In the Mix (44 page)

“No!” I smack his hand away and rescue my coffee.

“A little passionate about your coffee, aye?” His smile hits his eyes.

“Just a bit,” I agree and take a sip. “I meant that you don’t have to do this in general.”

“I rather enjoy Wednesdays now, if I’m to be honest.” He shifts in his seat. “This one hour of the week seems to be the only hour I get that has any normalcy to it.”

“Why do you say that?” I cross my legs, letting my right one hang over the left and it bops . . . bops . . . bops.

“I have to tell you, that’s terribly annoying.” His hand puts pressure on my leg to make me stop. I stare at his hand, secretly wishing it to travel to my lady business.
Ugh! What is wrong with me?!

“Sorry,” I almost whisper. “So, tell me why you feel that way,” I continue.

“I want to hear about your week. Tell me what’s new with your friends?” He taps my knee then pulls his hand away.

“Declan—”

“—Dec”

“Dec, this is the third week you’ve popped in on me with coffee. All we’ve done is talk about me. I’d like to hear some dialogue from you.” I’m calm but assertive, I think.

“No.” He shakes his head. “I’m not here for a therapy session. I’m here to talk to a very witty, charming, and beautiful woman. If I talk about me, you will turn this into a session and I will refrain from coming back.”

“Um . . . thank you for the compliment. No thank you to the judgment.”

“I’m not judging you. I just want to have coffee with you and pleasant conversation. I don’t want to come in here and unload my bag.”

I would so love for him to unload his bag!

Pull it together, Maddie!
“Well, that’s not fair.”

“You listen to people all day, every day. Don’t you want to take a break and be the one to talk for once?”

“I don’t just listen. I coach. I talk it out with them. Don’t slap a label on me.” I may have come off a little pissed with that last comment.

“I didn’t mean to state how you do your job. I just meant that I like to listen to you and . . . I don’t know. I should just go. I’m sorry for offending you.” He stands up.

I stand up with him. “Do you talk to anybody? Especially about your son?” I ask quickly.

“Have a nice night,” he says quietly before heading out of my room.

“Declan! Dec!” I call after and follow him down the hall. “Stop!” I grab his arm.

He knocks on the door to Ted’s office, ignoring my pull. “I’m sorry, we have to leave early today—something’s come up.” Dec says once he opens the door.

“Dec . . . wait.” I try to get him to turn but he is of Viking quality and I’m just, as Pa Ingalls would say, a half-pint. Finally, I give up. He and his son head down the hall.

Good job, Captain Asswhore!

Sneak Peek

Rescue Breathing

The Breathe Series-Book One

Written by Zoe Norman

Rescue breathing
, also known as “the kiss of life,” is a rescue technique where one person provides air for someone who has stopped breathing.

- Excerpt from www.ask.com/health&fitness

CHAPTER ONE

Olivia

“There is a time in every woman's life when she needs to just walk away. This, Olivia, is that time.”

That lovely quote comes directly from the mouth of my best friend, Charley, over the phone and across the country. She is giving me her version of a pep talk, which I am grateful is not currently including a stream of expletives directed at my ex, Jay.

About nine months ago, I found out he was not just cheating. Nope, that would have been too easy. In fact, at this point in my life, I would pay someone to turn the hands of time back and make it that easy. No, Jay provided me with a much more interesting betrayal. Wait for it. He was married. With kids. The whole time we were dating. All three years of it.

It's okay. Take a moment to absorb that. It's taken me nine months to just scratch the surface of taking that in. I am now at that special place where I'm just angry. Angry and decidedly spending the majority of my time fantasizing about different ways to remove Jay's testicles in a painful manner. Charley is all too willing to assist with this part of the grieving process, even from the polar opposite side of the United States, since dealing with sobbing, falling-apart Olivia is too much for her to bear.

“Liv, are you listening? This is your opportunity to have some fun. Get the hell out of the city and breathe a little. You need some space from all this. Even if you don't see him anymore, you need to get out of town. Come to this conference. I'll show you around Seattle. We'll go out with my girls here. It will be so much fun. Maybe you'll even get laid!”

