by West, Harper
I let out the breath I’d been holding. I won’t lie, I’ve wrestled with all of this internally. But I’ve come to a conclusion about this particular argument.
“I think that feminism is about choice," I tell her, "And part of that is defending another woman's choices," I say that part directly to the friend, who clearly didn't expect that to be my answer. "There's nothing wrong with wanting the life of a stay-at-home parent nor is there anything wrong with choosing career over having children. Do one, do neither, do both."
“But…”
“No,” I say resolutely, “The worst thing that we can do as women is tear down each other’s choices.”
The two friends look at one another.
“I’m sorry, Amy,” the woman says to her pregnant friend, “She’s right. I’ll try to be more supportive.”
“Thank you,” the woman, Amy, says. She turns to me. “And thank you, miss. Normally, we don’t go asking strangers to solve our arguments, but I’m glad we did this time.”
“No problems,” I say, just as a server drops off my sandwich.
After lunch, I feel like I’m working with renewed determination. I teach my class on Long Island tonight and find myself speaking with conviction and more energy than I’ve had in the past few weeks.
I call Logan when I get home that night. I barely wait for him to pick up and say hello before I tell him, “I’ll do it. I want to speak at the summit.”
“Good. I’m glad.”
“Me too,” I say.
“I don’t know what changed your mind, but I’m glad that you did,” he adds. “I can’t think of anyone better.”
“Thank you.”
“You're welcome," he says, "I'll have Tyler make the travel arrangements for the three of us. We'll be taking the private plane, and you're welcome aboard."
“Right, it’s out of town this year, isn’t it?”
“Los Angeles,” he supplies.
I sigh out. As I wasn’t technically invited by the organization, I’m just pinch-hitting as a speaker for someone who was invited, I'm pretty sure that my travel expenses won't be covered. And I'm not in a position to afford round-trip airfare for a last minute flight or hotel fees. I hadn't thought about that.
“If it’s okay with you,” I say softly. I know that Logan wouldn’t offer if he didn’t mean it, but I still hate that I can’t pay my own way.
“There’s another thing,” Logan says, “Tyler and I booked that last available room at the hotel.”
“Oh?”
“It's a suite. There's room for you, and we don't mind sharing with you," he says.
“There are other hotels in the area,” I say, “I’ll just book one of those.”
Logan sighs, "Ivy, I don't want this to sound condescending, but it's going to be expensive to do that, and you can stay with us for free."
“I want to pay my own way.”
“Look at it this way, you’re doing us a favor by speaking on my behalf. I invited you, the least I can do is make sure you have a place to say. I can’t ask you to spend hundreds of dollars.”
I hate that I can’t pay my own way, but Logan is right. Flying out with them and staying with them is the only way that this is going to happen.
“I guess so," I tell him. I shake my head. He's being awfully generous here. "I mean, thank you, Logan."
“You’re welcome,” he says. We say our goodbyes and hang up.
It’s been an emotional rollercoaster of a day from my stressful morning to the devastation that I felt after that meeting, to the elation of finding myself solving people’s problems again.
I’m officially too spent out to worry about the fact that I’ve just agreed to go out of town with my exes and stay overnight with them in a fancy hotel suite. I know that in the panic will set in in the morning, though.
Now I just feel drained.
Chapter 18
Logan
I spend the rest of the evening worrying whether or not I did the right thing. I know that Ivy belongs at that summit, but I don’t know if us staying together is too close for comfort. I wasn’t lying when I said that there were no other rooms in this hotel and I know that flying Ivy out is common courtesy considering she’s my guest.
But this will be the first time that Tyler, Ivy and I will be together again.
All night. Alone.
I'm equal parts excited and nervous, and I don't know which will win out.
We’re flying out a day before the event to hopefully acclimate to the time change before having to put ourselves in front of people.
The flight is mostly uneventful. Ivy makes a point of thanking me profusely as we board, and we make pleasant small talk until we're at cruising altitude. Then she dives into some work on her laptop, and she's virtually silent for the first two hours.
Tyler is dead asleep. I’ve never been able to sleep on planes, so I envy the shit out of him.
I have my own laptop open in front of me, but there’s nothing open on the screen. I’ve been pretending to work for about thirty minutes, but now the silence is getting to me. Usually, I like the quiet, but now I’ve been watching Ivy hammer away at her keyboard, her gaze focused laser sharp.
“What are you working on?” I ask her.
“My speech.”
“What is it about?”
I assume she’s going to talk about her time running Lawrence Vines and how she became CEO of a huge wine importing operation at such a young age.
“I don’t know. I have a few ideas, but everything I start just isn’t what I really want to say to them. I keep deleting it and starting over,” she answers.
“Why don’t you just talk about your company?”
“I was going to avoid it because… well, you know,” she starts, “It’s hard to discuss my failures and the downfall of Lawrence Vines. I trusted the wrong people. I tried to hide my pregnancy from people who would see it as a sign of weakness. And I didn’t get help right away when I needed it.”
“Maybe that’s your speech,” I say.
