What Comes After Dessert

by Ren Benton

  “You blamed a lack of heart, not time.”

  Where was the justice in pointing out his inconsistencies when he let her get away with hers? But at least she was speaking to him, which was infinitely preferable to vacant silence.

  He didn’t want her to know he’d failed at marriage. Divorce might be trendy in the rest of America, but in a town the size of Westard, it marked a man as a bad risk. Tally didn’t need more proof she’d been wise to write him off as an unstable investment.

  If her opinion of him didn’t matter, he would dump the whole story on her and invite her to explain where he’d gone wrong in terms even he could understand. She’d always been good at untangling his mistakes and teaching him a better way to solve problems.

  Hell, if her opinion of him didn’t matter, he’d be attacking while her walls were weak, prying information from between her teeth like gold fillings, and making off with the loot, but he never wanted to be the villain in her version of The Adventures of Tally and Ben.

  Fortunately, he had a slightly less damning excuse than his chronic relationship dysfunction to fall back on. “I’m in love with my best friend’s wife.”

  “The same friend you’re in business with?”

  Part of him preened that she knew anything about what he’d been doing with his life. The rest of him felt pinned down, cut open, and picked through like a lab specimen — just like old times. “That’s the one.”

  “I can see how that would be problematic. How did she end up with him instead of you?”

  “Seattle isn’t Westard. I don’t get a shot at every woman by virtue of being one of ten options available.”

  “He saw her first.”

  He wasn’t the only one prone to making groundless deductive leaps. “How did you arrive at that conclusion?”

  As if questioning her had violated some unspoken rule, she fell silent again.

  He did what he did best with her — wait.

  Since she wasn’t hugging her door at the moment and he didn’t want to give her cause to retreat further, he restricted his eyes to probing the empty landscape that turned the truck into an isolation chamber. The night had substance, zipped open by the headlights, impenetrable beyond the edge where it peeled away from the strip of exposed asphalt.

  Here, darkness pushed back against intrusion.

  Finally, softly, she said, “I can’t imagine if you loved her first, she’d go to anyone else.”

  None of them seemed to have a problem finding someone else, occasionally before the minor formality of ending it with him. Liz was a different sort of woman, though. “We saw her at the same time. She’s been our marketing director for eight years. I didn’t realize how perfect she is until after they were married.”

  “Ah.”

  The dashboard threw off just enough greenish illumination to verify the smile he detected in that syllable. “Ah what?”

  “Your perfect woman didn’t become perfect until she was unobtainable. As long as the perfect life you would have had together exists only in your head, it remains forever uncompromised by reality.”

  Life with Liz wouldn’t have been perfect. They bickered constantly, about Will, about work, about the weather, and that was just the first ten minutes of every day at the office. Liz called Ben her second mother-in-law, and when they devolved to that level of name calling, he broke out the nukes and called her Mom. “She’s not my perfect woman.”

  “That’s no way to talk about the woman you love.”

  If there had been any doubt she was mocking him, that settled it. Laughing at him beat the hell out of crying, though. He’d deliberately acted like a fool for less worthy causes. “She’s perfect for him. They’re a good team.”

  “Ah.”

  “Ah what now?”

  “The good news is, you’ve been misdiagnosed as being in love with your best friend’s wife.”

  She made his friend happy, and he loved her for that, even if she was a bossy little shrimp. “What’s the bad news?”

  “You’re afflicted with petty envy. You don’t want her. You want what they have. Somebody to be a good team with you.”

  Who didn’t want to be part of a good team? Everyone did what they were best at instead of dividing their attention thirteen ways and doing more jobs badly. If one person got overwhelmed, there were extra hands to lighten the load. Someone was always there to point out the flaw in the plan that the planner couldn’t see. Goals were met with greater quality and speed than one person trying to do the same work solo.

  He thrived when he could rely on others to do their part so he could focus on his. Asking him to pay attention to too many things at once made his thoughts scatter like a bag of Skittles dumped on a tile floor — most of them would get rounded up eventually, but that would take extra time, and a couple of the best ones would be found years later behind a bookshelf.

  In high school, between football, half a dozen odd jobs, and his social life, his grades dropped low enough to disqualify him from sports. Academic scholarships were out of the question, so without football, college wasn’t in his future. He begged the smartest person he knew for help, and Tally saved him. She pushed him, encouraged him, rewarded his successes, didn’t let him quit when he got frustrated, made him take a break when quitting would be more productive than smashing his face against the table.

  He could become good at anything when he was trying to make her proud of him. He got his football scholarship. He got a little something extra for decent grades. He went to college, allied with Will, and built their company instead of staying on Westard’s corporate ladder, waiting for someone with seniority to die so he could move up a rung.

  He and Tally had been a good team — until she expressed her lack of interest in a partnership by walking away. No notice. No negotiation.

  He could as easily have used her as his excuse for being alone now, or maybe it only seemed so because Liz’s theory that he made bad choices to punish himself for losing Tally was fresh in his mind. “My petty envy is still problematic. How do I cure it, Dr. Castle?”

