Exes and Ohs

by Beth Kendrick

  This sordid situation wasn’t entirely his fault. Why should I punish him for trying to be a good man, a good father in a society so full of fractured families that child psychologists had to turn away clients?

  But then I remembered: he could just be overtired from wedding planning with his once-and-future wife candidate. The one he’d sworn he wouldn’t leave me for.

  I folded my arms and waited for him to speak up. Which he finally did, after loosening his tie, shoving both hands in his pockets, and kicking at the doorframe in some masculine evolutionary-throwback move.

  “Gwen.”

  “That’s my name, don’t wear it out.” A little retro slang went a long way, and I instantly felt cheered. “What is it you want?”

  “You’re…” He continued to stare. “You’re blond.”

  “That’s right.” I fluffed my new lioness mane.

  Long pause.

  “Listen, I’m a busy woman, so if you’re done here…” I turned on my heel and headed back inside my office.

  He caught my wrist in a gentle but firm clasp. “You were supposed to meet me at Café Chou half an hour ago.”

  I whirled around to face him and snatched my hand away. “Let’s get something straight. I’m not your girlfriend. I’m not your fuck buddy. I’m just the runner-up in the ‘Who wants to live with a waffling weasel’ pageant. So I don’t have to meet you anywhere, ever.”

  I could see him struggling to temper his frustration with cool rationality. “That is completely—” He broke off in mid-sentence, still gazing at my head. “You’re blond.”

  “Yes, I believe we covered that.” I raised my eyebrows. “Got any new ones?”

  “How did you…?”

  “It’s called hair dye,” I explained. “Chéri.”

  His jaw dropped at the chéri. “Oh my God. This is Harmony’s doing.”

  “Don’t blame her. I simply asked her for a salon referral and took it from there. And if you think this is bad, you should see Cesca.”

  “It’s not bad. It’s…” He swallowed hard. “You look like…you look like a man-eater.”

  I rocked back on my heels and smiled. “You say that like it’s a bad thing.”

  “But you aren’t the blonde type.”

  “Au contraire. My new stylist, Matthieu, said my complexion is ideally suited for a shimmery platinum.”

  “Damn that Matthieu.” He gritted his teeth.

  “Why? I assumed you’d like it. You don’t seem to have any objections to Harmony’s hair.”

  He exhaled sharply. “I see. That’s what this is about.”

  I held up a hand. “No. Not everything is about you and Harmony. This is about me.” And Cesca. And E.P.T. “In therapy circles, this is what’s known as ‘moving on,’ my friend.”

  “You need to be blond to move on?”

  “What do you care? It’s not like you’ll ever be seeing me again.”

  He shut the office door. “That’s what I wanted to talk to you about.”

  “Hey!” I protested as he leaned back against the doorframe. “This is coercion! Ambush! Harassment!”

  “Give me a break.” He tugged at his tie and unbuttoned the top of his collar.

  My eyes narrowed. I clutched the lapels of my blazer together.

  “Blond. Jesus Christ.” He finally dragged his gaze away from my hair and announced, “I’ve come to talk about what happened this weekend.”

  “There’s nothing to talk about. You’re history, I’m blond, end of story.”

  “Gwen—”

  “Have a nice life with your gorgeous wife.”

  “Gwen—”

  But I was on a roll. “It was fun while it lasted, but that’s the way the cookie crumbles.”

  The corners of his eyes crinkled when he smiled. “‘The way the cookie crumbles’?”

  I sighed. “What do you want? I’m from Illinois.” But his smile drained the fight out of me. I sat down on the edge of the desk and shrugged. “I don’t know what else to say here.”

  “You don’t have to say anything.” He rested his hand next to mine on the desk. “I wanted to explain about this weekend. And to figure out where we go from here.”

  I shook my head. “If you think I’m having an affair with a guy who left me for a client, you’ve been watching too much Twilight’s Tempest.”