The conference she is referring to is an American Psychological Association conference where I'm supposed to present my most recent research to be published about trauma and servicemen. I've spent the last nine months of my grief process interviewing nearly every fireman, policeman, and paramedic in the city of New York. It's amazing how productive hating someone else and being devastatingly broken can make you.

“Charley, I'm not looking to get laid. My God, that's the last thing on my mind!”

This is a lie. A big, fat, stupid lie. I think about sex every time I go to bed. Not with my ex-that sex wasn't even that good. No, I think about the kind of sex I've always wanted, with a man who makes me feel amazing and cherished and isn't afraid of a little fun. So basically I think about my dream-man sex on the body of a celebrity. Whatever. It works.

“Charley, if I come out there, you know I have to actually work. It's a conference. I'd be presenting at three different lectures.”

I hear her sigh over the phone. “I know exactly what you're saying and I know you have to work. But you also have to have some fun, Liv. Hey, is that guy Rob going to be there? The guy you hooked up with at your last conference?”

I groan. Rob is a psychologist who presented at conference I attended in Chicago, several months after I found out about Jay. In a fit of sadness-and a tremendous amount of alcohol-I had sex with Rob in a stairwell of the hotel in which we were staying. Suffice it to say, it took me another two weeks to get him to stop calling me. The last thing I need right now is to run into him again.

“Absolutely not, Charlotte. That guy was like a leech. I have no interest in rehashing that disaster again.”

I hear her giggle on the other end. “Liv, please. I haven't seen you in ages. I miss you. Just come out to Seattle. If there is a happy side effect, it's that you get out of New York, and if you're able to put some of the Jay stuff to bed, all the better, but at least we can visit, okay?”

I sigh. “Okay, okay, okay. I'll come out. I'll send you the itinerary when I get it. I do know I'll be at the Fairmont Olympic, but I could probably use a ride when I get there if you don't mind. Maybe we can have dinner the first night?”

“Yay! That's the spirit, girl. Oh my God, I can't wait to see you! Liv, you won't regret this. I promise you, I'm going to make it all better. I love you, Livvie girl.”

I laugh as my heart clenches. Charley has been my best friend since we were in school together at Columbia. She moved to Seattle a few years ago for work and I miss her terribly. Not having her here during all this has been terribly difficult for me.

“I love you too, Charley. I can't wait to see you.”

We hang up our call and I collapse into my couch. The conference is next week. I have a lot of work to do before I leave, not the least of which is call our travel coordinator at NYU and get my flight plan together. I pick up the phone and dial away.

***

My flight out to Seattle is tomorrow night and I'm still packing. I decided to take the last flight out in the hopes of getting a little sleep before my plane lands. It will mean arriving very late at night, but that will allow me a full night's sleep before the start of the conference.

I have all my clothes laid out in front of me. I have all the usual work stuff-skirt suits, pant suits, sensible shoes. But knowing that Charley wants to go out, I decide I should also pack some cute stuff too, so I've included some short black skirts that are fun, a couple of sexy tops, and some real fuck-me stilettos. I don't know who I think is going to fuck me in these shoes, but it's worth a shot, right?

Just thinking about having sex with someone else, despite all my late-night fantasies, makes my stomach roil. I wish my heart didn't hurt so much still. I'm lucky I never run into Jay at all. My guess is that he's-smartly-avoiding the places I might be likely to see him.

My discovery of his infidelity (it's easier to just call it that at this point) came on the heels of another revelation that I thought would be the best part of my life. I found out I was pregnant. Jay and I had always been careful, but fate has its way of intervening. And intervene it did. I had never thought anything about the fact that he'd never had me over to his place. Or that there were weekends he didn't contact me at all despite having had plans. Or that there were times of the year he was flat-out nervous. When you're desperate to be loved by someone, someone you are sure is your soul mate, you gloss over these items for which the rest of the female world scream, “There Is A Fucking Problem Here!”

