First Down

by Paula Mabbel

  “I saw the article,” he commented as soon as he’d let me know it was him. “You did a great job.”

  “It’s what I do,” I answered curtly, not ready to really talk to him.

  “Tanya, I want to…”

  “Save it,” I stopped him. “Not my business.”

  “Look, can we meet for drinks tonight?” he asked, my heart skipping a beat at the idea before my brain kicked in and reminded me he was married. “As friends. Not a date,” he corrected.

  “I don’t think that’s a very good idea.” Speaking words I didn’t mean, I kept my voice steady. “Hadley would probably prefer you come home.”

  “Please?” he asked again. “Give me a chance to explain.”

  “It’s not my business, Brant,” I reminded him once more.

  “I like you,” he told me. “I enjoyed talking to you. I’d like to at least be friends.”

  I wanted to go. Even knowing I felt wrong about it, I still wanted it. It didn’t have to be a bad thing. He’d said “friends.” I could do friends and still feel good about myself, right? Even if I was imagining all the things I’d like to do to my new friend?

  “Okay,” I agreed. “Once. Where and when?”

  Jotting down the place and time, I made a mental note to ask for a rain check with Pam. I wasn’t sure just how to do that without telling her, but I couldn’t just stand her up.

  *****

  “How do I look?” I asked, and Pam nodded her approval, refusing to speak. “Okay, spill it.”

  “Spill what?” she asked, grabbing a piece of candy from the dish on my dresser and focusing on the wrapper rather than me.

  “Whatever it is that you aren’t saying,” I told her, sitting down on the edge of my bed in the hopes that she’d confess. “I know there is something and it’s going to come out eventually.”

  “Nothing really,” she began. “I just worry about you.”

  “Why?” The question didn’t really need an answer. I already knew.

  “This,” she waved her hand. “You’ve been spending a lot of time with him, Tanya. I’m not sure it’s a good thing.”

  “We are friends,” I reminded her, hoping she’d drop it. I wouldn’t be so lucky.

  “He’s married.” The reminder was like a knife in the gut.

  “Married men can have friends. We happen to have a lot in common,” I argued. It was true.

  “You don’t worry about how you look for dinner with a buddy, especially a married one.”

  “It’s not a happy marriage,” I parroted back a part of what he’d told me.

  “Then he should leave.”

  “It’s complicated,” I said, reminding myself more than her.

  “Is that how his wife would feel?”

  “There’s nothing going on, Pam. We are having dinner. Talking. Nothing more.”

  “Perhaps,” she agreed, somewhat reluctantly. “But intimacy is more than sex. How would she view what you are doing? Does she know?”

  Pam was right and I knew it. Brant needed to tend to things at home, not avoid them. I also knew that I was right. We weren’t crossing lines, at least none that I could recall. Yes, there was attraction. Neither of us had acted on it. We’d just developed a friendship and left it at that.

  It was something my best friend would never really understand. Sometimes I wasn’t sure if I did. What I did know was that, whatever it was, I needed it. It was important to me.

  “It’s just friendship. Stop worrying.” I smiled and grabbed my keys. “I’m off. I’ll tell you about it later.”

  I didn’t really give her time to ask any more questions or convince me that I was doing a bad thing. I didn’t want to think of that side of things. I enjoyed his friendship. I loved his company. I wasn’t going to tell myself the long list of reasons that I shouldn’t have both.

  Grabbing a cab to the restaurant, I pushed any negativity out of my head. I wasn’t doing anything wrong, and I wasn’t going to believe I was. It was friendship. Something we both needed.

  “You look beautiful.” Brant stood as I walked up to the table. Quickly, he ordered a bottle of wine and stepped around to push my chair in. “How has your day been?”

  “Well, the life of a society pages reporter is grueling, but I survived.” A quick smile from Brant let me know he appreciated my humor.

  “You look troubled,” he commented, waiting for me to explain. I wasn’t sure if I could.

  On our first night of drinks, Brant had apologized for everything that’d happened at the party. He’d confessed that he felt drawn to me. He told me he was attracted to me. That all of it had been honest.

  I had asked him about Hadley and why he’d failed to mention her. That was when his head had dropped and he’d told me his story, the one that Pam considered a shitty excuse.

  Hadley was the girl from high school who’d never noticed him. He was poor. He was nobody. She was top of the food chain. He explained that he hadn’t really stayed hung up on her. He’d joined the military and had plenty of experiences with women. It was nothing that stayed in the back of his mind like this great big “what if.”

  Then he’d come home. He’d gotten the inheritance and life was different. He had money. He had anything he could want. But he spent his time reliving those experiences. Readjusting to the normal world was hard.

  He’d found himself in counseling and trying to deal with the trauma he’d seen and been through. At the same time, he was attempting to get himself off the ground with the company he’d started and working on making some type of normal life.

  The press had been all over him. They still were. So trying to date or even just hook up was damned near impossible.

  Hadley had shown up at some big gala his company hosted. It was the first time he’d seen her since high school. She was still beautiful. She’d come to him and they’d spent the evening talking.

