I Loved You First

by Suzanne Enoch

  “I have two degrees in ‘this,’” Ned told her. “And why would I talk about that? You weren’t interested in my plans when you left. I assumed you wouldn’t be interested now.”

  Well, that point was pointed.

  “General human interest? The whole ‘catching up’ conversation,” she said, sitting on the bottom step of her staircase. “Filling the awkward silence?”

  “I don’t know if I’m ready for that yet,” he said. “I am sorry for what I said earlier, because I shouldn’t have shouted at you like that. I always told myself if I saw you again, I would be an adult about it, show you that you hadn’t hurt me, that you’d missed out on a mature, successful adult man. And I failed pretty miserably at that, I guess.”

  He flopped down on the stairs next to her, a boneless habit that had driven her crazy when they’d dated. He took out his phone and tapped numbers into the calculator app.

  Finally, he looked up at her. “It’s not going to be easy. And it’s not going to be cheap…and I’m not sure how long it’s going to take me.”

  “That’s a lot of ‘nots,’” she said as he handed her the phone. She grimaced at the sum shown. “And that is a lot of digits.”

  He grimaced. “Um, that’s just a rough guess. There could be other expenses, as I take the house apart. I could find problems we don’t know about. I could bring on other restorationists, call in some favors from people who would want to do the work just for the chance to work on a house like this, but that could still increase the cost. Do you have enough to cover that?”

  He nodded to the calculator.

  “I think so,” she said, mentally estimating what she might get for her emergency jewelry stash and wincing. There was so much wincing. “Maybe.”

  He sighed, pinching the bridge of his long, straight nose. “I will probably regret this.”

  She wanted to nudge him with her shoulder, like she used to. But she got the distinct impression than they were not at that place yet. “If it makes you feel better, I regret it already.”

  “That does make me feel a little better,” he said, turning and pinning her with his most serious expression. “I will work on this house. But you have to help me. You will pound nails and paint and lift and tote whatever I say.”

  “This could take months,” she told him. “You want to trap yourself in this probably haunted wreck of a house on an isolated island with me for months? Have you even seen a horror movie?”

  “Well, I get to leave at night,” he said. “And you don’t, so…yeah, I can live with that.”

  “That’s not nice,” she told him.

  To her surprise, he leaned against her side, bumping shoulders with her. It was the first time he’d touched her in twenty years and she felt it in every cell in her body. It was as if she had been in a coma and someone plunged a needle full of adrenaline into her heart. She was suddenly awake and aware of every sound and scent. Her eyes went wide and she inhaled sharply, that damn cedar scent flooding her lungs. He leaned closer, his nose bumping hers. It was so familiar and so alien to everything she’d known for decades. She knew those lips, their shape and the way they would slant against hers, and she knew that it would feel more real than every kiss of her marriage—even those heady early years when she loved Bash. She wondered if her husband had ever loved her back.

  Why was she thinking of her soon-to-be-ex right now? It was probably a sign she didn’t need to be kissing Ned. Before she could say so, he broke away from her. She couldn’t help the way her mouth followed his as he moved. Her rational brain could only control so much.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “Wait, I’m not sorry. You kissed me…and I shouldn’t have kissed back, because we’re just drunk on the nostalgia of seeing each other again. This isn’t real. It’s a stress response. At least, for me.”

  Ned groaned, tilting his head against the stair rail. “I can’t believe I let myself fall for it again. I can’t do this with you. Not if you’re just going to leave. I can’t live through losing you all over again, Ana.”

  “Well, who says that you would lose me?”

  “So you’re saying you would want to stay? That this isn’t some sort of rebound revenge sex to soothe your ego after what your husband did to you?”

  “Trust me, at this point, this is anything but soothing for my self-esteem. That’s not what this is!”

  “Then what is it?” he demanded.

  “I don’t know, it’s not like there are guidebooks for how to gracefully reconnect with the ‘one that got away’ while going through extensive personal crises!”

  “You don’t get to call me that,” he told her, standing. “You’re the one who left. You left and your damned husband bought our house and left it to rot. And now you’re asking me to fix it for you? Do you have any idea how fucking awful that is?”

  “Yeah, and the next couple of months are going to be really rough if you’re going to throw that in my face the whole time,” she said. “We can’t do this. I can’t do this. I don’t have the emotional reserves to walk through the minefield of memories and blame and bullshit every day. So if you can’t do this, we might as well stop before we start.”

  “No!” he exclaimed, his expression shifting from angry to anxious in a blink.

  Now her brows rose. Ned really wanted to work on her house. She wasn’t entirely powerless in this situation.

  “OK, so we’re agreed that you will do this work on my house. I will keep my face away from your face. And you will stop throwing my heartless and total abandonment of you in that face at every opportunity,” she said.

  He pursed his lips. “Fine.”

  “Thank you.”

  She gestured toward the door as she opened it. He said, “I’ll get a contract to you tomorrow,” and extended his hand.

  She shook her head. “We’re not there yet.”

  He titled his head. “Funny.”

