“Sure.”
Oh, shit. I hadn’t thought of that yet. There was every bit the potential for Will to stroll on in. Wouldn’t that just be grand for him to see Chris and Blake consoling me? To watch me lick my wounds over him while our friends were oblivious? Maybe he’d bring Emma, even though it was her weekend with Stephanie. Maybe Chris would be polite and ask them to join us at our table.
Maybe I could just crawl in a hole and die.
Despite the horrific scenario taking place in my head, I didn’t barricade myself in the truck. I stepped out and strode as purposefully toward the entrance as possible. No cop cars and no Jeeps in the parking lot, so we were in the clear for now. At least he hadn’t beat us here.
Turns out that he didn’t show up at all, not that deep down I really expected him to. Blake, Chris and I had a nice meal together and by the time we were finished, I’d begun to feel remotely human. Maybe there was something to be said about the restorative powers of bacon for a person’s soul.
By the time Blake and Chris dropped me back off at home, the clouds had lifted and I’d come to terms with my decision. Even though it had been made in the heat of the moment, perhaps Doug had been on to something when he’d intimated that I’d done what I had to do to avoid any further hurt.
A dull ache was something that I could live with; much better than the crushing torture that Lauren had gone through, or the unique brand of anguish that Blake had endured. And they had both come out better on the other side of it.
More importantly, they had ended up with the one that they assumed had been lost to them forever.
I pondered that as I sat on my bed, my face pressed against Will’s shirt.
Breathing the scent of him in, I wondered if one day I would be able to say the same thing about us.
Chapter Seventeen
Either Lauren was playing dumb, or neither Doug nor Blake clued her in about my less than stellar weekend. Whatever the case, for that I was grateful. For if anyone would have the talent to get me to break, it would be her and I’d much prefer not to go there.
Numbness had settled in quickly, combined with the fleeting hope that all was not truly over. I was able to flash a convincing smile. I didn’t resemble death warmed over. My thoughts weren’t constantly of him. I went to work and didn’t have any problem concentrating. All good things.
And for good measure, just because I could, I was back to the ponytail. Not just any ponytail, mind you, but a curly one high atop my head, worn proudly like a flag - and not one of surrender.
“Cute hair,” Lauren commented as she entered my house, Sadie in tow.
“Thanks.”
“What’s the occasion?”
I shrugged. “Just trying something new. Watch out; one day you might come over and I’ll have a pixie cut like you.”
She scrunched up her face and tried to picture it. “Nah. You can’t copy my hair, anyway. That’s cheating.”
“Why? Because people will get us confused? Wait - I’m the tall one and you’re the short one. End of that problem.”
“You’re so funny I forgot to laugh.”
“You’re just sensitive about being vertically challenged. Hopefully Matthew’s genes have dominated yours and you haven’t single-handedly stunted your daughter’s growth.”
Lauren looked down at Sadie and considered. “It wouldn’t be so bad to be a petite girl. Knowing my luck, she’ll take after him and be tall and if we have a boy, he’ll be the smallest kid in the class, including all the girls.”
I giggled. “As a consolation prize, he’ll be extremely hot and get all the babes anyway. He’ll just make them sign contracts that they’ll never wear heels in his presence.”
She snorted, then looked contentedly down at her baby’s face.
“Are you already talking about having another one?” I asked, picking up on the whole “if we have a boy” comment.
“Heavens no. Not yet. I just got back to work. I’m just now fitting into my pre-pregnancy clothes.”
I rolled my eyes at that one. Lauren had gained approximately twenty pounds during her pregnancy, seventeen of which she’d lost immediately after giving birth. She was the type of woman nurses lauded as being born to have children. In fact, I’d heard someone tell her that very thing in the hospital when I’d visited the new family.
Something burned inside me, a nagging sensation.
Lauren caught it, too. “What?”
“Can I hold her?”
“Did you just ask me what I think you did?”
“I suppose so.”
“Are you sick?”
So I’d never been a charter member of the Sadie fan club. As much as Lauren had tried to get me excited about the blessed event, I’d not warmed up to the idea of losing my best friend as I knew her to a little human. I’d been selfish; imprinting my ideals upon her and expecting her to want the same things as I did.
“No, I’m not feverish. I think it’s time that I worked on being friends with her. It’s not like she’s going away.”
Lauren’s eyes clouded with happy tears, which she wasn’t ashamed of because in the past couple of years she had become the type of girl who cried at the drop of a hat. Her tear ducts worked overtime for the both of us.
“Quit that,” I chided.
“Sorry,” she sniffled.
She handed over her daughter effortlessly, as though she’d had plenty of practice entrusting people with her miniature likeness. Before I knew it, Sadie had been passed to me like a baton, her tiny body snuggled into the crook of my elbow.
For a little thing she was solid, her weight noticeable. But what was more surprising was the warmth that radiated off of her body. I stared down at her face. Even though her eyes were closed, I couldn’t turn away.
“You’d do anything for her, wouldn’t you?” I asked softly.
“Yes,” Lauren said without hesitation.
