by Claire Kent
She felt Seth tense up momentarily beside her, and she suddenly realized something she hadn’t before.
“Oh. I called you that before, didn’t I?”
Seth’s gaze was quiet and unreadable, with something vaguely soft underlying it. “You did.”
Erin squirmed a little bit, irrationally embarrassed at this unconscious slip. But, after a moment, she decided it wasn't that big a deal. She remembered their conversation in the elevator several months ago, when Seth had been taking her to the hospital when she’d had that virus from hell—it seemed like ages ago now.
She tried to make light of her unconscious endearment. “And you said that no one called you baby.”
Her attempt at teasing didn’t work. Seth’s expression didn’t change, except to grow deeper, more intimate.
And all the lingering amusement faded from Erin completely, leaving that same tender ache in her heart.
Seth said, “No one ever has before.”
Eighteen
At just after five o’clock on the following morning, Seth walked Erin out to her car, which was parked in front of the old house. He was holding a sleepy Mackenzie, and Erin was carrying her stuff.
“You’re going back to your father’s?” Seth asked, when they paused in front of the car.
“Yeah. We’ll spend the morning there and then head back to the city.” She was tired, but not overly so. It was ridiculously early in the morning, but she’d woken up and decided she wanted to get back before her father got up.
Although he obviously knew where she’d spent the night, she’d still feel strange coming back from a night with Seth while her father was reading the paper and drinking his morning coffee.
Seth looked fully alert, despite the early hour. He’d pulled on a pair of pants and the t-shirt he’d been wearing the previous evening, and he certainly appeared more pulled together than Erin did in her wrinkled clothes and messy hair.
He didn’t seem tired, but he was unusually quiet this morning and a little withdrawn. Erin wondered how much of it had to do with what had happened between them the previous night.
“All right,” Seth murmured, kissing Mackenzie, who now appeared to be asleep, and handing her back to Erin. “I’ll call you later.”
Erin put Mackenzie in the car seat and made sure the baby was securely fastened before she stood up to face Seth again. “Okay,” she said, feeling a nervous clench as she looked at his distant face.
She’d felt so close to him last night, and now he seemed to be pulling away.
Not wanting things to get weird between them again, Erin raised a hand and placed her palm on his chest. “Seth? Are you all right?”
Seth met her eyes and his mouth tilted up. “Should I try to count how many times you’ve asked me that in the last twenty-four hours?”
Erin giggled, relieved at the brief flash of ironic humor—proof that he wasn’t emotionally closing down on her after all. Giving him a sheepish look, she slid her hand down a little farther, until it was curved around one side of his waist. “I guess I have been asking it a lot, but you seem kind of quiet this morning.”
“Are you implying that I normally babble too much?” His voice was dry and even, but Erin could tell that it was just a ruse. He was slightly tense, uncomfortable. And his eyes seemed as guarded as they’d been during the first few months of her pregnancy.
She gave a faint, appreciative smile. “I believe most of the babbling falls on my shoulders. But I’m serious. You seem... Is everything all ri—” She stopped herself before she asked the question again, but she peered up at his face anxiously.
Seth smiled faintly. “Are you all right?”
When she saw it was a genuine question, she answered honestly. “Of course. A little sore. But last night was so good.”
“So it was really what you wanted?”
She realized what he was worried about. “Yes. I wanted it. It was what both of us needed.”
They stared at each other for a minute. Then she stood on her tiptoes and pressed a soft kiss onto the side of his mouth. “I’d better get going. I’ll talk to you later.”
Seth nodded and opened the car door for her. “I’ll call you this evening.”
As Erin drove away, she could see him in her rearview mirror—standing on the side of the long driveway, watching them drive away.
***
“So you and Seth actually...” Liz paused abruptly, obviously rephrasing her sentence after a guilty glance over at Mackenzie. “…did it? Again?”
Erin pressed her lips together, her cheeks burning. She didn’t know why she’d been feeling so embarrassed recently about her relationship with Seth. She’d never been particularly self-conscious about men or sex before. She and Liz had shared details about sexual encounters for years. But, for the last month or two, Erin had felt like blushing whenever she referred to anything intimate regarding Seth.
She cleared her throat. Pulled Mackenzie’s hand away from the fistful of her hair the baby was pulling. “Yes. We did.”
Liz looked torn between amusement, surprise, and delight. “Well, well, well,” she began, a familiar taunt in her voice. “So what exactly is going on between the two of you?”
Mackenzie babbled happily and incoherently, and she made another grab for Erin’s hair. They were eating an early dinner in a sandwich shop near Erin’s apartment, and it had only been two days since the weekend with Seth.
Her daughter had been good while Erin and Liz were eating, but then she’d started getting fussy and restless, so Erin had moved her to her lap and was idly playing with her while she chatted with Liz.
Trying to distract Mackenzie with her baby spoon instead of Erin’s hair, she gave a shrug in response to Liz’s question. “I don’t really know.”
“So are you changing your mind about him?” Liz persisted, leaning forward.
“I don’t think so,” Erin admitted, feeling that guilty ache in her belly at the thought. “I don’t know. I mean, if we were in a normal relationship, then I guess I’d think things were progressing well. But I’m just scared that whatever progress we make still won’t take us to...where he wants us to be.”
