Going down on Mia.
My cock inside her.
Just like that, I start growing hard.
Fuck.
There was absolutely nothing bad about having sex with Mia. It was sheer ecstasy, every single moment of it. And she knows that.
“I was perfectly happy just being friends,” I grind out.
She scoffs and laughs, her eyes glittering with disbelief. “Were you? Were you really?”
Clenching my teeth, I turn and look out my window. The neighbor across the street is dragging his trash can from his garage down to the curb, and in the driveway of the house next to his, a couple of guys are working on an old Mustang, flood lights clipped to the open hood.
To them, it’s just a normal Sunday evening.
While I’m sitting over here, about to tear my heart out of my chest.
Still avoiding Mia’s gaze, I say, “I don’t know what we are anymore. And I have no idea where this is going, and I have no idea where you want it to go.”
She’s silent so long that I’m forced to turn back to her, finding her looking down at her lap as she says nothing.
“What I do know,” I continue, “is that the last thing I need before I leave to work for Relief International is to get caught up in a messy relationship.”
She looks at me then, stares at me long and hard while chewing on the inside of her cheek. “You don’t have to do that,” she says. “You know that, right?”
I’m blinking at her. Yeah, I do know. So what? “I’m not doing it because I have to. It’s because I want to.”
“No, that’s not what I meant.” She shakes her head slowly. “How long are you going to do penance for your past, Jay? Because your dad took away those people’s lives and because you lost your way for a short while, that means…what? You don’t deserve to be happy? You don’t get to do things for yourself, to have a life of your own?”
Her words sink into my stomach, where they twist and coil and nauseate me, and I can’t immediately figure out how to respond. Is she right? And if she is, does it matter? I’ll be working for one of the foremost relief organizations in the world, providing medical care in war and disaster zones. I’ll be devoting my life to helping, to doing good. And I’ll be doing it alongside my uncle, who I’ve longed to be able to spend more time with.
If there’s some underlying reason other than that, it seems entirely unimportant.
“It’s what I want,” I repeat, and I don’t voice the thought that follows, that it’s what I need to do.
With a nod and pinched lips, Mia breaks eye contact. Gripping the bottom of the steering wheel, she stares out the windshield. “So what now? We go back to being just friends?”
I swallow hard. Fuck this. I don’t want to do this. But what choice do I have?
“I don’t think that’s going to work,” I tell her. “Do you?”
“What are you saying?” She’s looking at me again, her head tilted, eyes big and blinking. “We’re done? You don’t want to see me again?”
It’s like a vise clamps down on my chest, squeezing the air out of my lungs. “I told you it was a bad idea—”
“No! No, you don’t get to—” She cuts herself off, and a gasping whimper escapes from her throat, her breath hitching. “This is not my fault. You’re doing this. You’re making this choice. For no fucking reason!”
My head starts pounding. To hell with doing this gently and nicely. She doesn’t get to lay all the blame on me. She just does not.
“You’re the one who said you didn’t want a relationship,” I snap, pointing a finger at her. “You said that. Well, guess what? I don’t, either. And I especially don’t want one with a woman who can’t get over her asswipe of an ex—”
“I am not—” she argues, raising her voice above mine.
“—who even acknowledges he was an asswipe,” I interrupt her in return, raising my voice, too, so that I’m on the verge of yelling, “so why the fuck can’t she just let it go and move on?”
She clenches her mouth shut, nostrils flaring as she stares daggers at me. I could go on, push her further, push her until she snaps. And it’s really tempting, because I can stomach her rage, and it’s kind of a relief to have her be so mad. It’s much easier to deal with than her heartbreak.
“Takes an asswipe to know one, I guess,” she says coldly.
Okay. I won’t argue with that. I’m a weak-minded ass who should’ve been strong enough to resist the temptation of her in the first place. So she can keep slinging that shit at me, and I’ll take it like a man.
Making a quivering fist, she puts it up to her mouth. And then she gives a bitter laugh. “You picked the perfect time to do this, didn’t you?”
