“Good, isn’t it?” Riley sits next to me. “It’s easy for men to go back to what they know.”
I beg her with pleading eyes to stop talking, but she’s not looking at me. She’s watching Vince and Leslie chat, or maybe not….It’s like she’s seeing through them and remembering something that happened to her.
“Don’t worry. It won’t last. Those two are awful together.” She downs her drink in one swallow and gestures for me to do the same. I do, wincing from the burn as she pours me a refill. “She bitched about him nonstop. He wasn’t doing enough for her. Wasn’t doing enough to her.”
“Spare me.” I do not want to picture what Vince and Leslie used to do together.
“She wanted bigger, better things than Vincent Carson. I always thought he and I could’ve had some fun.” Riley shrugs, then changes the subject so fast I get whiplash. “I have a casserole in the oven, sugar.” She bottoms out glass number two. “You may as well stick around for dinner. Get good ’n sauced and then head over there and hand him his ass.”
I sip my refill and smile. That doesn’t sound so unpleasant as I’m sinking into my moonshine buzz. I shoot the rest, and it doesn’t burn going down as much as the last one.
“What’s your story, Riley Mason?” I’m curious now that I have time to kill.
“You mean am I the local cougar hell-bent on stealing Vince away from his wife, my former friend, or do I have a deeper, less clichéd story to share?” She smiles, an attractive, strong woman over a decade my senior who drinks moonshine, loves plants, and has a secret.
Leslie’s car pulls out of the driveway and Vince waves, watches her drive away, then walks back inside. He’s smiling when he turns around, and that cuts deep. I settle in with my drink and ask for a refill. I could use a third with whatever casserole Riley is baking in there.
Chapter 27
Vince
After Leslie leaves, I venture out to see Davis for the first time in forever. I texted him and asked if I could buy him a beer. He responded with Already here and I was out the door in a flash.
Leslie showing up was unexpected, but after spending a few hours talking and sharing a pizza, I can admit it wasn’t bad. Which is unexpected in and of itself.
Davis sits at the bar at McGreevy’s Pub, wearing a suit, not unusual. What is unusual is that Grace is nowhere in sight. There’s a blond behind the bar. A blond guy.
I slide onto the stool next to Davis. “What gives?”
Picking up on my meaning, Davis shrugs, “Dunno. His name is Lars.”
“Liar.” I snort.
“Swear.” Davis makes a “scout’s honor” signal and the guy—yep, Lars, the name tag says so—stops in front of me to take my order. I give in and ask Davis where Grace is tonight.
He ignores my question and asks, “What’s up with you?”
Alrighty then, not discussing Grace.
“Leslie came by.”
“Damn. That’s a bomb. Couldn’t have given me the heads-up via text?” We watch TV, some commercial for a cheap plastic garden hose guaranteed to split in half after the third use.
“When is a wet towel more than a wet towel?” I ponder. Lars delivers my beer.
“When it’s being handed to the winner of a wet T-shirt contest?” Davis quips.
I lift my drink. “When it’s your ex-wife’s wet towel.”
“The fuck, Carson?” Davis sounds so pissed I snap my eyes to him. He’s scowling, his face reddening. His voice just above an accusatory whisper, he says, “You slept with Leslie?”
“No. Jesus. No.” I slice the air in front of me in a final manner. “No fucking way.”
Davis inhales and exhales a measured breath of relief. “I nearly seized. Don’t do that shit to me.”
“I was being metaphysical.”
“Don’t do that either.”
I tell him about how much time I’ve been spending with Jackie. About how she told me to rinse my coffee mug and I hung up the wet towel she tossed on the floor. The conversation-slash-argument about where to eat.
“That’s the worst.” Davis drops his head back on his neck so he can properly convey his dread.
“Then my ex-wife, who caused all this heartache and retrospection, shows up on my porch with a box of my CDs.”
“Who has CDs?”
“Right? Who needs CDs?” I put the box on my computer chair to sort through later, but I expect the majority of them to go directly into a donation bin at the local Salvation Army. “She stayed for a beer, then two. I ordered her favorite pizza.”
