“We’re like roommates. Roommates with completely different schedules. He comes to bed after I’m asleep, and I have to leave for work before he even wakes up. Most days, the total extent of our quality time is me waking up at three a.m. to tell him to stop snoring.”
She chuckled. “That bad, huh?”
“It’s pretty bad. We’ve only been married for a year and a half. Our friends, they’ve been married twice that long and they still behave like newlyweds. They’re always all over each other. If I didn’t love them so much, I’d hate them. They really have it figured out.”
“Maybe.”
“They do. They’re having this big thing on Saturday, we’re all going out on a boat and they’re renewing their vows ... they’ve worked so hard on this. They love each other so much.”
“Sounds like it, but it’s not always easy to know what’s going on in people’s lives. Unless they come and sit at your bar and start drinking.” She gave me a wink and went to take an order from a customer at the other end of the bar.
Morosely, I stared at my beer. What was I even doing here, drinking alone in the early evening? I was becoming a stereotype. Bored, sex-starved wife starts hitting the bottle. Or hitting the tap. Or tapping the bottle. Something like that.
A movement in my peripheral vision caught my attention. A big shape sat down on the barstool next to me. I closed my eyes for a moment, wishing with all my might that it was Ian. I knew it wasn’t, he was at work. And he didn’t know where I was. But in my fantasy version, he’d found me using some obscure app on my phone that broadcast my location. And he’d lean over, and whisper in my ear “I need you. Right now. Right here.”
I opened my eyes and looked to my left. Not Ian. Definitely not Ian. Damn.
“Can I buy you a drink?”
“You’re about three drinks too late, but thanks anyway.”
“Ah, there’s always room for one more. You don’t have to drive anywhere, do you?” It was an educated guess on his part. Most people around this neighborhood walked or took public transportation.
“This is my last drink.”
“Suit yourself,” he said. He wasn’t bad looking. Black suit. Blond hair. Glasses that made him look both smart and cute. But he wasn’t my type. My type was men who never stopped working. Or men who never stopped working who were in love with women who rarely stopped working.
“How about I buy you dinner instead?”
“No thanks,” I said. “I’m married.”
He looked me over. Then looked pointedly at the empty space on my other side. “You don’t look married,” he said, bluntly.
“But I am,” I said, whispering ‘technically’ under my breath.
“Suit yourself,” he said again, his small grin making me think I’d underestimated how quietly I’d said that last word. “If you change your mind ... or if you decide that you’re not quite happily married, I’m going to be over at a table. Feel free to join me.” With that, he clinked his glass to mine, got to his feet, and left.
“Ouch,” the bartender said, coming back.
“Yeah.” He’d seen my ring. He knew I was married. He just didn’t think I was happily married. And the worst part was, I wasn’t entirely sure about that myself.
Chapter Five
“HE SAID I didn’t look married, Ian.”
“So? He was hitting on you. He probably wished you weren’t.”
“But he said I didn’t even look married.”
“Probably because ‘married’ is not a physical attribute like brown eyes, wavy hair, or—ugh—beer breath,” he said, as he came closer to me. “How much did you have to drink?”
“A few beers. I hate to drink alone.”
“Then don’t drink alone.”
“I have to because you’re never around!”
“Me? You’re the one who gets up in the middle of the night and bolts out of here before the sun even comes up.”
“Okay, my bad. Tomorrow morning, I’ll sleep in with you ’til six and we can go get some suds then.”
“Sounds like a plan,” he said, heading toward the kitchen.
“Don’t walk away from me.”
“I’m not. I’m getting something to eat. Not all of us drank our dinner.”
I followed him, frustrated. I rarely drank except for a glass of wine a few evenings a week. He was just picking on that because it was easier than dealing with my actual complaint.
In the kitchen, he was making a PBJ.
“What are you, twelve?”
He finished assembling his sandwich, took a big bite, and stuck out his tongue to show me the messy mixture of peanut butter and grape jelly on it. Apparently, he was twelve. “Ian, we’re living like roommates. Not a married couple. Roommates who are never home at the same time.”
He went to the fridge and opened a bottle of beer. He took a long swig and looked over at me. “So what do you want us to do? Should I quit my job? Are you willing to quit yours? Because I don’t see either of our work schedules changing anytime soon.”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” I said. But he looked a little ridiculous—and adorable—with a smudge of grape jelly on his upper lip. Under ordinary circumstances, I’d want to lick it off. “We just have to try harder to make it work. Other couples do. Lori and Dan do, and they work long hours, too.” Lori was a nurse and Dan was an engineer.
“Not as long as we do.”
“But long enough to cause problems in a marriage. But they make spending time together a priority. Just look at what they’ve planned for Saturday. Do you know how long it’s been since we’ve spent a whole day together? And we wouldn’t be doing it now if they hadn’t asked us months ago. If they weren’t our best friends.”
I turned to the sink and got myself a glass of water. “Maybe that’s the secret. Maybe we need them to plan more mandatory special occasions.”
Ian moved up behind me and placed his sticky hands on my shoulders. “We’ll have time for that someday. Right now—we’re both making headway in our careers. You’re working your ass off to make partner; I’m working my way up the food chain at my office. Once we get into the upper ranks, things’ll let up a little. They have to.”