Something inside me shrinks and turns icy cold. Yeah, I deserve that, too. But if I’m going to be the asshole here, I might as well go all in, right?
“And when would’ve been a better time?” I ask, hardening my tone.
Her snorting laugh is full of disbelief, and her eyes look glassy and watery as they meet mine. “Tomorrow would’ve been better. The day after that even better. And the day after that, and the day after that…just better and better.”
Her voice cracks, and tears spill over, dripping down her cheeks. In a choked whisper, she says, “Best of all? Never.”
My gut is cramping, and it’s like a black hole opens up in my core, absorbing everything. I want to apologize and take it all back. Jesus Christ, I love her. I love her, and why the hell am I doing this to her?
You’re not right for her. You know that.
I expel a heavy breath, run my fingers through my hair. “We have no future,” I say, acknowledging that I’m starting to sound like a broken record. “I didn’t want this. You—”
“Get out of my car.” She sounds hoarse and agitated, like she’s on the verge of flipping the fuck out.
I’m looking at her, begging with my eyes for…I don’t really know what for. What did I expect? Did I think this would be pretty? I’m crumbling inside, but I’m managing not to show it. Unlike her.
“Mia—” I say, reaching out for her arm.
“Get the fuck out of my car, Jay!” she shouts, shrill and frantic.
All right. This is what I wanted, right? Mission accomplished.
With an unsteady hand, I pull on the car door handle, push it open, and vault outside. Slamming the door shut, I half expect her to drive away right then. So I’m kind of surprised when the tailgate pops open. I see her face in the shadows inside the car as she watches me, waiting.
Numbly and automatically, I walk to the back of the car and pull my bags out, pushing the lid shut when I’m done.
I take a step back.
Mia pulls out into the street, and with a roar of the engine, she speeds off down the road.
“How’s your grandma doing?” Angela asks from the treadmill next to mine. In her running capris and loose white tank top over a neon-pink sports bra, she’s doing the same thing she has been for the past fifteen minutes: walking. Yes, she’s walking briskly, but she’s still walking. I knew she wasn’t kidding about rarely going to the gym, but for Pete’s sake. She could at least try to work up a sweat.
It’s Tuesday, two and a half weeks since Grandma’s birthday weekend, and when it was time to head home from work today, Angela wanted to go out. Her kids are with her ex this week, and she wanted to party for no other reason than that she could.
She resisted pretty hard when I tried to convince her to go work out with me instead, asking me why the hell she’d want to be sweaty and miserable at the gym when she could be having margaritas and ogling cute guys at a club. I pointed out that there are plenty of hot men at the gym, and when I said I’d buy her dinner afterward, she was sold. So here we are.
“She’s still pretty okay,” I answer her question about my grandma. “She’s made a bucket list, so she’s keeping busy, which is good.”
Music with a heavy, pounding bass blasts out of speakers in the ceiling, and
the only sound in the room that’s louder is the clinking of the free weights. I put Angela through some rounds of curls and crunches and other exercises before we got on the treadmills, and I’m pretty sure she came close to walking out on me when we started on the lunges.
My running shoes thump steadily on the treadmill, the purple top I’m wearing with my gray compression shorts not quite damp with perspiration yet, and I’m breathing only a little harder than normal as I’m keeping a pace that easily lets me have a conversation.
“Tough to imagine what that would feel like,” Angela muses, her elbows pumping with each step she takes. “Knowing you don’t have much time left and deciding what to do with it.”
“Yeah,” I say with a sigh. “She’s prioritized everything on her list from highest to lowest activity level.” Twisting my lips with bittersweet amusement, I add, “Practical until the end.”
Angela lets out a sympathetic huff.
For some reason, her observation draws my thoughts to Jay’s dad, who’s been awaiting his execution for over a decade and now knows exactly when he’s going to die, almost down to the very minute. No bucket list for him. Nothing to do except sit in his tiny cell and contemplate his choices and his own mortality.