“And you didn’t fuck her?” Davis asks, but his tone is more like I better not have fucked her.
“Nothing happened. Relax.” He does, some, but he’s still frowning at me. “Anyway, I was telling her about the towel-on-the-floor thing. About Jackie. About the way I’m starting to feel.”
Davis’s scowl slides off his face and he looks more than a little impressed. I was pretty impressed with the conversation myself. I didn’t pull any punches when I talked to Leslie about my dating Jackie. I knew Leslie could take it. She wasn’t the least bit hurt over leaving me. She was the leaver. The leavee is the one left licking his wounds.
“Couple-y?” Leslie asks. “You’re thinking of something permanent with this girl.”
“Is this weird to be sharing?” I ask. I’ve probably overstepped some weird ex-spouse boundary I’m not aware of.
“It would be if we were still married. Or if you and this girl were dating while we were married.” She lowers her chin and raises her eyebrows as if she’s asking.
“You know better.”
“I do.” She smiles and lifts another slice of pizza from the box to her plate. Our plates. Our wedding plates. So, yeah, this is weird no matter what.
“I developed more than a passing interest in her, but I didn’t expect to feel this deeply for…” I’m not sure how to finish. But Leslie knows exactly what I’m getting at.
“For someone other than me.”
“She said that?” Davis asks after I relay the conversation.
“Yeah. She said she had the same thought when she and Ray were getting serious. We both convinced ourselves there was no one other than each other for years. That’s what you do when you’re married.”
“Sometimes that’s what you do when you’re engaged,” Davis mutters.
We share a silence that pays homage to Hanna.
“The wet towel, the coffee mug, the conversation about where to eat…I want to do it again, Davis.”
His brows bend in what might be sympathy. Can’t blame him. I feel sorry for myself too. Who knew I’d be ready to go back into the fold so soon?
“I want to do that, and more, with Jackie. Every day. That’s the conclusion I came to tonight when my ex-wife sat on my new sofa and ate pizza on our wedding dishes.”
“Heavy.”
“No shit.” I fall silent. What else is there to say?
Jackie has wiggled past my defenses. Either I disengage and move on because I can’t deal with my feelings, or I go with what’s behind Door Number Two: I hold on to her for good. I guess part of me always knew that was a possibility.
“Go figure. I’m a long-term guy.”
“You can have it, my friend.” Davis slaps me on the back, playing the role of carefree bachelor to the hilt. “Hey, Lars! Bring my friend another beer and make a round of buttery nipples for the girls in the corner, plus an extra for me.”
I turn and look behind me, wondering how long the three-top of giggling twentysomethings have been here. I was too into my own musings to notice. If that’s not proof Jackie owns my balls, I’m not sure what is. Lars is efficient, if short, but no one said you have to be tall to pour drinks. He sets the round of shots on a tray.
“I’ll deliver them.” Davis stands and takes the tray, and then turns to me. “You stay here, drink your second beer, and think about what you’re missing out on because you’ve decided to make Jackie-O more than your part-time lover.”
He says lover like “love-ahh,” which is stupid and he knows it and earns him a laugh from me. I shake my head as Davis delivers the drinks and gets invited to sit down at the vacant seat at the table. The three girls lift their shots and say cheers. He holds up his shot as I hold up my beer. This is the last I’ll see of him tonight.
I may be Mr. Long Term sipping my beer of monogamy, but underneath that player veneer, Davis is like me.
He just doesn’t know it yet.
Poor guy.
Jacqueline
All morning I’ve been wondering if my gray matter has split into two opposing sides, because what’s occurring in my skull is nothing short of civil war. I drank too much moonshine at Riley’s house—arguably any amount of moonshine is too much—and ate too much Tater Tot casserole (which I would have sworn I didn’t like until I was drunk on moonshine), and then I fell asleep on her uncomfortable wicker couch.
