This is where I’m sitting, emptying my beer while stewing in my resentment for Stu and mulling what to do next to try to “unfuck” my life as he put it, when Paige comes sauntering up the path. Her every step seems cautious and deliberate, as if she’s having to concentrate too hard on the simple task of walking.
At the top of the stairs, she comes to a halt, pushes her sunglasses up on her head, and fixes her somber gaze on me.
Fury twists inside me again as I crane my neck to get a better look at the injured part of her face. The skin around her left eye is slightly swollen and an angry pink that seems to be darkening. She’s definitely going to have a black eye. God damn Caroline Carne. And Stuart Garnett, and their inflicting their crap on us, and my wife is the one who gets hurt.
She doesn’t deserve all this shit. All I want is for her to let me back in her life, to let me make all the shit go away, to let me make her happy again.
That’s it, really. Pure and simple.
“How are you feeling?” I ask her mildly.
She lets out a brittle snort-laugh. “Let’s see. I’m sore from hiking and bruised from falling into that mud pit yesterday. I’m kind of hungover. And I just got hit in the face with a block of wood.”
“So…never better then?” I try joking while my mind strays down all sorts of inappropriate paths.
You felt so fucking good last night, I want to tell her. I want you again. Right now.
“I’m going to pack,” she replies with a roll of her eyes, and then she starts for the door.
“You can’t drive.” I let my chair plunk down on the boards of the patio. “You probably have a concussion.”
“My head doesn’t even hurt that much. I’ll be fine.” She grasps the door handle and pulls it out toward her. “I’ll take some Tylenol.”
“Paige.” I stand up abruptly, shifting in her direction and grabbing the door, holding it for her. “We have the cabin until tomorrow. Stay.”
Her mouth twists. “Why?”
“We need to talk.” I say it emphatically, insistently.
“Yeah,” she bites out, and then she makes air quotes with her fingers. “‘Talk.’ Like we did last night?”
“Without the quotation marks,” I say with a shake of my head even as flashbacks inundate me—how tight and wet she was and, oh, Christ, the sounds she made as she was coming. Curving my lips, I add, “Unless you want an encore. In that case, you won’t have to twist my arm.”
“More fun if I did, though,” she taunts, shooting me a provocative look before stepping through the doorway, leaving me blinking and stunned and more turned on than I probably should be.
God. It’s been so long since she’s said anything even remotely flirtatious like that, and I don’t know how to handle it.
I’m not repeating last night’s mistake, though. Sex is just an unproductive distraction right now. After taking a few deep breaths to push my desire for her down, I follow her inside.
I find her in her bedroom, her suitcase already open on the bed. Glancing my way as I stop in the doorway and lean against the frame, she offers in a neutral tone, “I told you it wouldn’t change anything.”
“Uh-huh. Which is why we need to talk.”
Sighing, she plops that delicious ass of hers down on the bed, tossing a half-folded shirt into the suitcase. Rubbing her eyes, she says, “I just can’t with this right now, Logan. I miss my babies. I want to spend time with Mia before she leaves for a really long time. And I’m so sick of this place I could scream.”
Right. Carrot, meet stick.
“One day,” I entreat her. “If nothing’s changed by the time we check out tomorrow, you can make another appointment with a mediator, and we won’t quit until we reach a compromise.”
That gives her pause. Clenching the edge of the bed, she narrows her eyes at me. “You’ll let me move?”
“I’ll consider it,” I say cautiously, and when she scoffs and shakes her head, I quickly make an amendment. “I promise we’ll find a solution you’ll be happy with.”
She still looks unimpressed. “I don’t think you can promise that.”
“I just did.”
Seconds tick by as we stare at each other, her suspiciously and me stubbornly, neither of us willing to be the first to look away, to back down. Does she think I’m just messing around with this shit? No, this isn’t life and death. It’s bigger than that. She has my heart, and the only way I want it back is if she comes with it. A package deal, if you will.