I need to be there for Jay. I remember thinking that during the drive home after lunch when he told me about it all. Yeah, I was pissed off and confused and hurt by the reason he hadn’t said anything sooner—and how he still wouldn’t have told me if it’d been left up to him.
Despite that, there was no scenario where I wouldn’t be a part of his life anymore. He’d claimed not to care that his dad will soon be executed, and I didn’t believe him for a second. So I’d thought, I need to be there for him. But he took that ability away from me.
I’m so tired, the sort of tired that can’t be fixed by sleeping. I’ve gone to the gym almost every day the past couple of weeks, pushing myself physically because it’s the only way I know how to cope right now. The routine I’ve put myself through has been pretty grueling, but I’ve kept going out of sheer desperation. If I weren’t here, I’d be at home, and if I were at home, I’d lie on my bed staring at the ceiling and never wanting to get up again.
“What kind of stuff has she been doing?” Angela—who I suppose is my best friend now?—sounds genuinely curious. Sounds like she actually wants to talk about this, which is like a balm for my soul right now, I realize. I haven’t had anyone to talk to lately. Except my family, and for them the emotional reality that Grandma will be gone soon is too new and too raw, and it’s a topic we’ve all been kind of avoiding.
So I tell her about my past few weekends: the hike on Angel Island, where my grandfather proposed; the trip to the beach, where we swam in freezing water, ate a picnic lunch, and played bocce ball in the sand.
“That sounds nice.” There’s a tinge of distraction in Angela’s voice. I follow her gaze across the room to where a guy who looks like he could be a long-lost Hemsworth brother is standing up from doing bench presses.
“It was,” I tell her, rolling my eyes at my coworker’s lack of subtlety. Fifty-fifty chance I won’t have to buy her dinner after all, because it looks like she might get a better offer.
“She seemed to really enjoy herself,” I go on, refusing to let Mr. Thunder From Down Under over there derail our conversation. “This upcoming weekend my sister and her kids are flying up, too, and Grandma is going to cook Thanksgiving dinner for us. One last time.”
Angela draws her eyes away from her eye candy to shoot me a soft look, a hum of sympathy coming from her throat. “I’m sorry, Waters.”
“Yeah. Thanks.” Glancing down at the treadmill display, I see that I’m about to hit 5k in twenty-two minutes. Not bad. Pushing the upwards-arrow button, I increase the speed to finish my run with a sprint.
“Do you have your boy toy around to cheer you up at least?” Angela asks, arching her perfectly groomed eyebrows at me.
My abdomen clenches tightly and painfully, and my lungs start burning—and it’s not from the exertion. “Uh, no,” I pant out. “That’s over.”
She blinks at me for a few seconds. Her ponytail swishes back and forth while she’s walking. With a benign smirk, she says, “So you’re friends without benefits again?”
“No, he—” I cut myself short. Nausea swells in my stomach, and a chill shudders down from my neck and all the way to my toes. Without thinking, I press the button that slows the treadmill down to walking speed. Because if I don’t, I’m afraid my legs might buckle.
“We’re done. Completely.” It takes serious effort to keep meeting Angela’s gaze while I’m wishing I could crawl off into an empty corner somewhere and curl up in a fetal position.
“What?” Pulling on the safety magnet so that her machine slows down to a stop, she stares at me, her forehead wrinkled. “What happened?”
I look away from her and down at my bright neon running shoes, bracing my hands on my hips as I’m walking on the treadmill, cooling down. “He just…broke up with me, I guess. Said it wasn’t working for him, and we couldn’t really go back to the way things used to be, so…”
And ever since, I’ve felt flattened and adrift. I finally get it, why he said from the start that sex was a bad idea. I didn’t understand it until that devastating conversation in my car that night.
I didn’t understand it because I could never have imagined that becoming more than friends might make him cut me out of his life like that. Could not have foreseen that he’d drop that bomb out of the blue and with such cold and steely determination.
But he did warn me, didn’t he? Guess I should’ve been paying attention.
