Tear You Apart

It’s my turn to be surprised. I’d been sure I was older than him, and by more than a few years. “You’re kidding me.”

“I could show you my driver’s license,” he offers, but I wave my hand.

We stare at each other as if this new knowledge has changed things, and maybe it has. We’re both too old to behave like kids, maybe that’s what we just learned. Or maybe it’s that we’re both adults who know what they want and how to get it.

“So,” Will says after a few more seconds. “About what happened.”

The memory of feeling his skin unfurls in my mind like a flower, and I can’t stop the hitch of my breath or thump of my heart. Will has no more smile. There’s definitely no flirting in the gaze he cuts so carefully from mine. The table between us is so small his knees bump mine every time he shifts, and yet I feel so very, very faraway. When he looks at the plain gold band on my left hand, I know what he’s going to say.

“We shouldn’t have,” Will says.

“Of course we shouldn’t have. But we did.”

The veneer tabletop is patterned with interlocking circles, orange on cream. It would be retro if it wasn’t probably legitimately from the fifties. Will traces the circles, one to the other, making a figure eight. When he looks up at me, his gaze is flat, and I don’t know him well enough to tell if this is one of his usual expressions.

He waits a few seconds before answering. “I just don’t want you to think I’m trying to cause trouble for you or anything. That’s all.”

“I didn’t think that.” Of course I didn’t, just as I never dreamed I’d be sitting across from him, watching him struggle with how to tell me he doesn’t want to fuck me again.

“Good.” Will shifts, clearly uncomfortable and maybe more than a little relieved that I’m not...what? Going to go all Fatal Attraction on him?

If he knew me, he’d know that would never happen, but Will does not know me. We are strangers who shared an unexpected intimacy. Nothing more.

“I just don’t think that it would be...good.” He clears his throat. Awkwardness. I’m blushing just watching him work at finding the right words, his struggle as painful as if it were my own. “Um, you know. Long term. For either one of us. To keep on with this.”

“No.”

“I don’t think married people should fuck around,” he says suddenly, harshly enough to set me back.

There’s something important I need him to know. To make myself clear. “I wasn’t out looking to be unfaithful, Will. It just happened.”

“I’m sorry,” he says, and I believe he means it.

“Don’t be,” I tell him, when I get up from the table and put a few dollars down to cover the cost of our order. “I’m not.”

Chapter Eight

The restaurant has been our favorite for a long time, since we moved into this neighborhood, which makes it close to twenty-two years. Demetri and his wife, Anatola, make the best gyros I’ve ever had, along with a homemade Greek dressing so good it should be illegal. I come here for every birthday. It’s tradition.

While we wait for our food, Ross slides a box across the table toward me. “Happy Birthday.”

I’d not-so-subtly hinted to him that I wanted a pair of black riding boots. Not for riding, of course. For fashion. I’d sent him links, told him the size. This box is too small to be a pair of riding boots.

It’s a pair of quilted, ankle-high boots. Not red or even rust, but an off shade of dusty orange. They are not my size. They are hideous. I will never, ever wear them.

“You said you wanted boots,” he says, clearly pleased with his purchase. “I picked these up when I was in Chicago.”

I slide the lid closed and smile. Big and bright. “Thank you.”

Over dinner, Ross talks about work and golf and something his buddies did, the outrageous things another friend’s wife was doing, but I’m concentrating on my salad. I chase a black olive around the plate with my fork; it’s hard to catch because it has a pit in it, and I can’t dig the tines in deep enough. I don’t really even want it. I like my olives pitted. But I’ll eat it anyway, because it tastes so good, and I’ll spit the pit into the palm of my hand and be uncertain about where to put it.

“...She wants the dog,” Ross says. “Can you believe that bitch? You don’t take a man’s dog.”

This snags my attention. Lifts my head. “What?”

“She wants the dog,” Ross repeats, with a stab of his fork toward me. “Can you believe it?”

“What makes it his dog?” I know the friends he’s talking about. Kent and Jeanine Presley. We aren’t that close, though we’ve been to their house for parties. I remember the wife. She had round cheeks and a pixie cut that somehow flattered her anyway, and everything about her had made me think of ponies. Not because of the thing in my brain that turned sounds into shapes and colors into flavors, but just because sometimes people remind you of things that have nothing to do with who they actually are or what they do.

Ross stops with a bite of salad halfway to his mouth. “What?”

I’ve captured the olive, but now I really don’t want it. I rub it through a smear of dressing as though that will convince my mouth to take it, but instead of sour olive flesh and the hard pit, my mouth has words. “I said, what makes it his dog?”

“Of course it’s his dog.”

“Why isn’t it her dog, just as much?” I think of the parties we’ve gone to at their gleaming and spotless house. The hors d’oeuvres on special plates designed for just that purpose. Him at the grill outside, flipping burgers, but leaving all the rest for his wife. “I’m sure she’s the one who took care of it most of the time, anyway.”

“What difference does that make?”

I put my fork down. “Probably a lot.”

“Not to the dog,” he says.

I laugh. “But it’s not the dog who gets to decide, is it?”

“You don’t take a man’s dog,” Ross says pointedly, and stabs more salad. “You just don’t.”

“I didn’t even know they were getting divorced.” I sip water to clear the taste of the dressing from my tongue. It’s delicious, it always is, but tonight everything seems to have a bit of sour taste. “What about the kids?”

Ross shrugs, clearly more concerned about the dog than the rest of the details. “He’s letting her have the house.”

“How generous.” Not all words have color, but generous has always been a soft powder-blue. It doesn’t match the sarcasm with which I’ve imbued it.

“They’re upside down. He’ll get out of it, find something better. In this market, he can snap something up.” Ross snaps his fingers to demonstrate.

“He can afford to do that?”

Ross pauses in the steady back-and-forth of his fork from plate to mouth. “Well, yeah. She has to buy him out.”

“So then he’s not ‘letting’ her ‘keep’ the house.” I don’t know why this irritates me so much. I barely know Kent and Jeanine, and they were always more Ross’s friends than mine. “She’s paying him for it. And I’m sure she did the lion’s share of taking care of it. So he’s not letting her do anything, he’s getting out from under a debt and starting fresh.”

Ross stares. “Why shouldn’t he?”

“Does she work?”

Shrug. “Sort of. Part-time, I guess.”

“So how can she afford to buy him out of that house?” It was twice as big as ours, and in a more expensive neighborhood.