Well, there goes that theory.
I drop my head into my hands to hide the grin on my face and hope neither woman thinks it’s out of embarrassment. I’m far from ashamed I’ve finally tasted Stella’s lips and I’d really prefer Steph turn around and walk away so I can show Stella just how much I’m not ashamed of our make out session.
Even still, how horrible this must look to Stephanie. The other day I was Mr. Nice Guy who visited with them over coffee and crayons; now I probably look like I’m preying on her sister. I should just collect my jacket and my kid and leave now. Save face and all that.
Chancing a glance at Stella, her smile hasn’t faded and it feels like I can’t breathe all over again. She lights up the entire room with the contentment and joy that’s washed over her features. I’m still lost in her when I hear Steph laughing.
“Damn. Holy shit.” And she’s gasping for air in an attempt to calm herself down. “Stellie, I wish you could have seen his face from there. He looked scared of me for a second. I mean, I am scary, but ... you have nothing to worry about with me, Brian.”
Stephanie is still trying to regain her composure when Britt wanders into the kitchen and silently takes in the scene.
“Did you find ice cream? Why is your shirt wet? Why is Stella crying?” He fires off one question after another without taking a breath and I start laughing because my little man is way too inquisitive for his own good.
Wait. Crying? No one was crying last time I looked around the room. The soft cries hit my ears and I turn to Stella next to me, seeing the tears running in rivulets down her cheeks. I gather her in my arms.
“Stell?” I say her name like a question, concern in my voice. “What’s wrong?”
The energy in the room has changed dramatically in the last half hour and it’s starting to make my head spin from all the emotions charging through my system. I brush the hair off her forehead, cupping her face in my hands, and I look at her — really look at her — and I swear she holds my entire history in the shimmery depths staring back at me.
Then she hiccups, and I fall a little harder.
“Nothing’s wrong. That’s just it. Everything is perfect right now.” Steph and I look at her, confused. Britt’s pulling a chair over to the fridge, likely in search of the ice cream. “This house hasn’t been this happy in a long time.” And she kisses me, sweetly brushing her lips against mine with the patience of a new lover, before wiping the tears that threaten to overflow again. The world moves in slow motion as we catch up to the here and now, before we have a chance to get stranded in one another and jump ship entirely.
“Here, buddy, let me help you,” Steph says, taking Britt’s hand while he jumps down from the chair, breaking apart the moment we were so consumed by.
Just like that the evening resumes, dessert is served and conversations are had about our daily interactions, schoolwork, the town.
It all goes back to normal, like my life wasn’t just flipped upside down by this woman sitting next to me, the one I catch myself staring at when I think she isn’t looking. My ice cream seems to taste a little sweeter, the pastries Britt and I made a little more buttery, but I think it has more to do with the company than the sugar and cream.
The evening moves into night and we finally pry an answer out of Stephanie about her impromptu visit. Once Stella threatens to call their mom for a reason why yoga night turned into Steph crashing our party, the poor girl sings like a canary.
“Okay, okay ... I wasn’t doing yoga with Mom,” she says, blushing. “I was supposed to be on a date with this guy from one of my grad classes. It just, ugh. It just wasn’t working for me.”
“What wasn’t working for you?” Stella and I trip over one another to ask the question simultaneously.
“He wasn’t. He’s cute and all, but I felt like he was only after me for my brain,” she admits sheepishly, like she wants to exchange “brain” for something else. “God, that sounds horrible. But really! He started quizzing me at dinner, digging around in my head like he was searching a textbook for answers about me. Weird, random questions, too. I’m surprised he didn’t pull a highlighter out of his pocket. Pretty sure he had one on his person somewhere.”
It throws me and Stella into a fit of laughter at the absurdity that Steph’s date spent the entire date playing Twenty Questions. The image of her face covered in neon marker only makes us laugh harder.
Catching her breath, Stella’s face falls a little. “Why didn’t you just tell me you had a date tonight? You didn’t have to scapegoat Mom, Steph. Kind of shady, you know?”
“It was more of a pity date than anything else, and I just didn’t want you to think less of me for it. It seemed you’d ask way fewer questions if I told you I was hanging with Mom than going out for burgers with What’s His Name,” she says more to the coffee mug in her hands than to her sister — shy, like she’s not telling the whole truth. “We got through dinner and I excused myself like a lady. I don’t want to lead him on any longer. He’s just not the type I like, you know? He was nice about it, I guess. Besides, I really wanted to come hang out with Britt. You’re raising a great kid, Brian.”
I look into the living room from where I’m sitting at the dining room table and watch the easy rise and fall of his chest. Snuggled under a blanket on Stella’s couch, he fell asleep while watching a movie, shortly after finishing his ice cream.
“Yeah, I like him,” I tease, eliciting a poke in the ribs from Stella. “Let’s put it this way, if it weren’t for Britton, I’d probably be working at a gas station wondering when my life was going to start instead of going out and fighting for my place in the world. His arrival and his mother’s departure gave me some insight into what I wanted, for myself and for him.”