Leaning on the treadmill handle, her face creased with concern, Angela asks, “Are you okay?”
No. No, I’m not. A few seconds pass before I manage to respond, my pulse taking a long time to slow. “I don’t know if I’ve ever been less okay, actually.”
Angela watches me through narrowed eyes. “Worse than when that college ex of yours cheated on you and dumped you?”
“Yeah. Without a doubt.” I’m not sure why I can say that without hesitation. But it’s clear that losing Matt versus losing Jay is like the difference between stubbing your toe and having to cut it off.
And realizing too late how much you really didn’t want to lose that toe.
Because while you can live without the toe, can hobble along without it and will eventually be fine without it…you didn’t want to lose it.
“Jay probably wouldn’t believe that, though,” I point out while tugging out my safety magnet and unhooking the clip from the waist of my shorts, grabbing my water bottle from the cup holder as I step off the treadmill. “Even as he was telling me he never wanted to see me again, he still accused me of being hung up on Matt.”
“Well…are you?” Angela asks as she heads toward the locker rooms.
“No.” Walking half a step behind her, I pop the top on my bottle and wet my parched mouth with a chug of cold liquid.
Okay, maybe it’s time to be a little less bullheaded about this. So I amend my answer with, “I don’t think so.”
Angela slants me a sideways glance.
“Pretty sure I’m not,” I insist.
She lets out a snort as she pushes open the door to the locker room. “You should talk to him.”
“Who, Jay?” I squeak out in disbelief. Has she been paying attention at all?
“No, the other one,” Angela says with a click of her tongue, putting her code into her locker keypad.
“Why?” Instead of getting into my own locker, I just stand there scowling at her.
Pulling her tote bag out, she gives me a dry look and replies, “Closure.”
Yeah. No. Like my life’s not shitty enough right now, she thinks I should talk to Matt? After all these years?
How would I even get in touch with him at this point?
Closure, my ass. Not gonna happen.
We don’t bother changing our clothes before leaving the l
ocker room. I never use the germ-and-fungus-infested gym showers unless I have to be somewhere and have no time to go home first, but today I just don’t care. Clean and sweet-smelling or sweaty and rank; it’s all the same to me.
And with her sad excuse for a workout, Angela doesn’t need to clean up, so we grab our stuff and head out. Once we’re in the spacious and brightly lit lobby, however, I catch sight of the guy she was ogling earlier, standing near the front doors talking to a couple of other men.
“Thor with his mighty hammer at two o’clock,” I say in a loud whisper.
“Whaaa?” she replies, sounding bewildered. And then her eyes go wide and she breathes out, “Ooh.”
I throw her a closed-mouth smile as we stroll toward the exit. “You can ditch me if you want. My feelings won’t be hurt.”
The hot dude has noticed us, and he’s pinning Angela with a heavy-lidded stare. Oh, yeah. She can definitely have that if she wants it.
Heaving a sigh, she wrinkles her nose. “I don’t know. You won’t expect me to sleep with you if I let you buy me dinner, right?”
I bite the inside of my cheek, suppressing my burst of laughter. “Only if you order the most expensive thing on the menu.”
Angela snickers, then lets out a fake groan. “Oh, fine. At least there’d be zero chance of getting knocked up again.”
We’re still giggling as we walk out through the double glass doors.
When I get home after dinner, still stuffed with Thai food, I take a quick and hot shower that I would’ve preferred be a long and hot shower, but there’s a serious drought going on right now, and my conscience is a nagging bitch.
Then I consider streaming an episode of House, M.D. There’s no reason to wait for Jay to watch it with me now, is there? The thought sinks like a rock into my stomach, and I know that I’d get less enjoyment out of it than depilating my legs with tweezers. Or walking barefoot on a scorching-hot sidewalk. Or cleaning a public restroom…with a toothbrush.
So instead I curl up on the couch in my robe with Adele on the stereo, my hair wrapped in a towel, my notebook computer in my lap, and a glass of water on the side table.
Bend Page 27