“I don’t know. If I’m going to be very honest about what happened to me, some people will be turned off. This conference is about celebrating achievement, not looking back and discussing what went wrong.”
“True. It could get mixed reactions,” I offer, “But if your story helps even one person in that crowd, I think it’ll be worth it.”
She muses for a moment, then returns to her work.
I take a long look at Ivy, hunched over the computer, putting everything she has into the story she’s about to tell. She looks as driven and vibrant as she ever has. She doesn’t look like the old Ivy though. She looks like a woman who has weathered her storm and come back a thousand times stronger and more glorious.
I’m in love with this version of Ivy. Maybe even more so than the other.
I want to tell her that I’m going to therapy. I want to tell her that I’m trying to wrap my mind around the fact that I can’t have her back until I can accept Oliver too. I want her to know that I’m putting in the work to get her back. To earn her back.
But I feel that in this moment, doing so would come off as cheap and desperate.
“I miss you, Ivy,” I tell her.
She looks up from over the screen. “I miss you too, Logan,” she says.
I want to reach across the space between us and take her hand or hold her close to me. Something like that. But it feels like too much too soon. And she knows it too because as soon as we confess that to each other, her eyes are back on the screen as though nothing had happened. She’s typing a lot slower, though, so I know that something’s going through her mind.
Suddenly, Tyler snores loudly. So loudly that he wakes himself up with a start.
“What’s going on?” he asks, blinking wildly, shocked, but still sleepy, “What’s that noise?”
I have to laugh. Ivy does too. God, I missed that laugh. It’s like beautiful music after all those months of silence.
“You h
aven’t changed at all, Tyler,” Ivy says, shaking her head and resuming her typing.
“You know it, sweetheart,” he says before nodding off again.
When Tyler came back that morning, the morning after we'd spent the day with Tammy’s children, and he’d spent the night with Ivy, I’d been jealous. Actually jealous. Even when he’d hooked up with Ivy without me there, I didn’t feel that way. But that night that he got to sleep with her in her bed, surrounded by her warmth and her scent… I was on fire when I found out.
I didn’t tell Tyler that, of course, but I couldn’t speak to him for the rest of the day, either.
It probably stems from the fact that this all seems so easy for him. He had gained her trust back quickly and worked his way back into her life and her bed. He can go and look at Oliver and accept him with open arms. In fact, he’s been back downstairs to Ivy’s place a few times to bring Oliver gifts or just to check up on him.
Meanwhile, I’ve been talking to a therapist and eerily painting away at a nursery that I’m terrified to fill.
“Where’s Oliver now?” I ask Ivy.
“Suitcase,” she answers.
“What?”
“I’m messing with you, Logan,” she scoffs, “He’s with my mom.”
“Oh,” I say, relieved, “Good.”
She squints, looking at me like she thinks I’m crazy. “Did you really think I shoved my son into a suitcase?”
“Of course not,” I say, “I just realized that ‘where is Oliver?’ is one of the first things I should have asked you and yet it didn’t occur to me until a few hours in.”
Ivy smiles sympathetically. “Takes a minute to get used to, doesn’t it?” she asks, “Thinking about someone else’s whereabouts and well-being all the time. Putting someone else’s needs before your own.”
“You did it,” I point out, “Though I guess you didn’t have a choice.”
“Didn’t make it any easier.”
“Yeah, I guess not,” I agree.
She looks up from her laptop again. "But you do get used to it," she tells me, "After a while, it becomes second nature."
I’m not so sure, but I really want to believe her.
We land in Los Angeles, and our driver takes us to a beautiful hotel. Tyler checks us in quickly, and we find our suite. Tyler and Ivy assume that they’re taking the smaller bedrooms, leaving the master to me.
I start inside but do a quick about-face.
“Do you want the master, Ivy?” I ask her, “I mean, you’re kind of the guest of honor here.”
“Hardly,” she says. She’s eyeing me strangely, like offering her this room is some sort of test. “But, no. I’m okay here. Really.”
“Are you sure? Might be nice to relax in a nice hotel room for a night.”
“I can relax in here,” Ivy says. There’s a teasing quality to her voice. “Or are you trying to get me into your bedroom, Logan?”
I chuckle. “My intentions were honorable, I promise.”
“I believe you,” she says, “But I’ll be fine in here.” She lets herself inside her room and closes the door, presumably to take a nap and get herself ready for dinner.
“It’s nice that we can joke like this. You know, like friends.”
I choke on the word friends.
“I’m taking a shower,” I announce to Tyler, though I know he doesn’t need to know that.
The master bathroom is as beautiful as the rest of the suite, but the luxury and the decor is lost on me. We may as well be staying in a roadside motel. I start the water, and within seconds, the steam starts billowing. I shed my clothes and step under the spray, washing away the grime of traveling.
Friends. It’s the most God awful word in the English language.
Chapter 19
Tyler
I’ve never had a more uncomfortable dinner.
It’s not lost on me that the last time that Ivy, Logan and I were all together in a fancy restaurant like this was the day that she left us, but somehow this is almost as terrible. We’ve spent almost half an hour discussing how unseasonably cold the weather is in Los Angeles, and now we’ve moved on to the equally entertaining topic of whether or not we enjoy the fact that the days are getting longer.