“And what do you want for the two of you?” Stella asks timidly, watching carefully for my reaction.
“For us Stratford men to find love and success.”
Stella
Chapter Sixteen
I lean against the closed door after watching Brian back out of the driveway and stay like that, listening to the quiet ... the blood rushing through my body and my nerves singing his praises.
It feels like I’m awake for the first time in years.
And it’s scary. It’s so scary I think running away might be the best option for me because I don’t do spontaneous.
I can’t.
My life is meticulously planned unless there’s an emergency.
Take a little peek at my planner and it’s all right there in black, blue and red ink. All color-coded depending on urgency and importance, from board meetings to charity events to family dinners.
Brian is a spark. He’s giving me hope before I’m ready for it. Brian is not an emergency but I feel him in my soul and he’s battling against my resolve with such force, such ... urgency.
Maybe, just maybe, Brian is an emergency.
But he’s not one I’m ready to face — he’s the freak storm on a cloudless day.
I have to run for cover.
I told him he’d have to work for it; I just hope I don’t hurt him in the process. I still need to figure out who I am alone. Right now I don’t know who Stella Barbieri is and I feel like I’m going to go crazy trying to remember.
I’ve had more than half a year to figure my shit out since Keith left. I didn’t allow myself to dip too low into any sort of depression, at least not low enough I couldn’t pull myself back up quickly. Maybe it wasn’t low enough to give myself a chance to start healing.
I thought I’d started restoring myself the minute I accepted my fate, the looming title of “divorcee,” and took back that maiden name. It made me feel powerful in the moment, to take that back and decide I’m my own person. In the end, throughout all these months, I think the only thing I came to terms with was Keith not loving me. I accepted that more than everything else.
I swept the rest of my feelings under the rug and consciously chose to ignore them.
And now I fee
l like, no matter how much fun we’ve had in the moment, it’s going to hurt Brian because I just don’t know how to deal with all of that shit I’ve buried. It’s bubbling to the surface and I don’t have the energy to push it down anymore.
Hanging my head, I let my body slide down the door as the sobs come wailing out of my body, screaming to get out, begging for release.
I cry for my failed marriage.
I cry for losing my best friend and because he came back to find me.
I cry because I’m falling in love and I never intended to love again.
I never want to hurt like this again.
This hurts.
It kills me that my own husband wouldn’t talk to me about all the problems with our marriage and instead sought to comfort himself inside someone else’s body. Maybe I was always just too busy to talk. He was too busy. Our careers took off and we were consumed by them ... until he was consumed by her.
I’m a failure.
If I had paid more attention I would have seen it all happening. Wouldn’t I? There would have been something, like a neon sign indicating he’d opened his heart for business and kicked my love to the curb. I just don’t know how I missed it all.
But maybe I just didn’t want to see it.
I just didn’t want to see someone else leave me after loving me for so long so I blocked it out. I ignored the smell of perfume on his suit coats, and made an excuse for the stud earring I found in his luggage. I blinded myself from the look in his eyes when he talked about work — about her — and tried not to notice how close they’d gotten.
I refused to see what was happening to my marriage, and for that alone I feel broken because only someone who is broken wouldn’t recognize a failure in the making while holding onto the hope that every feeling that screams “cheater” is wrong.
I was hopeful.
Instead of seeing it coming, I became an expert sugarcoater with a workaholic complex and lost everything I thought mattered.
I want to call Steph, but I can’t bring myself to tell her how this feels and try to release myself from the pain. It’s not fair to throw all this at her, not when I’ve acted so oblivious to it despite the truth being right in front of me for so long.
“I ignored it and I should be over it by now,” I scream into the silence. That’s what I kept telling myself all those months and it made it easier to push the feelings down lower and lower for a while.
I’m getting them out now, and I think I’ve figuratively stomped the feelings into the ground and buried my hate and hurt. For tonight, at least.
My eyes grow heavier under the pent up emotion, the exhaustion from months of being “fine” — the one answer I give everyone when they ask how I’m doing,
I’m not fine.
I’m not broken, I didn’t let that happen, but I’m finally falling apart.
And when all the parts of me crumble into a pile of dust, I pray there are some left over pieces large enough to start rebuilding me.
Reaching up from my spot on the floor, I lock the front door and pull myself up, stripping my shirt off as make my way up the stairs. I pull off my undershirt once I reach my bedroom, shimmy out of my jeans, pop my bra off. I reach for the first thing I can find to sleep in — a Syracuse University hoodie that’s about three sizes too big.
I crawl into bed surrounded by the comfort of Old Spice and cinnamon, and the tears continue to come silently as sleep finally wraps me in its arms.
***
Friday night. Three days have passed since Brian and Britt came over for dinner and shook my life up like a snow globe.
Friday night. Four days since I’ve been inside the coffeehouse.
Work. That’s all I’ve been doing. Working and begging Caryn to get me coffee every day when she goes to the coffeehouse just so I don’t have to go in there and see him while I try to get my head on right, because work will solve all my problems. It’s constant. There’s always something to do, something to read, something to write about, a meeting to attend.