“The partners work eighty-hour weeks, too. And think of how much your workload increased when you became a project manager. If you become one of the bosses, I’ll never see you. We’ll never see each other.”
He moved to stand beside me, his arm around my shoulder, both of us staring at the twinkling city lights outside the window over the sink. “We’ll make it work.”
“I don’t see how,” I said softly. “If we can’t manage to spend any time together now, how are we going to in the future? How could we ever even think about starting a family? Hell, we haven’t even taken our honeymoon yet.”
“We will, Lyss. We will.” He leaned in to plant a kiss on my temple, but I pulled away from him.
“Sometimes it feels like it’s never going to happen. We’ve been talking about going on a honeymoon for a year and a half. And in that entire time, I think we’ve had one full weekend together, when we went to that B & B upstate. One weekend trip—that’s all we’ve managed in eighteen months.”
“So we’ll do better.”
“How?” I said plaintively. “We know we need to do better. But we don’t have any freaking clue how.”
He opened his mouth, but then closed it again. He shook his head. “I don’t know.”
In the silence that followed, I heard a buzz and looked over. His phone was on the counter, vibrating with an incoming message. Perfect. That would be the end of this discussion. Work always came first. But you know what? Not tonight. “Don’t get that,” I said.
“Lyss,” he began, but I didn’t let him finish.
“We’re married, Ian. We’re supposed to discuss these things. Once you answer your phone, you’ll be in work mode until two o’clock in the morning.”
“Alyssa,” he said, more forcefully. “Your phone buzzed, too.”
“So? I have an important job, just like you,” I said, looking over at my purse on the dining room table. The soft glow coming from the open bag showed that I had gotten a message, too. “But unlike you, I at least try for a little work-life balance ... ” Wait a minute. Ian was still looking at me, his expression concerned. We’d both gotten a text at the same time. It might be something important.
We rushed for our phones. Fishing mine out of my purse, I thumbed the screen open. It was a text from Lori. Thank goodness. I’d been worried there for a moment.
I opened the message. It read: Friends, we are writing to inform you of the cancellation of our anniversary event on Saturday. Dan and I have been experiencing some problems lately and have mutually agreed on a trial separation. We ask for your understanding and prayers during this difficult time.
Mutely, I turned to Ian. He was still reading—or more likely re-reading—the text. His brow wrinkled as he frowned. When he finally looked up, his eyes met mine. He looked as stunned as I felt.
We stared at each other in disbelief for a long time.
Chapter Six
“AT LEAST WE went to bed together after that.”
I was back at the same bar as yesterday. It was after eight, and the girl with the purple cowboy boots, the one who’d been such a good listener, was working again. “That’s the only time in recent memory we’ve actually gone to sleep at the same time.”
“And did you—?”
I sipped the elaborate cocktail she’d made me when I asked for a beer. It was delicious. “No ... neither of us were in the mood after that news. But he held me. I fell asleep in his arms.”
She sighed, nodding her understanding. Today she was wearing a bright green tank top that was pretty much the color of that Tokyo Tea she’d made yesterday. Plus a denim skirt, the cowboy boots, the nose ring, and huge feathery earrings that looked like fishing lures. She was definitely an unusual temporary bartender.
I took another sip of my drink. It had amaretto and citrus, but it was a far cry from a usual amaretto sour. Maybe it was an amaretto sour on steroids. Under other circumstances, I’d ask her for the ingredients. But tonight, all I felt was shock. Worry. And fear. “If this could happen to them—to the strongest couple I know—then it seems like it could happen to us.”
I’d finally voiced my biggest fear. Even just saying it aloud seemed to give it power. Resisting the urge to knock on the honey-blond wood of the bar, I looked at the woman in front of me. Bartenders, even temporary ones, were supposed to be good at helping people with their problems, right? Like less stuffy psychiatrists?
“Technically, it could happen to anyone,” she said. “But that doesn’t mean it’s going to happen to everyone.”
“But what’s to keep it from happening to us?”
“You,” she said simply.
I tapped the red stirrer from my drink against my napkin, spilling drops of amber liquid. “I can’t even manage to have sex with my super-hot husband ... how am I supposed to fix our marriage?”
“I meant you, plural,” she said, smiling at the mention of ‘super-hot husband.’ “You guys already know that you’re having problems. So seems like the best thing you can do at this point is get to work on solving them.”
Did she really think it was that simple? “What, should we both quit our jobs and move to the countryside and work twenty-five hours a week in retail? Then we’d have plenty of time to see each other ... no health insurance, no living wages, but plenty of time.”
She shrugged. “If that’s what floats your boat. Or you could consider mixing drinks. It’s fun. You get to see people making messes of their lives and make them feel better with alcohol.”
“I’m not making a mess of my life.”
“You’re not making it less messy, either.”
Who was this annoying, truth-speaking cocktail mistress? “I don’t know how.”
