“You must’ve known I had some doubts,” Dan said, his voice as small as he was.
Lucy looked around the empty living room of the spacious three-bedroom California bungalow with original plank hardwoods and walnut built-ins. “You said you’d kill to have this house,” she said, wondering if the real estate agent, laying out the pages for their revised offer on the granite breakfast counter in the kitchen, could hear them.
“It’s a great house,” he said, sighing. “A perfect house. But now I see that it would just tie us down, drag out the inevitable.”
She blinked, not sure what she was hearing. “We’ve been planning this for almost five years.”
He hesitated. “I met someone.”
“When? This morning?”
Licking his lips, he said, “Why don’t we talk later, after you’ve had a chance to calm down.”
She frowned. “I’m hardly hysterical, Dan.”
“Yeah, I noticed.”
“You’d like me to be hysterical?”
“Forget it. Of course not. It makes everything easier.”
She nodded, belatedly piecing together some clues he’d dropped over the past few months. “Your six-month assignment in Seattle wasn’t the opportunity of a lifetime, then.”
“Well…”
“Ah. A personal opportunity, you meant.”
“I wanted to be sure. For both—for all of us.”
“Very considerate of you,” she said.
“Damn it, you don’t have to be sarcastic.”
“You’re hardly in a position to tell me what to do. I’m the wounded party here, wouldn’t you agree?”
“I think we’ll both need some healing.”
Lucy dropped the phone to her side and noticed that Robin, the real estate agent, had come up behind her. Her face was pale.
This was really going to screw over the older lady, the two of them walking away from the deal now. Robin needed a sale badly. Typical of Dan to think the world revolved around him.
Lucy lifted the phone. “We’ll have to call the mortgage broker.”
He jutted out his chin. “I already have.”
“You told Inez the mortgage broker before you told me?”
“She kept after me to sign the latest thing. It didn’t feel right to string her along anymore—” He stopped and cleared his throat. “Look, you’re getting digitized. I think the connection is breaking up…”
“It didn’t feel right to string her along?”
He sighed. “So much of our lives together is what you wanted. Not me. I felt… superfluous a lot of the time.” He tilted the screen of his laptop so she was staring out the window of his suite at the Extended Stay America. It wasn’t supposed to be sunny in Seattle. It looked sunny. She wondered if the new girlfriend was there, listening off-camera. Dan came back into view with a coffee cup at his lips.
In Berkeley, outside the house she wasn’t going to have, the sky was as gray as lint. “Our relationship was always shaped by what you wanted. We talked about marriage years ago. I hoped to have my first child before I turned thirty. But you wanted to save up for the house first, so we did, even though that was third on my list.”
“You and your lists. That’s one thing I’ve learned from Brittany—how to trust my heart.”
“Ah, so she’s one of those.” She took a deep breath and peered into the phone for a glimpse of her. “What else did the little ho say?”
Dan’s mouth dropped open in shock.
“You wanted hysterical. This is my version.”
He looked away, then back at the screen, his lips popping up and down like a broken garage door. “Brittany is not—” He shook his head and stared off to the side, made an apologetic face, then jerked his head.
So she had been there. “Thanks for making this such a private moment.”
“I can’t believe Brittany had to hear you call her a—a—I can’t even say it.”
“What? She’s been sleeping with my boyfriend. For months, apparently.”
“Brittany has nothing to be ashamed of.”
“Does she know about me?”
“Of course. She knows everything.”
Lucy snorted. Her college advisor would’ve broken out in a rash to hear her insult a woman for exercising her sexual liberties, but to hell with it. She was under a lot of stress. “Ho.”
Dan’s eyes went wide as he leaned into his laptop camera. “She is completely innocent. Brittany’s not in such a hurry to take her clothes off. Unlike you.”
Lucy felt an odd snapping inside her, her last grip on reality disengaging from Dan’s voice. “We lived together for five years. You think we should have waited until we were, what, forty?”
“It’s not how long we waited, it’s how often you wanted it. And how much you wanted to do it. I’m a man, Lucy, and I didn’t need half as much sex as you did.” Then he ran his hand over his eyes and said, “I’m sorry. I never intended to talk to you about this.”
Her throat suddenly felt tight. She realized Robin the real estate agent was hanging on every word. “Did you talk to her about this? Brittany?”
His sheepish look grew sheepier; he leaned away from the camera. Faintly, she heard him say, “That’s how we… how we knew we were perfect for each other. She was avoiding her boyfriend, and I… I was taking a break, too.”
“And where was this? Her convent?”
“Lucy,” Dan said, shaking his head, looking so disappointed in her.
Humiliation didn’t feel right, so she tapped into the rage, breathed it like oxygen. “I’m just trying to get the full picture here. I deserve to know the details.”
“Information isn’t knowledge, Lucy,” Dan said. “Knowing everything doesn’t make you wise.”
“And having a penis doesn’t make you a man,” Lucy said.
Robin snorted and patted her hard on the back. Lucy closed her eyes. He didn’t like having sex with me, she thought. It’s not like she had a he-harem of previous boyfriends to call up for rebuttals. She was thirty-four, but she’d started late.
Damn. It took him five years to propose. She didn’t have another eight to work on someone new. There were houses to buy, retirement accounts to fund, ovaries to harvest.
She frowned at him. “You’ve really messed up my plans.”
“Sometimes I think that’s all I was to you, Lucy. Just part of your plans.” He leaned back and put his hand over his heart. “I’ve learned that I need a partner who acts without analyzing everything to death. Someone more flexible.”
Lucy glanced at Robin, but it was far too late for any privacy. Holding the phone up to her mouth, she said, enunciating each word, “One of my plans was for decent sex. I was flexible about giving up on that.”
She drew back to see his reaction, but the window had gone black.
The Supermodel’s Best Friend (©2011 Gretchen Galway) is available now in ebook.
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