Cheating on Myself (23 page)

I snorted. “That is incredibly cheesy.”

He grinned back at me. “I’ll take a fling, if that’s what you want to give, but I’m not really big on meaningless sex. If I wanted to have meaningless sex, I would have stayed a lawyer and stayed married to my ex-wife.” He laughed humorlessly. “That sounds bad, doesn’t it?”

“Kinda,” I admitted, and realized we’d started jogging again. It felt good to be out, doing something other than huffing chlorinated air with judgmental women. And I realized I was messing it up. Somehow, a perfectly pleasant afternoon with an impulsive, hot, and yummy kiss was getting side-tracked by my judging and prudishness. I thought about what Joe had said—he wasn’t interested in a fling. But he hadn’t denied he was a total womanizer. I wasn’t sure I could handle the uncertainty of where he’d been before me, and who else he might be doing on the side. I couldn’t assume he’d changed, just because I was in the picture and he’d recited a few choice lines from a cheesy dating show.

I picked up the pace, and Joe was suddenly a few steps behind me. I narrowed my eyes, making an effort to refocus my attitude. Starting over was never going to work if I was going to drag all my old insecurities and judgment into things. And who was I to judge when I was actively fantasizing about a hot musician while carrying on with an ex who wanted me back?

I glanced over and saw Joe’s face was set and stony.

“I’m sorry,” I said. He hadn’t asked for or deserved my judgment—I’d just given it to him, mere moments after he’d kissed me and made me feel like the sexiest woman on the planet. I stopped running again.

“Can we decide if we’re running or walking and maybe keep to a pace?” Joe had his hands on his hips a few steps ahead of me on the path, his hat askew on his head again. “The stopping and starting is kind of killing me.”

“I think we should stop,” I said, moving toward him.

“Stop what?” he asked, squinting at me through the crooked sunlight pressing through the sparse evergreen branches hanging heavy with snow above us. “Stop dating?”

I moved closer to him, standing inches away from his body again. I could feel the heat pouring off him, and I wanted him to touch me. I needed to feel him. When I was with Joe, it felt like the days ahead of me had hope and laughter, instead of animosity and forgotten dreams. Maybe I was abandoning comfort and family and security with Erik, but I could make that again. I had to have me in order to have anything, and Joe was the kind of man who would let me figure out who I was.

“I don’t want to stop dating,” I said, my mouth close to his. “I want to stop running.”

His eyes were bright, and I could sense the silly grin on his face even though I was too close to really see it.

“You need to rest?” he asked quietly. I could tell he was going to make me make the next move. My hands were freezing, so I took my gloves off and slipped my hands under the bottom of his jacket, feeling through layers of cotton for the skin beneath. I’d felt his warmth rolling over me all afternoon, and now I needed to touch it.

Joe flinched when my fingers slipped over his stomach, my cold skin pressing against his hot, sticky body. He drew a breath in, and I could feel his breathing coming quick and shallow as I moved my hands from his stomach to his sides, warming my hands against his surprisingly hard body. As I watched his face, Joe’s eyes fluttered closed and he leaned his head back just slightly, letting me touch him. It felt so strange and scary to be touching a new man. There was a little trail of fuzzy hair that ran up the middle of his stomach, something I’d never felt before, and I traced it up until I could go no further without lifting his shirt and exposing his tender skin to the frozen air.

My hands crawled around the sides of his body again, stretching to fan out against his back. They’d warmed up, and now my hands were as hot as his body. I pulled him against me and leaned my face in toward his. His eyes were still closed, but he’d bent toward me, his mouth relaxed and open. I kissed his chin first, feeling the scratchiness of several days without shaving. He tasted salty, and I reached my tongue out to lick the little space under his lower lip. Joe groaned, and I moved my mouth to his jawline. His hands were on me now, pulling me against him tighter as I kissed his ears, his neck, the little dip that brought me from his ear to his neck. Finally, I brought my mouth close to his and breathed in his cinnamon scent. I could still smell doughnuts and sweetness, but there was something under all of that I knew was just Joe.