  His eyes narrowed. “I don’t want to have an affair with you.”

  “Good.” I tried not to feel insulted.

  “I don’t believe in affairs. Especially not when children are involved.”

  “There’s a shocker.”

  “I know you’re upset. You have every right to be. I know we can’t be…involved anymore.”

  “Then why are you here?”

  He squared his shoulders. “I wanted—I was hoping we could still be friends.”

  I had to laugh. “You want to be friends?”

  He nodded earnestly. “What happened with Harmony and Leo doesn’t change my feelings for you. But I can’t choose a two-week relationship over my son. And even though we can’t be…you know…there’s no reason we have to stop talking altogether.”

  I shook my head. “Slow down. Before we get all caught up in some tortured The Sun Also Rises scenario, you should know something.”

  “What’s that?”

  “I don’t want to be friends.”

  He looked down, and when he glanced up again, his eyes were shuttered and dark.

  “The whole friends deal would work out great for you,” I pointed out. “You’d get to live in the Apple Pie Utopia with a cute kid and a hottie wife. Plus, you’d get the also-ran gal to buddy up with for surfing and Northern Exposure. But what would I get?”

  “We’d still get to see each other. Not romantically, but…”

  “We’d see each other when you’re not busy with your family. Alex, you dumped me for an ex-girlfriend you claim you can’t respect. Friends don’t do that to each other.” I leaned back against my desk. “I understand why you’re doing this. I’d probably do the same thing in your place. You’ve got your priorities straight; a child does take priority over a two-week romance. Especially in a situation like Leo’s, where there’s no stability at home.”

  “She was threatening to take him to New York if I didn’t give reconciliation a shot!” He was officially down to his last nerve. “How am I supposed to bond with my son from three thousand miles away? What was I supposed to do?”

  “You did the right thing,” I repeated.

  The muscle in his jaw twitched. “But you can’t forgive me.”

  I tried to explain. “It’s not a question of forgiving you. It’s a question of protecting myself. I can’t just settle for second place.”

  “You’re not second place.”

  “Of course, I am.” I turned away from him. “And you’re right, I am angry, but on some level I understand that this isn’t your fault. We just had really, really bad timing.”

  “You can say that again.”

  “You’re being honorable. You’re trying to be a good dad so that Leo doesn’t have to have a million psycho stepfathers. But yeah, I’m still upset because…”

  “Because I made a promise I couldn’t keep and you got hurt.”

  I waited for him to break down and confide that he too had been hurt. But he was not following the script.

  “Your intentions are good.” I threw up my hands. “And you aren’t to blame for what Harmony did. But how am I supposed to trust you and pretend our little fling—or whatever the hell it was—never happened? I can’t turn my feelings on and off like a faucet.”

  “So that’s it?”

  “Yeah.” I studied the carpet. “I guess so.”

  “You’d rather have nothing than friendship?”

  I crossed my arms. “It’s not really about my preferences. We’re out of options here, don’t you think?”

  He nodded.

  I sighed again. “But I can tell you something that might make you fe
el better.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Whenever men ask me for parenting advice—which happens more often than you might expect; just last week my dentist asked me how to explain death to his six-year-old—I always tell them the same thing.”

  “Which is?”

  “Which is, the best thing you can do for your children is to love their mother. So there you go. You, me, and Harmony all agree.”

  “Christ.”

  “My sentiments exactly. And I think the easiest thing for us—for me, anyway—would be to make a clean break. Why make things harder than they already are?”

  “But—”

  “No. I have to move on.” The last of my anger slumped into sadness. “I don’t want to move on, but I have to.”

  He gestured to my hair. “Hence, the blond.”

  We looked at each other and broke into wide, double-edged grins. The sort of panicked hilarity that precedes emotional free fall.

  “So just let it go. Let it go.” My smiled wilted. I took a deep breath. “Let me go.”