“Okay. I’ll stay.” She announces it lightly, as if it doesn’t matter to her either way. “What are we going to do all day?”
Oh, I have ideas. And they all crop up at once, one R-rated mental image after the other. Again restraining the urge to put them into words, I point out, “You need to rest.”
Her nose turns up. “Well, I don’t want to. I told you, I’m fine.”
Feeling my phone in my pocket, remembering Stu’s sad little text message, I flash her a tiny smile. “How about a boat ride then?’
“This is the kind of nature experience that’s more my speed.”
I turn my head sideways and grin at my wife where she’s reclined with bent knees on the lounge seat opposite mine. In her tank top and shorts, red Stanford baseball cap, and oversize sunglasses disguising her blackening eye, she looks relaxed…and almost peaceful.
We had no issues getting the pontoon boat at the marina, and after a brisk trip across the lake, we’re now floating at the mouth of a small cove. A few hundred feet to our right, the rocky shoreline edged with pine trees is empty of people, and while there’s plenty of other traffic on the water today, there’s no one else anywhere near us.
“Kind of boring without the suspense of possibly running into a bear or a shark, though,” I comment, stretching my legs out. Chilling on a boat on Lake Tahoe in shorts and a T-shirt beats the hell out of suits and conference rooms.
“Well, did you bring any more of that beer? Fifteen percent of fatal boating accidents are because of alcohol, so that’d add some excitement.” She scoots down so that she’s gazing up at the sky, putting her feet up and crossing them at the ankles, and my attention gets stuck on her legs—those long, smooth, and trim limbs—and the way they looked last night, spread wide before me and with one knee up on the back of the love seat.
The air feels hotter, clammier all of a sudden. What were we just talking about? Right. The thrill of dying in a boating accident.
“I’d actually prefer it if my kids didn’t end up as orphans,” I point out, to which she responds with a sarcastic thumbs-up.
“Which reminds me,” she says, her gesture switching to pointing a finger at me, “we never got around to changing our wills to make Mia and Jay guardians ahead of my parents.”
Right. Just one of so many shitty things you have to do when you become a parent: decide who should take care of your kids in case you both die. We always intended to ask her sister eventually, because, at their age, neither my dad nor my in-laws should be saddled full time with three little kids, no matter how much they adore their grandchildren. But we waited, because it also wouldn’t be fair to ask Mia to take on the responsibility of single parenthood.
Because kids do better with two parents.
Not one parent and a second one who’s barely around, because he was dumb enough to think that if he stayed away, their mom would realize sooner that she didn’t want to be alone. That she wanted him back.
“Yeah,” I tell her, heaviness settling in my chest. “Guess we got distracted by other legal issues.”
Though she doesn’t look my way, her jaw tightening shows she understood my meaning. After a loaded silence, she pushes up on her elbows, and the leather cushion creaks as she sits up, folding her legs underneath her. Slipping her arm over the side, she watches the surface below.
The boat undulates gently, the water slapping against its side with arrhythmic gulping and slurping sounds. Above us, the sun radiates harshly in between smatt
erings of clouds, fuzzy and gray blobs that look painted on, carelessly dabbed onto a bright blue canvas. It’s a perfect summer day, in a perfect location: clear blue water surrounded by tall green mountains. If there was ever a place where I could feel carefree, this would be it.
Instead I’m weighed down by the daunting task of having less than twenty-four hours to convince my wife she doesn’t want to be without me anymore. And if I fail, I’ll either have to go back on a promise I probably should never have made—or find a way to make her think she’s getting what she wants without letting her take my kids away.
“We couldn’t go on the way we were, Logan,” she says suddenly, quietly, still gazing down at the water. “We were fooling ourselves to think we could.”
Yeah. Barely speaking to each other, except to bicker about the stupidest little things. Never doing anything together that didn’t involve the kids. Sleeping in separate rooms and having cold and rushed and mechanical sex once in a blue moon, because if we didn’t, that’d be it: the death knell. As long as we still fucked once in a while, we could make it. For another eighteen years. Until our baby boy, indirectly the cause of the whole goddamn mess, was legally an adult, and we could walk our separate ways with a clear conscience.