“Do you think that will ever go away?”
“No.”
“So let’s just say that you wanted something very badly, but you knew if you got it that it would hurt her. Would you sacrifice that to keep her happy?”
“Without question.”
I bit my lip.
“Look,” Lauren joked, “if Sadie decides that she hates you, I’m not going to end our friendship. Is that what you’re afraid of?”
“No,” I said honestly.
After all, my inquiry wasn’t really about them.
“How about Matthew?” I continued. “Would he do the same?”
“He’d be worse.”
“That’s what I was afraid of,” I muttered under my breath. That old adage about daughters having their fathers wrapped around their little fingers was apparently true if your name was Lauren, Sadie or Emma. Not so much if you were a Blake or Gracie. I was outnumbered. I also knew which grouping I’d rather find myself in.
Sadie’s eyes fluttered open and she laid there in my arms, observing me. I fully expected her to contort her face and burst into tears like she normally did when I was anywhere near her, but she remained silent.
“I suppose you’re not so bad,” I told her.
“They’re better when they’re yours.”
Sadie started squirming upon hearing Lauren’s voice. Typically, I would have used this as an excuse to hand her right back over. But I held on, not ready to let go yet. Remembering something that my best friend may have told me, or that I’d read in some internet article while trying to pass time and prove myself as sympathetic to those who chose to multiply, I reached for one of her tiny baby hands. Hesitantly, I offered her my index finger, stroking it against her palm. Her fingers latched on to it and squeezed with surprising strength. I was shocked that it worked, plus it had the added benefit of calming her down.
Lauren laughed at the pride that registered across my face. “You’re a natural.”
“Let’s not get carried away.”
My attention swung back to the angelic face belonging to th
e person snuggled in the crook of my arm. To be young again, with your whole life in front of you still. With no pain or heartbreak. A mistake free existence, unblemished by actions you wished you could take back.
“Will you tell her about Eric?” I asked suddenly.
“Why?” Lauren pressed.
Admittedly it was a random question, especially for someone that felt as much animosity towards the guy as I did. Why would I, of all people, be suggesting to tell Sadie about Mr. Less Than Perfect? I worked things out in my brain until they made sense to me, then opened my mouth.
“Because, most little girls dream of finding their prince and falling in love right away. You could save her some grief if you told her your story. About how your dream guy wasn’t the one who was the first. Your knight in shining armor wasn’t even the first one to put a ring on it.”
Lauren cleared her throat. “First off, Eric technically never got a ring on anything. Unless you count it being firmly in its box on the table, or firmly in its box on the front seat of my car when I drove down to give it back. Secondly, where in the hell is this coming from?”
“I’ve just been thinking.”
“About parenting?”
“About life in general.”
“Oh Lord.”
“I know, right? Maybe I’m just premenstrual, but I was remembering back to when my parents got divorced and I was thinking about how much easier it would have been for everyone involved if they would have just been up front with me. If they wouldn’t have tried to pretend they were perfect.”
Lauren chewed on her lip. Before her bullshit meter went off, I needed to soldier on.
“Is there some kind of parental doctrine that forbids you from ever admitting to your children that you’ve made mistakes? From showing them that you’re human, just like them?”
“I don’t think so.”
“So when she’s old enough, will you let her know the whole story behind how you and Matthew hooked up? Or will you hold on to the myth that her father was always your one and only? Because eventually she’ll be old enough to do the math and she’ll know that you two didn’t get married until you were already knocked up. In fact, she doesn’t even need to have any math skills whatsoever to look at your wedding pictures and find out. So you’ve already blown the whole ‘no sex before marriage’ thing.”
“I really don’t want to think about this right now.”
I met Sadie’s eyes. “You want to know about this kind of stuff, right?”
Of course, she didn’t answer.
“She needs to know this stuff, Lauren,” I pleaded. “She needs to know that not everyone marries their first love. Or even if they do, they don’t always end up staying together. Or if she looks to her aunt and uncle, it may take a decade to stop hating each other and just get on with life. So that when she breaks up with someone and she’s crying her eyes out and wearing mismatched clothes, she knows that she shouldn’t give up on love.”
“Have you?”
“Have I what?”
“Have you given up on love?”
“We aren’t talking about me.”
Technically, we were talking about Emma and Will, so I wasn’t lying. I was just stretching the truth like a rubber band that was dangerously close to snapping back on me and leaving a welt that would sting.
“Sure,” Lauren said, clearly not convinced. “Don’t give up. It will happen for you one day when you least expect it.”
If she only knew that it already had. If only I could voice my own concern that Will had made a sacrifice of epic proportions in order to shield his own daughter from the fact that relationships didn’t always mean forever. It didn’t matter that she obviously already knew that; what mattered was his inability to let her see that he was only human and that life went on after you picked yourself up from the lowest of lows. Unless I truthfully didn’t mean anything to him other than being a fuck buddy - a reality that I couldn’t bring myself to fathom.
“I’m not looking.”
“That’s when it finds you.”