When our lips touched, I could feel the same heat reaching deep inside me. I kissed him eagerly, and my body was overtaken by a spinning buzz that brought me up on my toes. I couldn’t even feel the cold air around us. Our bodies were pressed together, shielding us from everything, helping me forget we were in the middle of who-knows-where. All I knew—and I could feel it in every last corner of my body—is I wanted him. I hadn’t felt this kind of longing in years, and I knew I needed him.

Joe and I both pulled away from the kiss at the same time, and my hands slipped out from under his shirt. “I think we missed the beer stop,” he said, chuckling.

“I think that’s okay,” I said, still dizzy from the kiss.

“This is the best run I’ve ever been on,” he said happily. “I’m bringing you on every hash from now on.”

“Would this really count as an official hash? We only made it about a mile down the trail. And I haven’t had a beer yet.”

“You’ve just rewritten the rules of hashing for me.” Joe said happily. “I prefer running and kissing to running and drinking.”

“Should we call this run officially over?” I was tired of running, and wanted to curl up with Joe somewhere instead of sweating on a rocky path.

As we ambled back down the path toward the start of the route and Joe’s car, we held hands loosely. Our gloves were a level of protection between us, keeping me from feeling the tingle that ran up my arm when he touched me skin to skin. I was grateful for the distance—now that I was out of the heat of the moment, I realized it was lucky we had been outside for what had just happened. Had we been inside somewhere, it could have led to… well, anything, and I wasn’t sure I was ready for anything yet. Before I went any further with Joe, I needed to know I was mentally ready to let go of Erik. I’d only slept with three people total in my entire life, so this was a big step for me. I wanted to make sure it felt right. I needed that separation, and getting naked with two men in the same weekend felt a little dirty.

Joe squeezed my hand after a few minutes of comfortable silence and asked, “So why is it you’re so big on marriage?” When I looked at him out of the corner of my eye—warning him not to start teasing me about the list again—he spoke. “Not that there’s anything wrong with that… it’s just, the statistics say half of all marriages end in divorce, so why are you a believer?”

Erik had asked me this, too, but with him the question always came out defensively. I felt like I was on trial. In contrast, when Joe-the-former-lawyer asked, it felt like he was just curious. Like he really wanted to know.

“I’m not really sure,” I said honestly. I’d thought about it a million times during my years with Erik, and I could never really come up with a rational, well-thought-out reason for my conviction that marriage was the right thing for me. “My parents were always really happy, and I knew I wanted something like they had.”

“Your mom must have died really young,” Joe said, and I felt his fingers curl around mine more tightly. I let him hold me close, and felt the sense of security I’d often felt with Erik. I knew it was just a superficial comfort now, but I wondered if maybe Joe and I could grow to have the same thing I’d grown to need from Erik… stability, routine, trust that someone would be there and you’d never be left alone.

“She was forty-four. Ten years older than me now.”

“Is your dad still around?”

“He pretty much disappeared after my mom died. I mean, he and I lived together, and he was always a good dad—took pictures of me going to prom and all the other things you’re supposed to do as a parent of a teenage girl—but it was obvious that a piece of him broke when Mom left us. He started drinking and eating terribly and basically gave up.” I paused, checking to make sure Joe wasn’t uncomfortable. Most people got uncomfortable when I started talking about this. Joe nodded, telling me to go on. I did. “He died of a heart attack my junior year of college. Even though the same thing had happened to his dad—my grandpa died of a surprise heart attack when I was really little—I’m still convinced his heart just broke after my mom died. Medically, I know it was genetics, but the romantic in me wanted to think he just couldn’t make it without her. Maybe I’m naïve and maybe I didn’t see the bad stuff, but it really seemed like they lived for one another. They made marriage and love look like such a partnership. I want what they had.” I shrugged. “Without the dying.”

“You lost both your parents when you were still just a kid.” Joe’s eyebrows pulled together, concerned.

“Yeah, and that’s part of the reason I tend to hold on to the things I have, even when they’re not always exactly what I want. I think it was my therapist who taught me that I’m afraid of losing things that make me feel settled—I’m a serial monogamist with friends and boyfriends, partly out of fear of being left alone again.” I believed in family and friends and held them close, since I knew how quickly everything could be taken away. I was scared to lose Laurel and Cat and the girls. They were all I had. I wasn’t going to get into
that
with Joe. We didn’t need to psychoanalyze my breakup. “I spent a few years in therapy that helped me realize my list somehow signifies life with my mom. One of my therapists pointed out that maybe I was trying to freeze a piece of my life so Mom can be a part of my goals and dreams. I wrote the list the year she died, so by committing myself to it, I’m somehow trying to hold fast to a time in my life when my parents were still around.”