She’s right. That wasn’t sustainable. And the fact that she’s the one who cried uncle gave me the luxury of self-righteousness. She kicked me out, she called it quits, and so I was the offended party. All my anger and pettiness and meanness afterward were justified.
Blowing out a sigh, I sit up as well, swiveling toward her and planting my feet on the deck, and all I can think to say in response is, “I know.”
She throws me the merest flicker of a look before folding her arms on the rail and resting her chin there. “I’ve had divorce clients who tried to stay together for the kids. They all regretted it. All that wasted time, for no benefit. Kids are so intuitive. When something’s wrong, they know. They might not say anything, but it comes out in other ways: bad behavior, poor academic performance, neuroses.”
“We could’ve fixed it.” I know I sound more confident than I feel.
Her forehead wrinkles. “How?”
Having no ready answer, I chew on it for a while. “I was trying, at least.”
Straightening, she turns to face me, and her tone grows incredulous. “Really?”
When I remain silent, she lets out an exasperated breath. “You know why I called and broke it off during Mia’s wedding? It wasn’t because you weren’t there, because you chose work over family.”
My stomach cramps. Yeah, I asked for this conversation. But it’s fucking brutal, and it’s about to get a hell of a lot worse. “Why, then?”
“Because the last thing you said to me before I left for that trip was, ‘Behave yourself.’ And you weren’t joking.” Her chin quivers, and I see her swallowing with difficulty. “That wasn’t unusual. You know that, right? You asked me where I’d been and what I’d been doing all the damn time, question after question. Your suspicion and jealousy, they poisoned everything. The littlest things, stuff that used to be just kind of irritating, stuff I’d been able to just shrug off before, they got blown way out of proportion.”
I frown. “Like what?”
“Like—” She throws her hands up. “He missed the school winter concert again, and he doesn’t trust me. He’s talking about training for another marathon, which would take away precious time from me and the girls, and he doesn’t trust me. He left the toilet seat up, and he doesn’t fucking trust me.”
Behind my dark sunglasses, I squeeze my eyes shut. My chest feels like it’s on fire. It’s not just the self-disgust, how sickening it is to remember how I went off the deep end, or how long the madness lasted.
No, the worst parts are the ones she knows nothing about.
The ones she never will know about, because I sure as hell am not ever telling her.
I have only one line of defense, really. It’s something I lacked when shit blew up last year, and I’m not even sure I had it as recently as a couple of months ago: perspective.
“You don’t get it,” I tell her as soon as I manage to find my voice. “It had never occurred to me you might cheat on me. Then that day in the park when you told me you were pregnant with Elliott…” I exhale roughly. “It was like a switch got turned on. And I couldn’t figure out how to turn it back off.”
Her gaping mouth tells me I was right, that she doesn’t get it. “Not even when you found out your vasectomy had failed?” she asks incredulously. “And not when, every day, he looked more and more like your baby pictures?”
“No,” I agree. “Because it wasn’t about you.”
Her neck tilts slightly. “What do you mean?”
My response gets stuck in my throat. The sun glitters off the surface of the water behind her, encircling her blonde head in a shimmering halo. She looks like an angel. Like the dawn after a long night.
Like hope.
“My mom left my dad for another guy,” I say, mentally cringing at the banality of it, of blaming anything at all on my mother. “It destroyed Pop, and it fucked me up.” I force myself to keep my gaze on her. “If it could happen to him, it could happen to me. If she could betray him, you could betray me.”
Said out loud, the words sound overly simplistic, too one-dimensional to be genuine. But even though I can’t see her eyes, I can tell that Paige’s expression is one of curiosity, not dismissal, which gives me the courage to continue.
