until you’re immune to it. Until it stops hurting.”

  She walks back over to the kitchen table and sits down again. Her blue eyes find mine again and she looks so calm and so sure of what she’s saying, it’s like an anchor for my drowning soul. “Remember, as far as you know, she simply snuck into his bed and fell asleep. You don’t know they had sex. You’re assuming that and letting it hurt you.”

  “But they may have,” I squeak.

  She sighs and looks at the wedding pictures on her laptop screen again before turning back to face me. “Cole cheated on me.”

  My mouth hangs open. Jessie’s eyes look like they’re about to pop out of her head.

  “What the fuck…” Jessie whispers.

  “Yeah. I know, right?” Leah laughs, but it’s tense and not at all funny. “We’re the Garrison couple that’s immune to the drama, right? Wrong.”

  “When the hell did this happen?” I can’t help but ask.

  “Remember when we broke up the year he started college?” Leah asks softly. Jessie and I nod. “It wasn’t because of the distance or the fact that I was concentrating on my own studies or that I was interested in stupid Patrick Hannigan.”

  Both Jessie and I crinkle up our noses at the mention of that guy’s name. He was the manager at the ice cream parlor in town where Leah worked in the summer during college. We all always thought he was a bit sketchy but for some reason Leah started getting really close to him when she and Cole took a break for a few months. Some people assumed that she had broken it off with Cole because she liked Patrick. I never thought that. I had believed her when she said that with her at Yale and Cole in Boston it had been too hard to keep things going.

  “It was because he cheated?” Jessie whispers, and you can tell by her tone that she still can’t believe it.

  Leah nods and takes a deep breath. “I went to visit him in Boston after he’d been there a couple of months and he was cold and distant. I kept bugging him to talk to me. To open up, and then finally he confessed.”

  “Holy fuck.” Jessie gasps.

  Leah nods again but she looks oddly detatched from the memory as she recounts the incident. “He said it was at a party. It wasn’t sex, but it was close. And he regretted it the second it happened. He was just lonely and all the girls at school were hitting on him that night because he’d scored the winning goal in the hockey game and it just happened. He looked as upset as I felt.”

  I find myself staring at Leah like she’s Mother Teresa. She smiles at me. “Trust me, Rosie, I hated his guts. I refused his phone calls. I ignored his emails. I started hanging out with Patrick and made sure I accidentally ran into every single one of his family members. And when he came back for the summer I even went so far as to make out with Patrick in front of him.”

  “I remember that,” I say as a vision from the past leaps back into my head. “At the lake at a bonfire party on the Fourth of July. Cole got so drunk he puked on Jordan.”

  Leah laughs and nods. “And then after Patrick drove me home that night, I got in my car and drove back to Cole’s house and spent the night holding him on the bathroom floor in between his puking fits. Because that night broke me as much as it did him. The pain on Cole’s face when he saw Patrick and me making out didn’t bring me joy. Most important, it made the dull ache in my chest worse instead of better. So I gave in. I went to him and held him and listened to him apologize and whimper and beg all night long. And then I took him back.”

  “Holy crap,” Jessie says and I nod at that, because holy crap. Leah and Cole are so content and happy with each other. They love each other so much and they managed to do that after something like that? I’m beyond stunned.

  “The point is that I knew for sure he cheated on me,” she explains and shrugs her tiny shoulders. “I knew it for a fact and I still ended up forgiving him.”

  I think about that and twist my hands in my lap. When I look up, Leah’s pulled up a shot of just me and Luc that was taken at the wedding. We’re dancing, our heads tilted together. He’s smiling at me and I am beaming back at him. Then she flips to a picture of Cole and her. She’s sitting on the hood of the antique car they rented that day, leaning forward. Cole is standing in front of her, his hands on the hood on either side of her puffy wedding dress and he’s kissing her forehead as she smiles with her eyes closed.

  “Rosie, I would be lost without Cole,” she tells me, her eyes still on the image on her screen. “He’s the best man I have ever met. He’s the love of my life. I want to raise babies with him and grow old with him and die in his arms. Do you love Luc
like that?”

  I nod easily.

  “Has he told you it was a mistake?”

  “He said if he did do it, it was a mistake. That he might have thought she was me.”

  “Luc is just as devastated by this as you are. Just as devastated as Cole was. He still loves you and only you. So whether he did it or not, just forgive him.”

  “It’s so hard,” I whisper. Leah stands up again, walking over and hugging me.

  “It’s harder to hate him. Trust me,” Leah says softly as I hug her back.

  Over Leah’s shoulder I catch Jessie’s eye. She just gives me a little nod, like she’s agreeing with Leah, urging me to try to forgive him. But… can I?

  Chapter 40

  Rose

  It’s almost midnight and I can’t sleep. My mind has been reeling with Leah’s revelation and her advice. It’s almost impossible to imagine Cole cheating on Leah. He’s loved her since high school. I wasn’t really close to Leah when the events she told us about were going down. Jessie was in Arizona and because of the fight between her and Jordan we’d kind of stopped hanging around the Garrisons. We were still friends with Leah, but she was off at Yale, and when she was home, we saw her sporadically at parties or the lake but didn’t hang out all that often. Callie was busy working and taking community college classes and I was busy with high school stuff. Looking at them now, if she hadn’t told me herself, I wouldn’t believe that they had ever gone through that. They were happy and in love—stronger in their bond than I’d ever seen them. Could Luc and I be like that? Could we be perfect together again if I just let this go? And how do I do that?

  I finally give up on sleep and change out of my pajamas into jeans and an old oversized sweatshirt. After pulling my hair into a knot, I unplug my phone from its charger on the nightstand and quietly leave my room and head downstairs.

  Out on the porch I sit on the steps and take a deep breath of the cool night air. I stare at the barn. It’s basically finished. Callie and I are going to move into it tomorrow. It’s a beautiful little apartment but I miss waking up by the lake, in Luc’s arms. Despite everything, I still want Luc. So how do I move past what happened? I guess I just… try.