“Deep stuff,” Joe said lightly. He wasn’t making light of the situation, I could tell. He was just playing off my tone. I didn’t do a lot of moping, or it would have been a long twenty years. In a way, it felt like I lost both Mom and Dad at once, which had made the grieving a little easier at the time. “Do you think that’s true?”

I shrugged. “Probably. I don’t know. It seems valid enough. I probably could have figured that much out on my own, though, and saved myself more than a few angsty sessions in college therapy offices. I was a real treat my junior and senior year.”

“And then you met Erik?”

I nodded. “Yep. Then I met Erik, got back on my feet, and got back on track with the list. It was the one thing that kept me grounded.”

“Grounded, or held back?” Joe asked. His voice was still light, and I appreciated the fact that he wasn’t getting drippy and emotional on me. Usually when I told new people about my parents, they got overly apologetic and awkward. Joe seemed to sense I wasn’t going to break down on him, and was responding appropriately. It had all happened twenty years ago, so I’d pretty much come to figure out how to talk about it.

“I didn’t really feel like I was held back until a few years ago. That’s the first time I paid attention to the fact that I hadn’t edited the list beyond a fifteen-year-old’s imagination of what adult life must be like. I mean, really, I didn’t even give myself enough to do to get me into my thirties. There are no notes about whether or not I should dye my hair when the grays start to take over.”

“You shouldn’t,” Joe said. “You don’t seem like a bottle blonde candidate to me.”

I laughed. “And let’s face it… you live life off of a list, and you manage to miss a few things.”

“Like what?”

I looked at him and noticed his hat was askew again. His ear was poking out of the bottom of it, and had flipped down on itself. His cheeks were ruddy and red, and I once again pictured him as a lumberjack. I was realizing how much I loved unshaved scruff and a rumpled guy. Joe looked a little like a shirt left in the dryer for several days that had cooled in a wrinkled, relaxed heap. He also didn’t look at all breakable—versus Erik, who freaked when his hair was out of order—and that was part of the reason I wanted to see what he was like in bed. I cleared my throat, trying to get my mind off Joe between a set of flannel sheets. Would he have flannel sheets? I suddenly really, really needed to know.

“What did I miss out on, you mean?” I asked, clarifying his question to get myself back into the conversation.

“Yeah. You have any specific examples?” he asked, smirking, and I wondered if he could tell I was thinking about what his body would look like stretched out under messy sheets.

“Not really.” I wasn’t going to admit I’d started living for Erik’s goals. It was embarrassing enough that I knew it to be true.

“You just sort of know you’re missing something?” Joe eyed me suspiciously.

“Italy,” I admitted, blushing when I looked at him walking along next to me. I couldn’t look at him without thinking about him naked. Now that I’d touched his abs, I needed to see them. Soon. “I always wanted to go to Italy, but Erik went in college and so the one time we went anywhere fun, we decided to go somewhere neither of us had been before.”

“So why don’t you go?” Joe asked, and it sounded so sensible that I almost asked him what he was doing for Thanksgiving.

“To Italy? Like, by myself?”

“Sure,” he said, swinging our hands through the air between us. “Or you could bring a friend.”

“Yeah. Maybe I’ll do that.” We’d finally reached the car, and I found myself grinning when he unlocked the car door and opened mine for me. It was such an antiquated expression of chivalry, but something no one had ever done for me before. There had to be something more than a womanizer inside this guy… or he was just very, very good at playing the game. Either way, he was a hot distraction while I struggled to escape the pull of Erik’s comfort circle.

“So, I have some stuff I have to do for the band this afternoon. I really, really wish we could hang out the rest of the day, but the pull of responsibility means I should probably drop you off at your place, okay?” Joe said this casually as he backed out of his spot and pulled onto the busy street. I was glad he was driving, because he couldn’t see the disappointment that flashed across my face.