“And that feeling didn’t go away,” I confess. “It didn’t get better. It kept coming back to me, all these little snippets of memory. I overheard them fighting a lot. My mom, talking about another man and how much she loved him. Accusing my dad of working too much, never being home, not paying enough attention to her, and how she’d found someone who did. I remembered all the times she’d lock herself in the bedroom to talk on the phone. How my dad worked weekends a lot, and she’d find someone to babysit me, probably so she could meet him.”
Miserably, I finish with, “All that shit, it was in my head all the time, feeding my paranoia. It constantly gave me new ideas for what kind of suspicious behavior to watch out for in you.”
A faint noise comes from her throat, a muffled protest. “And that seemed reasonable to you?”
I shake my head. “No. I was beyond reason.”
She pauses, and then she emphasizes, “Was.”
“Yeah. As in, it’s in the past.” I tear off my sunglasses and let them dangle from my hand between my knees. Because she needs to see my face, needs to see and understand that what I’m about to say is the undiluted truth. “I don’t feel that way anymore, Paige. It’s done. I know you didn’t cheat on me. I know you never would’ve.”
Her throat working, she’s silent for so many heavy, painful thuds of my heart, for so many seconds of me holding my breath, that I start growing light-headed.
“How did you figure all of that out?” she asks at last, weakly.
Sitting up straight, I lean back against the cushion, spreading my arms out on the railing. “That counselor we talked to, Sharon Lorentz?” At her nod, I go on. “I’ve been seeing her by myself since we split up. It’s helped a lot.”
She turns to watch the twinkling water, and in profile, I can see her eyes blinking profusely. “Why didn’t you tell me this stuff sooner?”
“At what point would you have been willing to hear it?” Hers was a fair question, but I’m pretty sure so is mine. Neither of us have spent much time in an open-minded, diplomatic mood over the past couple of years.
Opening her mouth as if to respond, she appears to have second thoughts, eventually clamping it shut again and ducking her head, staying silent for a long time. And I just sit there, watching her and saying nothing further.
Defense rests.
“Can we swim? I wanna swim,” she says at last, standing up and stretching, which means she’s pushing out her tits and ass. Blood drains from my head—and it’s not just from the sudden change
of topic.
“Water’s really cold,” I feel obliged to warn even though it goes against my religion to discourage her from taking her clothes off.
“Scared you’ll freeze your balls off?” she asks with a smirk, and while I narrow my eyes at her, she wrenches off her tank top, revealing the bikini top beneath. Hooking her thumbs into the waistband of her shorts, she pushes them down, baring all of her glorious, gorgeous skin save for what’s covered by a modest triangle of fabric.
Goddamn. Heat flows straight to my groin, stirring my dick to life. Regret slices through me that I was in too much of a hurry last night to undress her. It’s been too fucking long since I’ve seen her naked. Her playful mood is also unexpected, encouraging me, giving way to a stupid and raw encouragement that I can’t suppress.
As she reaches up and uses an elastic band to put her hair up in a messy bun, I rake my gaze down her body, zeroing in on the faint pale line just above the hem of her bikini bottoms. Her battle scar. After two uncomplicated deliveries of our girls, she had to have an emergency Caesarean with Elliott. It was the cherry on top of the shit sundae that was her third pregnancy, and yeah, I blame myself. She was stressed the whole time, and that was my fault.
And of course she saw the C-section as a personal failure. My wife prided herself on being the valedictorian of childbirth up until then. The only part of that ordeal she didn’t regret was getting her tubes tied during her procedure.
Just one more item on a long list of crap I need to atone for.
I stand up as she tosses her sunglasses onto the lounge seat, climbs up on the railing, and unceremoniously dives in. Guess I’ll be doing the same, even though I’m pretty sure it’s going to suck. In fact, I didn’t even bring any swim trunks on this excursion, even though Paige brought towels, and of course, I told her she was nuts.
So I ditch my shoes, socks, shirt, and shorts, and then I find myself following her wearing only my boxer briefs.
When the water envelops me, it feels like a physical assault. In a split second, I’m frozen to the bones, and when I break the surface, gasping, I exclaim, “Shit!”
Mend (Waters Book 2) Page 27