She stared wistfully off into space, no doubt recalling her own introduction to the perfect storm that was Matthew Snyder. A stolen kiss while she’d still been conflicted about Eric. Granted, she’d been conflicted about Eric in large part due to Matthew, but still. A decision that had led her away from them both.
“Would you change things?”
Lauren jumped, snapping out of her reverie. “Change what?”
“Would you go back and erase those years with Eric if you knew then what you know now? How you’d end up? Would you have taken all those words back and not given him any of your love? Is there still a part of you that misses him? That still loves him, even just a little bit?”
“Eric is history. Like I told him before he left for Georgia, I’ll never completely stop loving him. You don’t spend that many years with someone without having some residual feelings. I wouldn’t have felt as awful as I did when I walked out on him if I didn’t care about him. And I’ll never hate him, not in a million years. I’m just not in love with him, and he knows that.”
I flashed back to Lauren’s wedding, in the hallway outside the reception. At that point in time, after Eric had been done kissing Blake and getting slapped when he copped a feel on her ass, I would have been hard pressed to say that there hadn’t been a glimmer of hope in the douchebag’s eyes that he hadn’t lost the battle yet. That he hadn’t garnered a bit of sympathy from all involved because he had been just a bit too late to stop the wedding and ask for her to take him back.
Of course, Lauren didn’t even know that Eric had been in the same building as she was on her wedding day, nor that he had called her repeatedly asking for an audience. And she’d never find out - a secret that Will, Blake and I had silently vowed to take to our graves.
Will had a thing about keeping secrets. He was damn good at it. It would be much easier to swallow if he wasn’t keeping one about me.
Is that what Will was waiting for? For Stephanie to come to her senses and realize what she’d lost? For her to race in and admit that she’d made a horrible, terrible mistake and beg him on hands and knees for another chance? Why wasn’t he ready to let go and explore his own happiness, instead of holding out hope for a reconciliation that would never happen?
And why in the world was he using Emma as a scapegoat?
Was she just an excuse for him to hide the origin of his true fear?
“Will you tell her about Matthew’s past?” I asked, eager to shift the subject to one that wasn’t so uncomfortable for me. However, this one was still as awkward for Lauren. “She’s going to find out about that, too. The internet doesn’t lie. Well, it does, but you know what I mean.”
“I’m sure we’ll address things when we have to.”
“I’m just saying that people talk. And you don’t want Sadie to find out that her dad’s a convicted felon from little Timmy on the playground.”
“Well, no. But considering that I don’t even know the whole story-”
“Maybe that’s what the real problem is,” I mused. “We’re so busy keeping up appearances, letting the ones that we love assume roles on these pedestals that we’ve built for them, that it hurts too much to admit to ourselves that we’re anything less than perfect. Instead, we never really get too close, because we’re afraid of not liking what it is that we see.”
“Matthew’s past doesn’t define him any more than mine does me. Or Blake’s. Or yours, even if you don’t have any skeletons to hide.”
I raised an eyebrow at her assessment. “That’s what you think, sister.”
Chapter Eighteen
We didn’t talk about it any more. Not Doug, not Blake, not Chris, not Lauren. And certainly not me. I’d put introspective Gracie away somewhere in my back pocket and pulled out standard issue Gracie instead. Gracie who didn’t give a shit, Gracie who smiled and joked and was basically a ball of rambunctious fun.
It helped immensely that Will had neve
r been a significant member of the group as a whole. He’d always been someone on the outskirts of the inner circle, a guy that you could call on to go to a last minute hockey game, stand up for you at a wedding, or move some heavy furniture. I was probably the only one who missed his presence. I didn’t dare ask Chris if they hung out when it was just the two of them; I just knew that Will wasn’t included in the group plans.
I considered it kind of shocking that I still factored into the group plans. But more and more, Sadie ended up being included in things, so we were still an even numbered bunch. The two of us got bounced around between the happy married couples - when Blake was doting on Sadie, I’d catch up with Lauren and to a lesser extent, Matthew.
My comfort zone was leaning more and more towards Blake and Chris, which wasn’t that surprising when I really thought about it. Blake and I spent upwards of forty hours a week together. And Chris was awesome at not making me feel like a third wheel. After spending time with him, I’d go back home and repent for ever saying mean things about him. That man could ride up on his white horse any day as far as I was concerned.
Things were also going better on the work front. I was starting to shed the restraint I’d learned as a banker - supposing that you could even call a former teller a banker - and think more creatively without even really trying. So much so that Blake had decided it was time for me to take on my first major project: redecorating my own house.
Which explained why Blake and I found ourselves yet again in the home furnishings department of a big box store, this time on a Saturday afternoon. Chris had bowed out of this one, leaving us on our own.
“What I want you to do is to take the bones of what Lauren already gave you and turn it in to something that’s all your own,” Blake instructed.
“You don’t particularly like anything she picked out,” I reminded her.
It was true. Lauren and I had done the whole house ourselves, since Blake wasn’t exactly accessible to offer decorating advice. Lauren had been stubborn in many areas when she’d bought that house. Blake had never let her forget it.
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