Liz’s eyebrows arched up. “And where’s that?”
As she was squirming, Mackenzie accidentally kicked Erin in the stomach, making her grunt softly in surprise. “Don’t be obtuse, Liz.”
They were distracted from the conversation by a beep of Liz’s phone. She glanced at it idly but then did a double-take at whatever she saw on the screen.
She clicked on something, and her entire body froze.
“What is it?” Erin asked, concerned by her sister’s reaction.
“This link was just sent to me. It’s Mary Carlyle’s…”
She sounded so upset as she trailed off that Erin just took the phone out of her hand.
She stared down at the screen. There was no story this time. Just a photo and a provocative question: “Has Seth Thomas moved on?”
The picture was of Seth in the hallway of a fancy apartment building or hotel, and he wasn’t alone.
He was with a gorgeous, slender blonde—one that Erin recognized as working in the mayor’s office.
Seth’s arm was around the woman, and she was smiling up at him seductively, her hand disappearing inside his suit jacket. A suit that looked very much like the one he’d been wearing yesterday when he’d dropped by her apartment in the evening, before he’d left for what he’d called a “dinner meeting.”
Erin blinked. Felt her throat close up. Started to shake inwardly. Had absolutely no words.
“That bastard,” Liz muttered, finally finding a voice.
Mackenzie must have been able to sense Erin’s distress because the baby’s face screwed up and she let out a few whimpers.
Then she burst into deafening squalls.
Erin couldn’t seem to think. Couldn’t seem to move. Couldn’t seem to breathe. She instinctively pulled her daughter closer and jostled her a little, but she
couldn’t begin to murmur anything comforting.
Never in her life had Erin been so utterly stunned—so utterly without words.
It wasn’t a crisis or a real trauma. Certainly not a life-or-death situation. But it had leveled her in a way she could never remember being leveled before.
She wanted to laugh bitterly from the sheer, exquisite irony of it all.
Irony had always been her oldest of friends.
For some reason, though, Erin found herself incapable of laughing it off.
“Erin,” Liz was saying. “Are you all right? What do you want me to do?”
She couldn’t respond to any of those questions.
After a minute, Mackenzie finally quieted into pitiful sniffs and whimpers. Erin rocked the baby against her.
The more she processed the situation, the more she was able to move past her first stunned and agonized response.
Nothing was ever as simple as it seemed.
And some things weren’t what they seemed at all.
So Erin was finally able to meet Liz’s eyes, in control of herself again. She actually thought she could see something clearly for once.
“Erin,” Liz said again, pulling her chair a little closer. “The picture...Seth. Wait until I get my hands on that fu—freaking...butthole.”
“I think in this case you can save your outrage. I don’t think this is what it seems.”
Liz drew her brows together. “What do you mean? Seth and that woman. And evidently he spent the night with her.”
Erin didn’t feel quite as casual as she sounded, but she was starting to feel a strange kind of confidence growing from the storm of her initial emotions. “Yeah. That’s what the story said. But what kind of source is Mary Carlyle? I’m not going to react until I talk to Seth about it.”
Liz was staring at Erin like she was an alien. “Seriously? You think he’ll tell you the truth? If he’s really been sleeping around behind your back—”
Erin shook her head urgently. “See, that’s the thing. I don’t think he has been.”
“What? That picture—”
“Was in a hallway, not a bedroom. His arm was around her, but nothing else. They could mean anything.” As she spoke, Erin became more and more certain that she needed to wait before she completely freaked out. “We don’t have enough information, and I don’t think Seth would have done this.”
Staring at her incredulously, Liz asked, "Why not?"
Erin felt herself blushing, behind the flush of all the other emotions. She looked down self-consciously at the table in front of her. “He loves me.”
Liz looked a little uncomfortable. “I know that,” she said, her voice obviously an attempt to be comforting and reasonable at the same time. “But sometimes a person can love someone and still have sex with someone else. And, if we think about Seth’s history, it doesn’t exactly lend itself to—”
“I know,” Erin interrupted, feeling a rush of anxiety that she immediately talked herself out of. “I’m not saying it’s out of his character completely. Who knows what anyone would do if they’re pushed in certain ways. I’m just saying I don’t think he did this now.”
“But you’re not together.”
Erin wished Liz would shut up, although she knew that her sister was just trying to prepare her for the worst—as an act of kindness and support.
The thing was, for once, Erin wasn’t expecting the worst and didn’t want to start expecting it.
“You keep telling Seth you don’t love him, so maybe he wants to try to move on.”
“It’s possible. But I think he would have said something to me first, if he’d changed his mind about...about me.”
Liz’s voice was almost hushed now. “Is he normally open about such things?”
Seth wasn’t open about such things. He wasn’t open about anything.
But Erin—however unreasonably, however much her cynicism and sense might tell her that he could have easily sought some sort of solace and power by fucking another woman—still didn’t think that he had.
A shaky kind of peace had settled over her. One that could be rattled at any moment and one that left her fingers trembling as they held on to her daughter. But a peace nonetheless.