“Look, you and your husband have how many years of higher education between you? And your jobs—you’re both problem-solvers there, right? So apply some of those same skills at home. You find solutions for your clients at work, people you barely know. If you can solve problems for virtual strangers, you should be able to find some answers for yourself and the person you know better than anyone else in the world. You’ve just got to take a step back and look at this more objectively. Don’t think about how you’re hurt. Don’t think about how you’re scared. Don’t think about how badly you need to get laid. Think about what motivates you and Ian.”
Wow. That was quite a lecture. Fortunately, she got called away to make a drink, so I had a little time to digest what she’d said. And she was right. Not sure how she’d pegged me and Ian so quickly, but we were problem-solvers. As long as they were other people’s problems.
When she came back around, I focused on the flaw in her plan. “It’s just never going to be enough, us wanting to spend more time together, wanting to do more things together. We both want it. But it’s not possible with our jobs.”
“Okay, so, your jobs are a fixed variable. That’s not going to change. So you have to change other things.”
“What do you mean?”
“It’s like when shit happens. You can’t change that, and you can’t avoid it. So you have to change how you react to it.”
“Like how? Am I supposed to embrace the shit?”
She laughed. “Now there’s one hell of a mental picture. But no. When bad stuff does happen, try to re-write the way you react to it. The way you deal with it. You’re always going to be busy. A block of free time to fix your marriage is never going to fall into your lap. You have to make it happen.”
She paused, stabbing a maraschino cherry with a tiny cocktail sword and popping it into her mouth. “Like I said, what motivates the two of you? What would motivate you to direct your brains and energy and ambition into doing something proactive for your marriage instead of your jobs?”
I thought about it. We were both plenty motivated at work. At home, we were often too exhausted to feel passionate about anything. Except ... “Well, Ian’s super competitive. He can never resist a challenge if something’s at stake.”
“And you?”
“I’m pretty competitive, too.”
“Such a rare quality in a lawyer.”
I smiled in spite of myself, in spite of the situation. The world needed more snarky bartenders with nose rings. “So what do I do, say that the one who fixes our marriage wins a prize?”
“If you can’t think of anything better,” she said, taking away my empty glass. “But somehow I think you can.”
Chapter Seven
WHEN I REACHED the entrance to our apartment building, I heard my name. Ian was coming up the sidewalk, looking as tired as I felt.
It was nearly nine, which kind of felt like an early night for him, at least compared to the hours he’d been keeping lately. Of course, fifteen minutes from now, he’d be on his laptop doing work stuff. Most nights, I would as well. How could I keep that from happening tonight?
In the elevator, we talked briefly about our days. The highlight—or lowlight—of Ian's had been a meeting with a new client, a heavy smoker. “I’m gonna take a quick shower,” he said.
While he was doing that, I could make him a snack. I didn’t know if he’d had time to eat anything at work.
Looking in the fridge was a depressing exercise in futility. Apparently, people who don’t have time to have sex or fix their marriage don’t have time to shop for groceries, either. So I made him another PBJ. I arranged it on the plate and opened a beer for him. There. That was some high-quality wifeliness on my part.
“What’s this?”
I jumped. I hadn’t heard him come up behind me and—holy crap. He was only wearing black jeans. Bare feet, wet hair, and a glistening expanse of smooth, hard chest. Most of the blood in my system reversed course to a very neglected body part. Now how was I supposed to concentrate?
“Thanks, hon,” Ian said, sitting down at
the table. After a moment, I joined him. “This is nice. Never seen parsley on a plate with a peanut butter sandwich before. Very fancy.”
“I wouldn’t eat it—I snipped it from that fern in the living room.”
He chuckled, taking a huge bite of the sandwich. Really, who ate half a sandwich in one bite? My husband, apparently. But it was best not to get fixated on his mouth right now.
“Have you heard from Dan?”
The smile died on his face. “Just a text. He didn’t say much of anything, just that he didn’t want to talk about it. What about Lori?”
“Pretty much the same thing. It sounds bad.”
“Yeah,” he agreed, laying what was left of the sandwich on his plate.
“I just can’t imagine what happened.”
“Maybe one of them cheated.”
“I hope so,” I said, without thinking.
Ian looked at me like I was insane. “You what?”
I flushed under his incredulous gaze. “I just mean ... I hope that one of them was an idiot. That one of them messed up big time. I’d hate to think neither of them screwed up but that this happened anyway.”
“Why’s that?” he said, studying me closely.
“Because I’m afraid it could happen to us.”
He reached out and took my hand. “It’s not going to.”
“You can’t know that,” I said, squeezing his hand harder than I meant to. We couldn’t let things continue on as they were, and I wished I knew how to make him see that. “Don’t you think that if someone had told Lori and Dan that they’d be separating soon, they wouldn’t have believed it, either? Yet they did.”
“That doesn’t mean it’s going to happen to us.”
“Yeah. But it could.”
“We won’t let it,” he said firmly. As a lawyer, I knew all about using a firm, strong voice. And I also knew that I often employed my firmest voice for my shakiest cases.
“Things are already not so great, Ian. Do you know how long it’s been since we’ve spent any time together? Since we’ve really talked about anything except work? Since we’ve had sex? If we’re having problems now, how do we know we won’t end up like them?”
Wicked Bet: A Bad Boy Romance Page 3