I woke at three A.M., dying of thirst and, if the headache was anything to go by, sober. Sober enough to drive and sober enough to shut off my headlights when I slipped past Vince’s house. I wasn’t sure if he was inside or not. Shortly after Leslie left, so did he. I didn’t notice if he came home. That introduced a litany of stomach-churning thoughts, like What if he went to Leslie’s to finish what they started inside?
I dismissed the idea since that made my heart hurt as well as the rest of me, and I wasn’t that cruel.
When I arrived at work this morning, I sneaked by his office and shut my door, hoping today’s meetings would keep him too busy to come looking for me. I don’t want to explain what I was doing last night: getting drunk with his nosy neighbor because I suffered a debilitating bout of jealousy over the fact that Vince once loved Leslie…or maybe still does.
It’s nearing lunchtime, and after an extra doughnut from the break room and my second cup of coffee, I’m feeling semihuman. With my brain in working order, I begin to question my actions of late. Maybe I was being melodramatic. Or worse, I let Riley Mason into my subconscious and made assumptions I wouldn’t have made without her.
Did I allow my old, unresolved feelings from my marriage to overtake my good sense?
I need to tell Vince. I need to confess before Riley tells him. I know her well enough to guess that she won’t hesitate to gossip about my visit with her. I’m also fairly certain she’ll chat up Leslie at their next spin class.
Ugh. How embarrassing.
But, as the saying goes, if you’re going to eat crow, best to eat it while it’s warm.
My office door opens and a bouquet of flowers with legs stands before me. Déjà vu.
Sandy, the temp, lowers the blooms. “These came for you, Jackie.”
It’s not just Sandy at my door. Following behind her are four, five, six other staff members. All women, all tittering questions like “Who are they from?” and “What time does he come?”
“Are they from the runner?” someone asks.
“Doesn’t he jog by right about now?” someone else says.
A gasp precedes the gaggle of high-heeled women shuffling to my wide window.
“There he is!” someone says, and silence precedes a collective sigh.
I take in the sight outside the window. A sight I enjoyed on plenty of previous occasions—and, not unlike my ovary-laden cohorts, with my face pressed against the glass. J.T. jogs by in his tanned, shirtless, blond splendor. He’s gone from painfully attractive to achingly familiar to…neutrally admirable. I can appreciate his masculine, athletic form, but only in the most distant of ways. He used to be my fantasy, but now there’s only one man who claims that title.
“What’s going on?” Kayla, late to the party, wanders in and sends a look of distaste at the women clogging my office. Then at the flowers, which we both regard with confusion. “Daisies and roses?”
I open my mouth to agree it’s an odd arrangement, but my brain quickly provides the word “generic.” A generic arrangement of daisies and roses. The two types of bouquets I received on two different occasions from J.T.
I remember the moment midmoonshine when Riley pulled up a website on her laptop and asked me what flowers I’d like sent to my office in the morning.
I know how to make Vince jealous, Jackie.
“Ohmigod,” I cover my mouth with my hands as crooked pieces of the memory conjoin in my head.
Riley selecting the DIY bouquet. Riley asking me what the card should read. Me handing her my credit card. Her verifying my work address.
“Oh. My God,” I repeat, my headache returning with a dull pulse.
“Well, that made my day,” one of my coworkers says. Show over, the women lining the back of my office leave. I receive a couple of congratulatory pats on the shoulder and a comment or two about the “beautiful flowers,” and I hear one girl whisper to another, “She’s so lucky.”
If they only knew.
“Whoa, what did I miss?” Vince pokes his head around the corner. His eyes go to the bouquet and he blinks. The second he calculates who the “generic” flowers might be from, his blue eyes slide to mine and narrow slightly. “Odd choice of flowers, Butler. Who sent you this disaster?”
Kayla, sensing a disturbance in the Force, wisely dismisses herself. “I’m going to lunch.” She slips past Vince, correctly assuming that the truly disastrous arrangement wasn’t from him.
What she doesn’t know is that it’s from me. Jury’s out on whether Vince has figured as much.
“I haven’t seen you all morning.” He leans a shoulder against the doorjamb and folds his arms over his chest. I search the office behind him for backup, but the coworkers who were in my office are one by one grabbing their purses and filing out the front door to lunch. “Are you sick?”