  But he didn’t. He came closer. I turned my face away as he caught a lock of my hair between his thumb and forefinger, studying the pale shades of blond in the afternoon sunlight.

  I waited, motionless, listening to the gentle whirr of the air conditioner.

  When I finally turned back to him, he moved his fingers from my hair to my cheek. And I knew, raging physical chemistry or no raging physical chemistry, this would be the last time he touched me this way.

  “I don’t want to let you go,” he said.

  “Me either.” I laced my fingers through his. He tugged me even closer. And our “good-bye” turned out to be a whole lot more than a peck on the cheek and a friendly handshake.

  I’m proud to say that at least we managed to hold back long enough to lock the office door. After all, there were children wandering around. But once that dead bolt clicked and the window blinds closed, there was no turning back.

  And it turned out that blondes, in addition to having more fun, also have fewer inhibitions.

  “This is a big mistake,” I murmured, fumbling with his belt buckle.

  “Huge,” he murmured back, popping a button off my blouse.

  “Nothing good can come of it.” I sighed as he swept me off my feet, winced as he pushed me back against the desktop—and my stapler.

  “I wouldn’t say nothing.” He reached behind me and shoved the rest of my desk accessories onto the carpet. After which both of us stopped talking and tried to find what we needed. A strong, bittersweet release.

  We didn’t say much afterward. No holding, no talking, no rash and empty promises. We just picked up our clothes, buttoned up our shirts, and struggled back into our workday roles. He started to retrieve the piles of books and folders we’d tossed to the floor, but I stopped him.

  “Don’t,” I said. “You have to go.”

  “I don’t want to let you go,” he repeated.

  “But you will.”

  And he did. He let himself out without another word.

  I turned the lights off, curled up in my chair, and put my head down on the desktop that was still warm from our bodies.

  I didn’t see how this day could get any worse.

  Then Cesca called with the big news.

  14

  “Gwen! Thank God you’re there!” My roommate sounded like she’d just sprinted all the way from Sacramento. “Guess what?”

  I tried to manufacture some semblance of enthusiasm. “What?”

  “Guess!” she insisted.

  “Um…Alex came over to my office and offered to be friends, I told him to go to hell and right before we vowed never to see each other again, we ended up having sweaty, animal sex on my desk?”

  I could practically hear her jaw hitting the floor on the other end of the line.

  “You did not!” she yelled.

  “Oh, but we did.”

  She whistled. “Damn, that hair dye oughta come with a warning label.”

  “Yes, I blame the peroxide. Slutty women everywhere ought to band together and file suit against L’Oréal.”

  “‘Slutty’? Please. You’re practically Sandra Dee.”

  “Until now.” I sighed ruefully as I pondered my tawdry desktop escapade. “Anyway, didn’t you have some news?”

  “Oh yeah.” She waited a beat. “About our dirty little secret under the bathroom sink.”

  “The pink-lined oracle has spoken?” I crossed my fingers, bit my lip, and held my breath.

  “My uterus has spoken,” she corrected. “The red seas have parted.” Her voice radiated relief.

  “Woo hoo! How do you feel?”

  “Like a convict who’s been paroled from the Mike Jessup Maximum-Security Prison. The grass is green! The sky is blue! And there are some mighty good-lookin’ men on the outside!”

  “Good for you.” Now that the crisis point had passed, I was shifting back to droopy-eyed depression.

  “Yeah. That was a close one. Can you imagine?” Her voice hushed in horror. “I could be carrying the spawn of Mike Jessup. Thank God my reproductive organs thwarted his fiendish sperm.”

  “Your womb must be very selective.”

  “Strictly A list. Invitation only.”

  “Well, now that you’re in the clear, what are you going to do?”

  “I can tell you what I’m not going to do: I am not going to call Mike Jessup.” She laughed guiltily. “Well. I’m not going to call him again, anyway.”

  “Cesca!”

  “What? I had to tell him about the pregnancy scare!”