  “Get your own wife.”

  “Did.”

  Shit.

  By the time they got home, she’d know every move he’d made in the past twelve years, and he still wouldn’t know what made her cry when she was out of his sight for five minutes.

  Maybe he ought to learn from her example how to conduct an interrogation.

  “Couldn’t live without a fresh woman every month or two?”

  His mother had assumed the divorce was the result of infidelity on his part, but she had always expected him to turn into his father, so he expected the accusation from her. Tally thinking he was that much of a scumbag resurrected the burn in his gut. “I’m told I have innumerable flaws, but being a cheating bastard has never been one of them.”

  She opened her mouth but closed it before uttering whatever argument she’d been about to make.

  He wanted to hear it. He wanted to know how low her opinion of him was, how hopeless the notion of redemption. “Spit it out.”

  Slender fingers drummed on the steering wheel. “I guess I never saw you pick one up before dropping the one you had. You were just a serial dater.”

  He released the breath he’d been storing up in preparation to defend himself. Wasn’t everyone a serial dater — date someone, date someone else, until one stuck? “What’s wrong with that?”

  “The longest I ever saw you between relationships was the first time Trish Roby broke your heart at the beginning of recess and you were swearing eternal devotion to Carmen Latimer by the end of it.”

  “If I’d waited another day, Carmen would have been sharing her bubble gum with Shane instead.”

  “You won that race. Congratulations. But imagine how perfect she’d have been if she belonged to someone else.”

  He couldn’t see her left eyebrow from his current position but assumed it was being saucy. If he called attention to it, he’d scare it away again. “At the time, I
still had hope the perfect girl would belong with me.”

  Every other girl had been practice so he’d have something worthwhile to offer her.

  “Would it kill you to be single for more than half an hour after having your heart broken?”

  “I survived once for six months.” That remained the worst half year of his life, worse than the last six months of his marriage, worse than the first six months after the divorce — the exception to the rule that proved he’d been right all along. Starting something new beat the hell out of wallowing in misery. There was no benefit to prolonged suffering.

  “Now, I believe you were in love with that one. It ought to take a while to recover from legitimate cardiac damage.”

  She hadn’t believed he was in love with her at the time. “Is that why you doubted my sincerity when I told you I loved you, because I didn’t mourn previous breakups long enough?”

  “You are kind of free with your top-shelf affections. You were also trying to get laid.”

  He’d been wrong about wanting to know how low her opinion of him could sink. He’d put more effort into making her smile than getting into her pants, and he would have been content with smiles if she’d been as shy about initiating getting his zipper open as she’d been about initiating conversation. He’d been full of honorable, romantic intentions, and she thought all he’d cared about was pussy. “We did a lot more than hold hands without invoking the L-word.”

  He hoped her fidgeting with the steering wheel meant she was remembering what a lot more entailed. He’d hate to be the only one tortured by memories.

  “Fine. It had something to do with hearing you tell every girl I’d ever met you loved her first. My mother said she loved me all the time, too. It doesn’t mean anything. So what went wrong with your wife?”

  While he wasn’t looking, she’d sharpened that point she was trying to make and jabbed it between his ribs three times.

  I trust you as much as the person who beat me.

  Your love is meaningless.

  Tell me about this other woman you meant nothing to.

  Maybe what he was supposed to be learning was an appreciation for vacant silence. Words lacerated. “I missed the part of the vows where I agreed to change everything about myself by the time we got to the reception.”

  “Apart from the traditional matrimonial adjustments like forsaking other women?”

  He was a one-woman man even without matrimony. That was the one thing he did right by default. “My clothes, my hair, my tendency to run out the door in the morning without shaving, the amount of time I spend at work, my grotesque taste in movies, my juvenile eating habits, my juvenile sense of humor, my juvenile television-viewing behavior, my juvenile video game collection...”

  She took her eyes off the road for one second to glance his way, brows pinched together, no trace of sauciness evident now. “If she didn’t like anything about you, why did she marry you?”

  “That is an excellent question, to which I never got a satisfying answer.”

  “Why did you marry her?”

  That was an excellent question he didn’t want to examine too closely because he suspected he wouldn’t like what it said about him.

  He reached for the assortment of knobs on the dashboard and turned on the radio.

  Chapter 12

  Within a week of starting kindergarten, every five-year-old at Westard Elementary School had taken to referring to Tally as Know-It-Tal. Even at that age, other people’s problems seemed so simple to her, so easily resolved when viewed through the twin lenses of distance and practicality.

  She had cultivated sufficient distance from herself that she saw the practical solution to her own woes: marry some guy with a job, bring another income into the household, problems solved.

  If anyone else suggested such a plan to her, she would tell them to stand real still while she expressed her thanks by rolling the truck over them a few times. Yes, splitting the bills three ways would relieve some of the strain. No, she would not latch onto the first agreeable man she could find just so she could buy toothpaste whenever she wanted. She would have to live with that person every day, take on whatever additional baggage he brought as a dowry, and have his hands on her for reasons other than wanting his hands on her — a steep price for toothpaste on demand.