“No.”
“Busy?”
“Not particularly.” I decide to come clean. “I’m hungover.”
He chews on the inside of his cheek, his expression noncommittal.
“It was a long night.”
He snatches the note from the flowers. “This have anything to do with why?”
“Vince. Give me that. It’s not what you think.” I move to take it from him, but he reads it aloud before I can.
“ ‘I’ll never forget you, beautiful. I’m an ass. Love, J.T.’ ” Vince fixes me with a glare.
“I can explain.”
“No need.” He tosses the note on my desk. Then he’s…leaving? Vince starts down the corridor through our emptying building as I chase after him.
“Vince, wait. Hear me out.” I’m aware I sound desperate and that we’re not alone. I can hear a handful of coworkers diligently working away behind their cubicle walls. Vince is ignoring me, so I blurt, “I sent them to myself.”
At his office, he faces me.
“Give me a second and I can explain everything.” I hold my hand out in front of me, praying he won’t walk away until I’m through.
“Let me guess.”
I shake my head as if to say You’ll never guess, but he keeps talking.
“You drove by my house last night and spotted me walking Leslie to her car. Instead of stopping by to see me, which is, I’m assuming, why you were on my street in the first place, you instead confided in Riley Mason, my cuckoo neighbor who stares at me through her tinted greenhouse window.”
“You know about the window?” This story sounds so much worse coming from him.
“Riley asked you in, and you went, spying on me as you proceeded to get drunk and pass out at her house. But you left before she woke up. Sound about right?”
My mouth is frozen in a gape.
“What I didn’t know but am now puzzling out”—his expression morphs into thoughtful, even curious, which gives me a modicum of hope that maybe he’s not that angry with me after all—“is that you at some point ordered a bouquet of hideous flowers for yourself and signed them Love, J.T.” He leans a hairbreadth closer and asks, “Why would you do that?”
Rather than defend myself, I allow my s
houlders to sink and take a stab at how he came to know all that transpired last night. “You talked to Riley.”
He straightens. “She showed up on my doorstep this morning with a cup of coffee and a tale about how my girlfriend—meaning you, I assume—saw me canoodling with my ex-wife and had to be consoled. Her words.” He glares down at me and a muscle in his jaw tics in frustration. This isn’t fun-loving, teasing Vince. It’s worse. It’s legitimately (and justifiably) angry Vince, and his anger is directed at me.
“It was Riley’s idea to send the flowers,” I squeak. “She used my credit card, though.” I wince. That doesn’t sound better.
“And that was a superior plan to talking to me yourself?” His voice escalates slightly. “Confiding in my nut-job neighbor?”
“You left right behind Leslie!” I exclaim quietly, feeling a dab of justification.
“To go see Davis at McGreevy’s,” he replies calmly.
“I didn’t know where you were going,” I mumble. “At the time I assumed it was to chase Leslie down to finish whatever conversation you were having in your driveway.”
Or worse, but I don’t admit that part.
“You assumed.” He laughs, but it’s a dangerous sound—devoid of his normal good humor. It sparks my own flickering anger into a full-blown fire.
“I’ve been in this position before, Vince. I’ve been the woman looking on while the man she…”
I trail off because I almost used the word “loves.” I loved Lex and he disappointed me, and I think I’m in love with Vince. Though “know” might be more accurate than “think,” given the fear that carved a path through my torso the second I saw him with Leslie.
“I’ve been cheated on before,” I finish lamely. “It’s not fun.”
“So now I’m cheating on you?” His severe expression communicates I’ve said exactly the wrong thing. “You know what, Butler? I’ve had it with being compared to Lex. And now you’re using J.T. to make me jealous? I’m starting to feel sorry for the guy, and I hate him.”
“I’m not comparing you!” I press my lips together as two guys with briefcases walk by. They send us sideways glances and I smile uncomfortably. After they pass, I tell Vince in a quieter voice, “We shouldn’t do this here.”
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