  “After you started your period?”

  She sniffed haughtily. “A father has a right to know.”

  “That’s the most pathetic rationalization I’ve ever heard,” I scoffed.

  “I’d hang up on you if I weren’t so elated.”

  “I’d hang up on you if I weren’t so miserable.”

  Our friendship truly was a beautiful thing.

  By Friday afternoon, I was so distracted and sleep-deprived from the big breakup that I decided to stop pretending to work and just pack it in early.

  Alex and I had stuck to our promise and avoided all contact since our little indiscretion on Monday, but that didn’t mean I wasn’t thinking about him. Obsessively.

  So I went home around three-thirty, changed into the white tank top and red track pants that always served me so well in times of emotional distress, and had just collapsed into bed when the doorbell rang.

  If you live in L.A., an unexpected doorbell chime before 5 P.M. signifies one of the following: a religious fanatic determined to convert you, a bloodthirsty serial killer, or a high-priced call girl who got the wrong address. I wanted nothing to do with any of these options, so I burrowed my head deeper into the pillows and squeezed my eyes shut.

  Ding dong.

  Damn serial killers. I rolled over, pulled up the covers, and gritted my teeth.

  Dingdongdingdongdingdongdingdong.

  “Oh my God!” I bolted upright. “Knock it off!”

  The doorbell just kept on ringing. The premed student who lived next to us started pounding on the paper-thin wall. I charged out into the hallway, ready to unleash my bottled-up wrath on a deserving target.

  Please, God, let it be a representative for Synchrona.

  I flung open the door without even bothering to peer through the peephole. “What?”

  “Hi, Miss Gwen. Your hair’s different. I don’t like it.”

  My gaze dropped from eye level down to waist level, where Leo stared up at me. His customary Spider-Man cap had been replaced by a large construction-paper crown with the number 5 emblazoned on the front.

  I squatted down to get a better look at him. “Leo?”

  “Hi.” He strolled right past me into the apartment. “Do you gots any Goldfish crackers?”

  I closed and locked the door, then started after him. “Leo! How…what…how did you get here?”

  He stood
in the middle of the kitchen, gazing speculatively up at the counters and cabinets. When he heard the tension in my voice, his eyes widened. “Am I in trouble?”

  “I don’t know,” I said truthfully. I knew that open-ended questions would get me nowhere, so I fell back on the trusty standby of preschool conversation: directives. “Tell me how you got here.”

  He sighed and let the small blue knapsack he was toting drop to the floor. “I took a limo.”

  I sat down on the beige linoleum next to him. “You took a limo? Really? Tell me where your mommy is.”

  “Home. Can I have a snack?”

  “One second. Tell me where Al—your daddy is.”

  “At his job.”

  I decided to go for broke and venture into the realm of yes-no questions. “Did you tell them you were coming here?”

  He tried to look sweet and innocent, but mischief danced in his eyes. “No.”

  “Then I have two questions for you.” I got to my feet. “And I will get you a snack while I ask them.”

  “Do you have any cookies?”

  “No,” I lied. “It’ll have to be fruit. Do you want grapes or apple slices?”

  “Grapes.”

  “Grapes it is. Now how did you get here without Mommy or Daddy?”

  “I called the car service.”

  I sat back down, amazed. “For real? You can dial a phone?”

  “Sure.” He helped himself to a grape. “I know our phone number, and Mommy’s cell phone number, and I can use the special buttons on the phone to call the policemen and the fire engine and the ambulance and the car service.”

  Which of these things was not like the others? “You guys have car service on speed dial?”

  “Yeah.” He nodded proudly. “Mommy lets me call and talk to them when she’s getting ready. And also, I can use the computer. I can even get level three on Rattler’s Revenge.”

  “Very impressive.”

  “Yep.”

  “So they know who you are at the car place? And they picked you up without your mommy?”

  “Yep.”

  On to burning question number two. “But how did you get my address?”