So when I told him I was pregnant and he freaked out, I was stunned into silence. I mean, I wasn't exactly prepared for it, nor had I been expecting it, but I certainly wasn't shrieking, “Fuck!” at the top of my lungs or “How the fuck did you let this happen?” From there, it was all downhill.

During his tirade, he said, “I don't want any more kids.” And there it was. What other kids? What did he mean? And then, as if it were the most natural thing in the world, he told me that he was married, had two kids, and lived in a brownstone on the Upper East Side. And in that one quick moment, my entire life fell apart and his went back to normal.

Jay and I had been seeing each other for three years, since grad school. He was bright, handsome, and slated to be a very successful psychiatrist. He also seemed to be increasingly unavailable. Scheduled visits, phone calls where he was whispering. I talked at length with Charley about this. She told me that I was being paranoid, that it was in my head, but I knew it wasn't. And then, the “incident.” Two weeks late on my period, vomiting in the morning, hypersensitivity to smells, and fifteen positive at-home pregnancy tests revealed what was now obvious-I was pregnant.

When I finally allowed Charley to convince me to go to the doctor to run a test and that too was positive, I decided that it was time to tell Jay. I called him and asked him to come over for dinner. He hemmed and hawed, complaining about some work commitment, but in the end, he agreed to come for dessert later in the evening. I was nervous, although I didn't know why. When I told him about the pregnancy, he blanched visibly and fell back into the couch. Not the response I'd been hoping for.

He wanted to know how this could have happened, where had I gone wrong with my birth control. I watched him, frozen, as he spewed accusation after accusation until finally he spit out, “I don't want any more fucking children, Olivia!”

Huh? More children? When had he gotten the first set? He turned and stormed out of my apartment and, eventually, my life. I had never been more broken in my life. I spent two weeks in a full-on fugue that then morphed into rage. Every day a little more bitter, a little more angry. By the end of the second week, I somehow found strength. Strength born by anger to be sure, but strength nonetheless.

After a doctor's visit where we discussed my no-longer-existing relationship and what was left of my options, my doctor started in on the “termination of pregnancy” talk. I listened to her speak, my mind reeling, my heart splintering. We talked about how abortions happened, what I could expect, did I have a friend who could take me? In that moment, I suddenly realized that I wanted to try and do this. This baby didn't deserve to not have a chance just because its father was a piece of shit. This baby was still part of me too.

I smiled the whole walk back to my apartment, eager to tell Charley I actually was as strong as she said I was. I was keeping this baby, damn it. So help me God, I was going to be such an amazing mother that I was going to blow all other mothers out of the water. We were going to do this together.

Two days later, I miscarried. I had barely gotten home from the hospital confirming the loss of my baby when I texted Jay.

No more worries. I lost the baby.

Have a great rest of your life.

There was no helping or consoling me. I would vacillate between deep, debilitating depression and almost manic work hours when I was trying to forget. My parents were devastated, my friends were full of sorrow and my heart was pulverized. From that point on, I had no interest in anything related to the opposite sex. Not dating, not sex, not marriage. Oh, in my heart, those were still things I wanted, but I mourned the loss of that dream lifestyle I thought I would have with Jay every day. It was safer to just close off.

The following months were a blur. It was as if someone had uncapped his bottle of lies and it came spilling out all over me. It turned out, people we had been friends with had all known. Every little thing I'd thought was real fell apart under his betrayal. I locked myself in my apartment for a week straight, crying and sitting in the fetal position on my couch. I didn't shower. I didn't eat. I didn't talk to anyone until my brother, Simon, and his fiancée, Reese, showed up one day and threw me in the shower, force-fed me some soup, and then let me sob in his lap.

For some reason, that pulled me out of my funk, and I returned to work. I threw myself into my research, everyone around me walking on eggshells and avoiding the topic of Jay. To this day, his name is not uttered by anyone I know, friend or colleague, with the exception of Charley and Simon. And good riddance for that.