  He’d learned that she was more than her appearance. She was very intelligent and seemed interested in all of the same things. He was lonely and struggling. The relationship just moved quickly from there.

  It wasn’t until a year or so into their marriage that he discovered that many of those interests she had shown were not real. She didn’t care about the same things. She cared about basically what I spent my time writing about. Society nonsense.

  He’d brought up divorce several times, but never had the heart to go through with it. Hadley’s reputation meant everything to her. She didn’t want to be divorced at a young age and viewed as undesirable.

  As he told me, he was a man of morals and principles. He’d been the one to make the decision and he was going to live with what that meant.

  “Not once have I ever thought about straying from my obligations,” he had told me as we sipped on cocktails that night. “Until you.”

  Yes, it sounded bad. It was almost like every excuse you hear from married men who cheat. You are special. You are different. I’m unhappy at home. Yet somehow, I still believed him.

  We’d agreed to keep it on a friend level. We’d agreed not to explore the attraction we both felt. And we had stuck to that. The problem was that the more time we spent together, the more I realized how much I cared. The physical attraction had turned to emotional, and I was beginning to think Pam was right.

  “Tanya,” he brought me back out of my thoughts. “Is everything okay?”

  “Does Hadley know we do this?” The question popped out before I could filter and block it. Guess my mind really needed the answer.

  *****

  “So much for that promise,” I laughed, rolling over and looking at Brant.

  As I’d expected, he’d answered my question with a no. It had led into a conversation about why, provoking confessions I didn’t quite expect.

  He didn’t want her to know because deep inside he knew it wasn’t as innocent as he would tell her it was. His heart was involved. He may not have acted on it, but he wanted it to be so much more than friendship. Hadley would want it
to stop and he wasn’t quite sure he could give her that. So he avoided it.

  Pam would have been disappointed in me. Not because I stayed, but because I was happy that he felt that way. I didn’t want to lose it either. Mostly I was grateful that he was honest with me even when he knew it could ruin everything. He still told me the truth.

  So I didn’t leave. Instead we enjoyed dinner, discussed an organization he planned to start and had a few too many drinks. Those drinks led us to the dance floor, only bringing our bodies closer than we’d expected. After a short time, our feelings took control and before I realized what was happening he was opening the door to a hotel room and we were walking inside together.

  “I’m sorry.” His face showed remorse, but his eyes did not. My mom always told me the best way to know the truth about a man was to look into his eyes. She was right. “This wasn’t very good of me.”

  “I’m pretty sure I was here, too,” I reminded him, snuggling my head against his shoulder. “It sure as hell felt like I was here.”

  “So what do we do now?”

  “Prepare,” I laughed. “I’m pretty sure we are going to hell after this.”

  “I’d rather be in hell with you, than in heaven with anyone else,” he whispered as he kissed the top of my head.

  “Do they teach you those cheesy lines in the military, or was that a Brant Wells original?”

  “It’s honest,” he spoke. “Tanya, I don’t know what to do about any of this. I am not this man. But what I feel for you…I can’t just pretend it isn’t there.”

  “I guess we just take it day to day, see what happens.”

  “You deserve better than this,” he mumbled, sitting up and looking down at his hands. “She deserves better than this.”

  “You will sort it out, Brant.” Wrapping an arm around him, I leaned in closer. “Don’t worry about me. I made my decisions. I will live with them.”

  “We should probably say we aren’t going to see each other anymore.”

  “Probably.”

  “We should agree that this will never happen again,” he continued.

  “Yes, we should.”

  “We should get dressed and leave and chalk it up to a lot of drinking and a bad decision.”

  “That’s exactly what we should do.”

  He looked over at me, sadness filling his face.

  “I can’t do that, Tanya,” he confessed. “I can’t stop seeing you. I want it to happen again. I don’t think it was a bad decision.”

  “I know,” I nodded. Standing up, I looked for the clothes I’d thrown around the room in the heat of passion. “I can’t either.”

  “I think I love you.” His words caught me off guard. “I think I love you and I think I can’t stop loving you.”

  “Then how about we stop worrying about what we should do,” I suggested. The completely wrong thing. “Let’s just take it one day at a time and let it sort itself out.”

  “It’s wrong,” he argued.

  “Well, we’ve already been wrong once….actually twice, but who’s counting,” I laughed. “You know what they say…go big or go home.”

  “Speaking of home,” he stood, allowing me a moment to admire his body in the daylight. God, he was sexy. “I really should…”

  “I know, Brant,” I nodded. “We need to go.”

  The cab ride home was too silent. The driver didn’t speak. There was no music. Just me, lost in thought. Not always a good thing.

  I told myself that I’d be fine. This was going to be okay. I hadn’t done anything wrong. It wasn’t wrong to love someone -- to want someone.

  I found out quickly I was easier to convince than Pam.

  “Well, she decides to come in at ten in the morning,” her stern voice showed me that she was worried, likely about more than my late arrival and safety.

  “What are you still doing here?” I laughed. “That bored at home?”

  “That worried,” she corrected.

  “Nothing to worry about, Pammy,” I walked to the coffee pot and found she’d already brewed some. “Thanks for the coffee.”

  “I figured you’d need it.”