I refuse to have any down time. Down time is for wimps. Down time is for people who aren’t serious about their career.
Down time gives the demons lurking in my mind a chance to wish and hope and think.
I can’t afford down time right now. My heart can’t handle it.
It’s Friday night, nearing midnight, and I’ve been on the clock since 9 a.m. I don’t remember if I ate lunch, but Steph stopped by with a chicken Caesar wrap around seven tonight, so I know I’m not starving.
The vibration on my desk pulls me back from the spot I was staring at on the wall. Caryn’s name lights up the screen, along with the first part of her text. I unlock my phone and read the whole thing, and then I’m sorry I did.
Caryn: Why is your truck still at the office? Bitch, get home. You’re doing it again.
Shit.
I drop my head into my hands, rubbing away the exhaustion. Or, at the very least, trying to. She knows all too well how I get with work when I’m blocking other things out, but usually I can persuade her to believe I’m just doing the job I love.
Picking up my phone again, I text Caryn back.
Me: Just making sure everything is set so I don’t have to worry over the weekend.
It totally makes sense to hang out — at work — on a night we don’t print. Totally logical. She won’t question it though because for so long this has been my life. It was this way in college, too, when our friendship first blossomed. This is the Stella she’s used to.
I need to sleep and as much as I don’t want to admit it to her, Caryn is right. I am doing it again. It’s my coping mechanism. One of them. Aside from wine and cupcakes, I work more when I’m stressed and it keeps me from realizing how truly depressed I am.
Work makes me forget my real life.
I did it a lot when Keith and I were still married and I wasn’t able to deal with the out of town work trips. The problem was it would continue even after he was back from a trip and stay that way until an evening of plans came up and I was forced to leave the office before midnight. Dinners at his parent’s house, dinners out with his colleagues, business events he needed to attend always seemed to crop up at the best times because they pulled me out of myself. Out of that darkness where I would hide.
But this time there isn’t any of that and as fucked up as I am right now I’m looking forward to not being bothered with the dinners and the schmoozing and ass-kissing to bring me out of the funk steamrolling me.
At some point, I have to let the healing begin.
Another half hour has passed without me even realizing it. I’m going into shutdown. The weekend is going to be spent on the couch with ice cream and movies. Probably crying. If I give myself permission right now to break down completely this weekend, maybe Sunday I’ll be ready to face Brian and be able to go buy my own coffee on Monday.
Maybe by then, I will remember my real life is better without Keith and I can allow myself to watch Brian look at me like I hold his world in the palm of my hands.
It just feels like my whole life hurts right now and I’m experiencing a different emotion every other minute — everything I went through with Keith and all the emotions thrown at me throughout the course of the entire divorce, and now these raging feelings for Brian that came from somewhere out of the depths like a giant squid on the hunt, it’s gotten out of hand.
This is what turmoil feels like.
I shut down my computer, gather everything I might need over the weekend and put it all in my messenger bag, grab my cell and keys, and prepare to go out into the night.
Pulling the door shut behind me, I twist the key until I hear the safe sound of the deadbolt slide into place.
“Have you been avoiding me?”
I jump at the sound of his voice and slowly turn, my shoulders slumping with the weight of the question. How do I respond to that?
“Not intentionally,” I say.
He’s sitting against the front bumper of my
truck, arms and ankles crossed, a Cleveland Indians baseball cap pulled down tight and sitting on his head backwards. I can see the fabric of a jersey beneath his unzipped Carhartt. He looks stunning. Can a man look stunning? Because, he does. He exudes country boy confidence.
“Stell, you’ve never been a good liar. Remember when we were seven and you broke your parent’s kitchen window because you throw like a girl? You tried to get them to believe a flying unicorn hit the side of the house and its horn went through the glass.”
I laugh at the memory. My mom was pissed.
He’s not laughing, though.
“Would you believe me if I said I haven’t been in the café this week because I told you you’d have to work for it?” I ask, pulling the corner of my bottom lip between my teeth. God, I hope he believes me.
Brian’s eyes find mine and humor dances beneath his lashes in those dangerously deep blue pools.
“I might believe that, at least for tonight.” He pushes off the truck and takes a step toward me; I have nowhere to go. I was already leaning against the door to the office when this conversation started. “I’ll believe it for tonight, Stella, because I know you need time. The other night, when you started crying, I saw all those emotions play out on your face. I know you’re scared. It’s the first time in a long time you’ve been able to just be yourself. I won’t stop you from having that.”
How can he know me so well? He’s reading me like an open book and has since the day we sat face-to-face for the first time in two decades. Other than my parents and Steph, no one has ever gotten that close. No one.
He takes another step closer. I could reach out and touch him. I could get over my insecurities, the fear of small town gossip, the idea that someone is going to think poorly of him ... I could just get past it all right now and make him take me home. With him. To his bed.
Like some lovesick schoolgirl, I sigh.
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