Ivy is in favor. Logan claims to prefer the shorter days.
They ask me to weigh in, and I want to fucking scream. It’s not supposed to be like this. The three of us together were scintillating. We had deep, meaningful conversations. We made each other laugh until our faces hurt. We were the people you wanted to be.
But I'm currently at dinner with the two people I love most in this entire world, and I want nothing more than to be literally anywhere else.
Suddenly, I hear someone calling my name. Logan. I blink, shaking myself out of my little trance.
“What?” I ask, “Sorry. Just spaced out there for a second.”
“Logan asked you a question,” Ivy supplies.
“Oh. What was it?”
“Did you seriously not hear me?” he asks.
“Are you having a stroke, Tyler?” Ivy wonders.
“I know you’re joking, but that could happen,” Logan says, “Tyler, can you smile and raise both hands above your head?”
“No, you’re supposed to get him to say a complicated sentence,” Ivy supplies, “Something with a lot of hard consonants.”
I can’t stand it anymore.
“What the fuck happened to us,” I blurt out, “We’re sitting around talking about the fucking weather and longer versus shorter daylight hours. It’s mind-numbing.”
“Well, what are we supposed to talk about, then?” Logan asks.
“I don’t know,” I say quickly, scrambling for an answer, “Us. Our lives. Oliver. Anything, really. It’s just… It’s not supposed to be like this.”
“Like what?” Ivy asks.
“We’re not supposed to be sitting here like three perfect strangers making small talk.”
“I don’t know,” Ivy says, “I thought we were doing pretty well here. I mean I’d rather have you guys as my friends than not in my life at all.”
I look to Logan. Surely, he’ll back me up here. I saw the way he flinched earlier when she called him that. The f-word.
“Agreed,” he says.
“Are you serious? You really think the three of us can just sit around and be friends?” I’m on fucking fire here.
They just look at me blankly.
“Fuck, I can’t do this anymore,” I say, slamming back the last of my scotch and getting up from the table. I’m not loud enough to cause a real scene, but Ivy and Logan look at me like they want to urge me to keep my voice down.
“Can’t do what anymore?” Logan asks.
“I can’t pretend that we don’t all belong together,” I say, my words rushing out faster than I can process them. “I can’t pretend that I’m not falling back in love with you. I can’t pretend that everything’s fine.”
“Tyler,” Ivy says gently, “You know why we can’t all be together again. I need you to accept that Oliver is…”
“I’ve been over to your place every night this week to spend time with our son,” I tell her, “I know that he prefers carrots to peas and that he cries like a banshee if you take away that stuffed froggy thing he sleeps with.”
“That isn’t…”
“Isn’t enough?” I retort, “I know that, Ivy. I know that it takes more than that to fully accept someone into your life. But you know how I would get to know him and love him better?” She blinks at me, taken aback. “If he moved into the nursery that Logan and I are building for him in the third bedroom at our place.”
Logan snaps at me. “Tyler!”
Ivy suddenly looks like she might cry. “You’re building Oliver a nursery?”
I pull out my phone and flip through a few poorly lit pictures of the work in progress, showing them to Ivy. She takes the phone from me and scrolls through the images slowly.
“I’m speechless,” she says
. She’s holding her other hand in front of her mouth. “Logan, are you really doing this?”
“He’s even seeing a therapist and trying to get over his fucking mommy and daddy issues,” I say without thinking.
I don’t even have to look at my best friend to know that I just fucked up royally.
“Fuck you, Tyler,” Logan shouts before getting up from the table and heading towards the door.
“Wait, that’s not what I meant,” I say, pointlessly. I sit back down, trying to ease the tensions. Several pairs of eyes are on us.
Ivy looks at me with her mouth agape. “Is he really?” she whispers, “He’s really getting help? After all these years?”
“He is,” I confirm, though I’m shaking my head in regret. “He should’ve been the one to tell you, though. I’m in some deep shit for that, I’m sure.”
“I’ll talk to him,” Ivy says, rubbing my shoulder, trying to reassure me that everything will be alright. My panic subsides when she touches me.
“He’s really trying,” I say softly, “We both are. We want you back, Ivy. We know it’s not going to be exactly the way it used to be. But maybe it can be better.”
She sighs and retracts her hand.
“Just think about it,” I beg her, “Please. We’re not… complete without you.”
“I don’t know,” she says, sipping the last of her wine.
“What’s holding you back?” I ask, equal parts desperate and frustrated. “We’re making room for Oliver in our home and in our lives. We love him. We do. Even if we’re not with him twenty-four hours a day, he’s always on our minds.”
“I…”
I cut her off. I’m not done yet. “And we never stopped loving you. Logan… he never so much as dated anyone else while we were apart. He hid himself away from the whole world while he licked his wounds. And I liked to think I got over you, but it’s not the truth. I distracted myself, sure, but now that I’ve had a small taste of what it’d be like to have you back in my life, I’ll never be satisfied with anything else.”