  He descended the porch steps. She was just grateful that his foot didn’t go through the wood. The tension she’d been carrying since she’d basically begged him to work on Fishscale House melted from her middle. While her situation with Ned wasn’t exactly comfortable, she wouldn’t have to walk on eggshells around him. He seemed to want access to her house far more than he wanted to avoid her. He glanced over his shoulder as he climbed into his old red truck. This was what Bash liked to call “leverage.” She waved back and worked to keep her expression neutral.

  She really needed to turn that reptilian part of her brain off if she was going to move in polite non-predatory, non-New York society.

  4

  Now that she was semi-settled on the island, there were things that Ana missed about the city—reliable wifi, her day spa, that vegan Turkish place that delivered to her building even though they weren’t technically supposed to, coffee that she didn’t have to mix from freeze-dried crystals with an old iron kettle. Her household staff. Good God, did she miss her household staff.

  She never realized how much of the tiny, annoying details of her daily life those dear, dear people protected her from—making her own food, doing her own laundry, the thousand thankless tasks that it took to maintain existence as an adult. Hell, it had taken her two hours to get the utilities switched over to her name when Larry Cooper, the local meter reader, informed her that Bash’s accountants were closing the house’s accounts.

  Those hours spent on hold gave her a lot of time to think about her character and just how much of an asshole she’d become. Those people—the ones who’d worked in her home for years, making her life easier, learning all that information about her life and her children—she wasn’t even sure she knew some of their last names. No matter how much money she’d had, she didn’t think she’d changed on the inside. She thought that she’d held onto the values her parents had instilled in her—working hard, knowing the value of money, being kind to people. She’d tried to share those same values with her children…obviously, that blew up in her face on several levels as those children
weren’t currently speaking her.

  Ana wanted to write apology letters to each and every one of her staff, like some sort of privileged twelve-step program. But she didn’t know how to contact any of them, what with the last name issues…also, she suspected that none of them would want to hear from her. And it made her more than a little sad that none of the other things she missed about her old life included people. The friends that she thought might not be calling or contacting her over social media because they were giving her space? Or maybe they thought she was too embarrassed to talk? Well, at this point, she’d figured out that they weren’t calling because they weren’t really her friends. She knew that she’d developed a tendency to hold people at a distance, after being burned by too many Housewife types, but she thought maybe she’d made connections with some of the other moms from the girls’ school…whose husbands Bash had put out of business…or maybe some of her neighbors…who Bash had sued over co-op association rules…

  Yeah, her life was a strange, toxic stew of not-quite-relationships.

  On the subject of non-relationships, Ned started work on the house on the very day she signed the contract, tearing out rotten floorboards and stairs, sanding down plaster and other messy, aggressive work that seemed to involve a lot of dust and noise. He had absolutely held her to the agreement that she would tote all of the debris to the giant garbage bin out front labeled Fitzroy Construction. There were work gloves involved and muscles that were not prepared by extensive hot yoga for this sort of exercise. But there was no talking.

  Ned communicated mostly through grunts and pointing—which was way sexier than it should have been, when combined with Ned wearing dirty, tattered jeans and a gray Fitzroy Construction t-shirt that hugged every long line of him. There were moments when she would pause in the doorway to the parlor, watching the muscles of his back work as he pried the baseboards from the walls. But then she would shake herself out of that frame of mind because that way laid madness. And Ned seemed absolutely content having nothing to do with her or her face.

  The best part was that she was exhausted and therefore, had never slept better. She couldn’t remember working so hard since those early days in New York, when her feet were so tired from waiting tables and running retail that they burned. It was good though, to lay her head on a pillow at night, feeling that she’d accomplished something. It was something that she hadn’t felt for a long time.

  She’d only ventured off the island once, bumming a ride from Nell to Grand Rapids to sell her jewelry. It was a grueling drive and she’d gotten…significantly less than she’d hoped for, but she also knew she was dealing with market forces of the Midwest. And there were drawbacks to wanting a quick sale. She had just enough to cover Ned’s estimate and her relatively minor living expenses, plus a tiny margin of error for any “extra problems” he might find.

  Going back to a larger city was strange. It had taken her very little time to get used to the quiet of Espoir again. Everything seemed too loud and too crowded. The signs were garish and too bright. She’d tried to soak up as much noise and traffic and people as she could but it felt just as foreign to her now as New York had been in the beginning.

  She was standing at her bay window, staring at the full garbage bin and contemplating the sore muscles in her back, when Ned walked up behind her.

  “I’m all done for the day,” he said, making her yelp and whack her forehead against the glass.

  “Ow!” She’d gotten so used to “silent Ned” that human speech almost sent her tumbling out a picture window.

  “Easy,” he said. “That glass is pretty old. It can’t take much in the way of headbutts.”

  “And I’m fine, thank you,” she said, glaring at him while she rubbed her forehead.

  “I figured. You’ve always been hard-headed.”

  She reconfigured her hand so just her middle finger rested on her skin.

  “Charming,” he said dryly. “I’m going to cut out early. Nell needs me to tend to the bar tonight and I need to get there before seven. She’s got her meeting over at the library.”

  “Oh, sure,” she said, rolling her neck and wincing at the crackling of her vertebrae. “What kind of meeting?”

  “The historical society. Nell’s on the board.”