Erin's mind and heart and instinct had settled into a tense, waiting quiet. An eye-of-the-storm kind of thing.
“Erin? Are you sure you’re all right? You handling this so calmly and maturely is kind of freaking me out. Are you about to have a breakdown or something?”
Erin huffed with what wasn’t quite real laughter. Mackenzie was warm and substantial in her arms, and Erin clung to her—couldn’t even imagine what it had been like to not have her daughter to hug. “I don’t think so. It’s weird, isn’t it? But I think I’m all right. I’m going to wait until I talk to Seth.”
“And will you have the breakdown afterwards?”
“I hope not. Like I said, I think the picture is misleading in some way. Mary Carlyle isn’t a good source.”
Erin sat with her daughter in her arms, at a corner table in the quiet sandwich shop. It felt like her world had changed in some way during the last five minutes, although she couldn’t exactly name what had changed.
It was bizarre, surreal, and almost frightening, but it felt like something had shifted in her universe.
Liz was silent for a long time, just watching Erin anxiously, uncertainly.
Until finally Liz said, very softly, “What will you do if this is what it looks like?”
“I told you. I don’t think—”
“But what if it is?” Liz repeated, in almost a whisper.
Erin’s tenuous calm vanished for a moment as she unwillingly acknowledged the possibility. Put herself in the position of hearing Seth tell her that he’d actually fucked another woman last night.
And Erin could feel it. All of it. Knew exactly how she’d react to hearing it and was almost overwhelmed by the pain of it.
Her face twisted as she tried to control her rising emotions. “He has the right to do what he wants,” she forced out, her voice thin and unnatural. “It would be fine.”
“You know, it doesn’t look like it would be fine. It looks like it would be...devastating.”
Erin's shoulders shook a few times, and she squeezed her eyes shut before she got control of her emotions again—not wanting to overreact before she knew the whole story and not wanting to upset her daughter again. Sniffing and then opening her eyes, she managed to speak, her voice wavering but clearer than before.
“It would be,” she admitted. “For me. I would be really upset. But there’s nothing keeping Seth from doing so, and what kind of heartless bi—witch would I be if I tried to stop him from moving on? But, of course, I’d be upset. I’ve built this whole chapter of my life with Seth in it, with him functioning in this certain role, and without him...”
Erin was slammed with another flood of emotion as she pictured a life without the Seth who had somehow moved, with Mackenzie, to the center of her existence.
She had no idea when that had happened, but couldn't deny that he was.
At the center of her life.
“So you’ll just be sad that things have changed? That Seth isn’t as big a part of your life as he’d been before?”
Erin groaned. Hated this conversation. Didn’t want to think about all of this. Wanted to go home and have a short, private cry. Then call up Seth and figure out what had happened.
But she knew Liz’s questions were good ones. Were true ones. Were ones that she really needed to think about. So she made herself answer them, no matter how it felt like they were ripping her apart.
“No. Of course not. It would be a lot more than that. If Seth really did this, I’d be broken, and furious, and betrayed, and...and...broken.” She sucked in a painful breath in a harsh gust. “I know that’s not fair, but that’s how I’d feel. I’ve slept with him twice in the last week and a half, and he’s professed to love me for the last six months. And I care about him so m
uch. I’d be...broken.”
The words had started pouring out in an agonized rush, and Erin’s eyes burned painfully. Darting a glance over to Liz’s sympathetic face, Erin concluded in an embarrassed quaver, “He has every right to move on, and I can't blame him if he does, but it’s felt for so long like he’s…”
“He’s what?” Liz breathed.
“He’s mine.”
There was a thick silence at the table. Erin closed her eyes and breathed deeply, trying to find her waiting calm again.
“Erin,” Liz began carefully. “All this sounds pretty deep. Are you thinking now about changing your answer to him?”
“No,” Erin mumbled, confused and overwhelmed. “Maybe. I don’t know. It might be too late anyway. I need to think about this some more.”
Something changed on Liz’s face—almost lit up—but Erin was too drained and bewildered to know what had prompted it.
Then Liz said, an edge of something in her voice, “Well, as much as I hate to say it, if Seth has moved on, I think he’s picked a pretty good woman. From every account, that woman is not just gorgeous and successful. She’s also smart and really nice.”
Erin’s vision whited out for a second in a wave of rage and jealousy. Her whole body clenched up as she visualized the blonde again—that elegant hand disappearing into Seth’s suit coat. Those hands all over Seth.
Erin’s Seth.
Slammed with instinctive, visceral fury, Erin wanted to scratch the woman’s eyes out.
Then maybe Liz’s—for saying such a thing.
Erin turned on her sister with a snarl. “What?”
Liz bit her lip, to hold back...something. “Oh. Sorry. Just checking something. Damn.”
“Liz,” Erin said reproachfully, covering up Mackenzie’s ears—too late, of course.
“Sorry. Slipped out. Stress does that to me, and your relationship with Seth has been very stressful for me.”
Erin watched her sister suspiciously for a minute, but then relaxed and leaned back in her chair. “Anyway, I should get home so I can call Seth. All of this is probably pointless, since I don’t think Seth would have moved on without telling me first.”