  If she thought her own advice sucked, she ought to know better than to offer it to anyone else. Ben obviously had the same old aversion to being alone, but her stupid suggestion that he fix it with matrimony hadn’t taken into account that he too might have needs beyond a marriage license — or that he’d already tried and gotten his heart broken.

  She was so far out of the loop, two major nuggets of gossip like the marriage and divorce of Westard’s golden boy managed to miss her ears. For the first time, she regretted not being part of the community. Access to just one big mouth could have prevented her from stuffing her foot in her own.

  Why had she even asked him about other women? Hearing about his current conquest wouldn’t have made the evening more enjoyable for her. She certainly hadn’t meant to torpedo his mood along with hers. “Ben, I’m—”

  He punched off the radio mid station identification. “So who’s missing you tonight, other than Officer Beaver?”

  Did that aggressive snap negate the apology she owed him? It killed her desire to offer it. If he’d rather take a shot at her in lieu of hearing a sorry, she’d practiced that routine throughout childhood and knew the steps by heart.

  If he hoped to strike a lonesome nerve in her to correspond to his, though, he’d be disappointed. Isolation suited her just fine. “The only single man in town at the moment is Jed Bartlett, and he’s not going to tie himself down to one woman while he has all the widows keeping him fed and entertained.”

  “So Shane.”

  “Is technically still married and is decent enough to think I’m not the kind of girl to take up with a married man.”

  “Why would anyone think that?”

  Not anyone. Everyone. Word on the street was that the bakery had become a front for a whorehouse under her watch, the logical career progression after taking her clothes off for money. More than one woman had physically obstructed her man’s crotch when Tally came within twenty feet of him, fearful she couldn’t control her whorish tendencies in the presence of a penis, even if it was buried under a sixty-year-old man’s beer gut.

  “Obviously, they’re threatened by my lack of a permullet.” If he wanted details of their thought processes, he could ask the source. She’d heard enough without inviting elaboration. “Since the only two options aren’t options, I’m lone-wolfing it.”

  “There are men outside Westard.”

  Someone who looked upon solitude as a death sentence would never understand her lack of interest in acquiring one of those men, so she borrowed one of his excuses for being unattached. “I work all day, every day.”

  What little remained of her time went toward chores and sleep. Unless those men happened to be inspecting eggs for cracks at 7 a.m. every other Sunday while she was doing likewise during her regularly scheduled grocery shopping, they were unlikely to cross paths. Given her unadventurous lifestyle, neglect of appearance, and surly demeanor, she was unfit for human companionship, anyway. A man’s interest in her could only be related to her tits, and she’d had her fill of that relationship foundation.

  “Sounds lonely.”

  Ben would wither away to nothing if forced to live without adoration as long as she had, but his sympathy was wasted on her. “You must get something from being with other people that I don’t. I’m happier when they leave me alone.”

  “Some things never change.”

  In her experience, everything changed, if only to get worse.

  She knew her mother only as the monster that stalked her waking hours and her nightmares, but pictures taken before Tally’s birth showed Bonnie Castle to be full of laughter and love for everything and everybody. Her daughter simply brought out the w
orst in her. Since many others — including most of the population of Westard — had a similar response to the same irritant, Tally came to think of herself as being extremely allergenic, like ragweed, but instead of sneezing, she provoked eruptions of vitriol.

  Even before she became the town disgrace, she hadn’t dared allow anyone to get close to her. She had too many secrets to guard. She couldn’t invite friends to her house because her mother might be drunk or raging. She couldn’t join them at the lake because they’d see the bruises. She couldn’t talk about herself because her life story would bring down the room, and when she had nothing to say, they complained because she shared less than they did. Friendships didn’t last when one party contributed nothing.

  One of Ben’s finest qualities — prior to tonight, anyway — was that she never had to say much with him. He cheerfully carried the burden of conversation all by himself so she had to come up with fewer excuses and lies. He never yelled, never questioned, never told her she did everything wrong, never hurt.

  Never gave the impression her presence wasn’t enough of a contribution or demanded more than she could give.

  He’d wanted the perfect girl, and he got stuck with her instead. When he needed the tutoring to stay in football, she gave him that. When he mastered the lessons and lingered like he wanted something else, she figured he was being a guy, and since the eighth grade, what every guy wanted was to get his hands on her tits.

  Because she wanted to give him more than others got from her and couldn’t bring herself to say, Go ahead and touch my boobs, she kissed him and hoped he’d intuit the invitation.

  He hadn’t touched them, not then. He used both hands to cradle her head, kissed her back in the shadow of that dead tree he’d carved some other girl’s initials into, and ruined her for all other men by setting her expectations sky high.

  She learned there were things she could give him, just the two of them alone in the dark, all bare skin and warmth, without letting the wreckage of her life touch him. In return, he gave her an hour or two away from that wreckage, to forget and just feel something that didn’t hurt for a change.