  “Nell’s on the board? Is everybody from our high school class on the board?”

  Ned slipped into his jacket. “We own the oldest bar on the island. It’s in her best interest.”

  “So how do you have time to help run the pub and work on houses like this?” she asked,

  “Nell’s running things more and more these days, giving me more time to do the construction work,” he said. “If anything, I’m just part-time. I tend bar when she needs help. She’s always been better at the paperwork, the licenses and managing people, believe it or not. Also, I always order the wrong beer kegs. Drives her crazy.”

  “OK, well, I hope it goes well and you don’t…spill anything?” she suggested.

  “That works as well as anything else,” he said, opening the door. He paused there and gave her a little half-nod. “You’ve been working hard, Ana. You’re keeping up your end of the deal.”

  She smirked at the reluctant tone with which he was praising her. “You didn’t expect me to, did you?”

  He scowled. “I’m not going to hand you an ‘Employee of the Month’ plaque, woman. I’m just saying, I’ve noticed and I appreciate it.”

  “You’re welcome. I appreciate you working so hard and making the first floor look less like a Scooby Doo-style nightmare in such a short amount of time.” She sighed. “This feels like a very awkward couple’s counseling exercise.”

  “I wouldn’t know,” he said. “I’ve never been in couple’s counseling.”

  “Ohhhh, I’ve been to every marriage therapist on the Upper West Side,” she said. “I am a connoisseur of couples counseling styles—the Gottman Method, attachment therapy, narrative therapy, imago therapy. I tried it all.”

  Ned grimaced, and she got the impression that it was related to not wanting to know anything about her marriage rather than any sympathy for her. “And none of that…worked?”

  “Generally speaking, if therapy is going to save a marriage, both people need to show up for the appointments,” she said.

  “Well, that sucks.”

  “Really does,” she agreed. “So, you’re really good at all this,” she said, gesturing towards the chaos of construction.“Thank you for not sounding surprised,” he said, leaning against the door.

  “Why didn’t you tell me that you’d gone to school? Gotten all of your qualifications?” she asked.

  He rolled his eyes. “Why does it matter?”

  “It doesn’t really, I guess. Other than it’s a big part of your life and I’m interested.”

  “Because there were more options than you thought,” he said, staring through her with those frank gray eyes. “You saw your future two ways—staying on the island and being unhappy or leaving the island and having everything you wanted. We were young and you didn’t see all of the different possibilities in between. I found one of those possibilities—I left for school, saw some of the outside world, experienced something different, and realized how much I liked life here. You…you didn’t talk to me, Ana.”

  “It was no secret I was planning to leave,” she said.

  “Yeah, but you talked about it like it was ‘someday.’ Everybody we knew talked about it as ‘someday.’ Except for Dougie, of course. You could have told me it was going to be the day after we graduated high school. I went to your parents’ house and they were just sitting at the kitchen table, staring at your note. If you hadn’t left it, they might have dragged the lake for your body. You didn’t call. You didn’t write. You didn’t answer when we called or wrote to you. Did you even think about how that would make us feel, to be completely cut off like that? Did you think about me at all over the years? Or was I just some stepping stone on the ‘Ana Gustavsson path to better th
ings?’”

  “No, and yes. Too many questions at once. No, I didn’t tell you when I was leaving because I wouldn’t have been able to leave you. You would have convinced me not to go. You were the only one who had the power to do that. So I stayed away. And I didn’t come back or call or write, because you were the only one who could talk me into coming back too. It wasn’t because I didn’t think of you, it was because I thought of you too much.”

  She’d decided to diplomatically omit the part about imagining him bald and surrounded by sticky children.

  Ned pressed his lips into a thin line, nodding. “Goodnight, Ana.”

  And with that, he closed the door behind him.

  “Once again, you are a stunning conversationalist—stunned him right out of the damned house.” She sighed, lightly thumping her sore forehead against the door.

  Turning to her disarrayed, achingly quiet house—no staff, no family, not even a TV to make her feel like she had company, she was suddenly desperate to escape all that silence. She walked into the kitchen to make herself some tea and spotted the museum poster. She’d left it splayed across the kitchen table after marking it extensively with one of Ned’s red grease pencils.

  “No,” she told herself, crossing to the stove to heat water in the old iron kettle.

  There would be people there, because there was very little else happening on the island that night. And those would be people she’d known since she was a kid, some of whom would be more than happy to laugh at Ana’s misfortune. Or some of them might do worse. She’d felt like she’d sort of neutralized Nell, but that didn’t mean some other former classmate wouldn’t come out swinging.

  She would make herself some tea and try to call the girls. It was probably masochistic, considering that they’d yet to answer, but she dialed their numbers every other day, just to make sure their numbers were still in service.

  When both calls went unanswered, she opened Chloe’s Instagram. Ana was grateful, she supposed, that her oldest hadn’t blocked her there, and Ana could still see how she was enjoying London. New posts assured her that both girls were, at least, safe and functioning. She tapped on Chloe’s account, opening what appeared to be a classic “beach feet” picture—Chloe’s delicately painted coral toes peeking out over a linen beach lounge with turquoise water in the distance.