  “Definitely,” I answered.

  “Want to go back to our conversation now? Tell me how you aren’t doing anything? It’s just friendship? No lines are being crossed? Because I call bullshit. Unless you left the married guy at the restaurant and spent your night with a complete stranger.”

  “Pam, this isn’t…”

  “What it looks like?” she interrupted. “You were gone all night. You are coming home in the same clothes. You look…happy. I’d say it’s probably what it looks like.”

  “I was going to say ‘your business.’” I turned angrily. “It is my choice how to live my life. You are my friend, not my conscience.”

  “I see.” She grabbed her things. “Then I’ll just go and let you live with your decisions. No need for me to worry about you, right? You got this.”

  Walking out, she slammed the door behind her. In that moment I knew that everything in my world was about to change. I just wasn’t sure how much.

  *****

  “How does this happen?” I cried, not quite sure what the hell I was going to do.

  “Well, when two people…”

  “Pam, stop! This isn’t a joke.”

  “You asked,” she laughed. “What do you mean ‘how’?”

  “We were careful. We didn’t….I mean we always…how the hell can this be? Maybe it’s wrong. I bet that’s it. I got a faulty test. It isn’t right. I’ll go to the store now and…” I was grabbing my keys when Pam reached and held my arm.

  “Tanya,” she spoke softly, “calm down. It’s going to be okay.”

  “Okay?” I looked at her. “I’m pregnant! How is that okay?”

  “Many women do it every day,” she offered, her idea of support. “You have a good job. A nice home. A supportive family. And if I do say so myself, a spectacular best friend. You will be fine. The baby will be fine. You will be a good mother.”

  Sinking in to the couch, I began to cry.

  “Until it realizes its father is a married man,” I moaned.

  “At least you love the father,” she tried to cheer me up. “That’s more than most can say anymore.”

  “That doesn’t help,” I reminded her.

  “Maybe he will be happy?” she offered. “You said he’s miserable in his marriage. He loves you. Maybe this will make him happy.”

  “Are you fucking kidding me, Pam? You think I’m going to tell him?”

  “Why would you not tell him?” Her shock surprised me.

  How could she think I would tell him? He was married. He had a life. He was in the news almost daily. An illegitimate baby was not going to be beneficial to his life. Come to think of it, this was not going to be particularly beneficial to mine either. I could see the reputation-ruining headline now:

  Society Reporter Knocked Up By Married Man She Interviews

  “He’s married. He’s well known. Practically a celebrity around here. It’d ruin him,” I told her as if it were obvious.

  “I didn’t say put it in the paper,” she snapped. “He’s the father. He has a right to know.”

  “It wasn’t supposed to happen,” I told her. “It was an accident.”

  “He will understand that,” she tried to convince me. “He’s intelligent.”

  “No. This was my stupidity. I will deal with it.”

  “Deal with it?”

  “I don’t know Pam. Okay? I don’t know what I will do. I am not sure how I will handle any of this. I just fucking found out. Give me some time.”

  “Okay.” She grabbed her things. “Take some time. But remember that it is not that baby’s fault what you guys chose to do. It deserves to know its father.”

  Listening to the door slam, I realized Pam had left angry a lot in recent times. My fault. She was watching me fuck my entire life up and had I listened to her I wouldn’t be in this situation. I made a
mental note to be a better friend, and then I curled my knees up to my chin and completely broke down.

  My mother would be ashamed of me. Unmarried and pregnant was bad enough. The father being a married man would crush her. I could hear her words as I cried.

  “I raised you better than that! How could you be messin’ with what ain’t yours?”

  I wouldn’t have words. It’s not like I didn’t know what I was doing. I knew he was married. I chose to continue. I pushed the boundaries. I went in that room with him. I continued the affair for what had been a few months. I made those choices knowing there was a wife at home who knew nothing.

  *****

  The phone ringing drowned out the sound of the movie, a minor annoyance in what had become a very frustrating life.

  Pam and I were decked out in pajamas and having an old-fashioned slumber party. We had thought it’d be fun. More specifically, she was afraid I was going to go off the deep end if she weren’t up my ass constantly.

  Five months along and I was an ornery bitch, but I wasn’t suicidal or crazy. Overall, I’d made the most of it. I hadn’t even cried much in recent days.

  “Him?” she asked, knowing I’d know what she meant. I just nodded and continued to avoid the phone. “Gonna answer?” A quick glance at her shut her up.

  Brant wasn’t taking things very well. Of course he didn’t know the important parts. I’d decided against Pam’s wishes to never tell him. It had been hard, but I knew it’d happen.

  I’d been very lucky to spend so long without showing. The doctors claimed it was good health that kept the weight off. The baby, I’d found out it was a girl, was doing just fine.

  Not having a baby bump had allowed me to continue life as normal and not tell anyone. Even my job didn’t know. So I’d also never told Brant, and he’d never noticed, even as much time as we spent undressed.

  Then it’d happened. I’d seen the small pooch of my tummy and I’d known. Life was about to change. I was going to have to do something.

  Work was easy. I’d claimed some personal problems and worked out an arrangement to do my job from home. No one would ever know the difference.