Naked (28 page)

“How old is your son?”

“Cam’s almost three.”

Outside, Alex and Jamie had disappeared from the deck.

“I’m starving,” she said. “Let’s go outside and get something to eat, all right? And I’m sure someone’s doing something crazy, like playing lawn darts or getting ready to sing karaoke.”

My own stomach rumbled, and I thought eating, if nothing else, would give me something to do, since I’d been abandoned by my boyfriend. “Food would be good.”

“C’mon,” Anne said. “I’ll show you where it is.”

I’ve been to parties where I knew every person and had an awful time, and to ones where I didn’t know a soul and had a blast. This party was a mix. I didn’t need Alex by my side every second, but I spent more time waving at him from across
the yard and watching him play lawn darts or drink beer after beer than I did talking to him. He didn’t ignore me—he checked in on me every hour or so, and I saw him looking for me a few times. But he wasn’t with me.

He was with Jamie, whom everyone else called James.

The other people at the party were all very nice. They included me in their conversations as if they’d known me for years. Some of us set up a rousing game of Balderdash, one of my favorite board games, and we all laughed a lot. Claire and her husband, Dean, took me out on the little sailboat while their daughter Penny stayed behind with Anne’s parents. We ate a lot, danced a bit, even sang a little karaoke.

Darkness fell, and someone lit a few tiki torches along the edge of the water and some paper lanterns strung along the deck. Guests with small children began to leave. The crew for the pit beef came to clean up, and I helped in the kitchen, bundling leftovers with Anne. We worked well together, side by side, saying little. Frankly, there wasn’t much to say.

And finally, Alex and I were the only guests remaining. Anne had put Cam to bed an hour before, and we’d finished in the kitchen. She’d just turned on the television, and I blessed her for it—we could both watch something stupid together and not have to speak. She’d handed me a glass of iced tea and poured one for herself when Alex and Jamie at last stumbled in from outside.

“Baby,” Alex said.

I’d never seen him drunk before. His eyes shone with it, and his cheeks were flushed. His mouth looked wet and soft. He’d unbuttoned his shirt nearly to the waist, and had somewhere lost his shoes. Jamie didn’t look much better—his hair
was stuck with sweat to his forehead and his shirt bore grass stains.

“What the hell have you been doing?” Anne said. “Wrestling?”

“Fucker tried to jump me for the last beer,” Jamie said. “Had to kick his ass.”

“Fuck you, fucker,” Alex said, and added a two-handed one-finger salute. “You stole the last dinner roll.”

“We have more dinner rolls,” Anne said drily, and tucked her feet under her on the couch. “They’re in the fridge. Help yourself.”

Alex put a hand over his heart. “Anne. You’re a goddess.” He looked at me. “Baby…baby, where’ve you been all day? I missed you.”

He tripped on the two stairs leading to the sunken living room, and hit the love seat beside me ass first. Laughing. He put his head on my shoulder to look up at me with those big gray eyes. “Baby, hi.”

I touched his face. His skin was hot. He kissed my palm and I took my hand away, awkward at this sudden display of affection in front of his friends. “Hi.”

Alex sat up. Jamie had gone to rustle around in the fridge. I caught Anne’s gaze, staring after her husband. She didn’t look upset, exactly. More as if she was resigned. And definitely not surprised.

“Bring me one of those rolls, fucker,” Alex called.

“Fuck you, dick, come get your own. I’m not your fucking servant.”

“Fuck you, ya shit-kicker,” Alex said, and settled farther into the love seat next to me. “Baby, will you get me a dinner roll?”

“Baby,” I said tightly, “maybe we’d better think about heading back to the hotel.”

“No, no, you can’t go yet.” Jamie turned from the fridge, his face a picture of dismay. “You just got here! I’m about to crack open a bottle of Jameson!”

Both men cracked up laughing. Anne and I did not. She sighed. I felt my every muscle go stiff.

“James, Cam’s sleeping,” she said.

Jamie put a finger to his lips. “Right. Sorry. I forgot. We’ll go outside. C’mon, you fucking cocksucker, get your pansy ass out on the deck so we can drink this shit.”

Beside me, Alex stirred and sat up straight. I thought for sure he would take offense to Jamie calling him a cocksucker, but he only laughed and nudged against me. “We’ll go in a little while, baby. Okay?”

I bit down on my tongue, hard. There’s a fine line between being firm and being a bitch, and I was about to cross it. I was even considering making a scene. I’d spent hours here, being ignored, making nice with strangers. Watching my fiancé act like an idiot with a guy who stood too close to him.

“James,” Anne said quietly, like a warning.

I didn’t want to be grateful to her, but I was. I stood. Alex stood, too. He held on to my arm, maybe for support, maybe just to prove a point.

“One drink,” he said. “Then we’ll go. I haven’t seen Jamie in a long time.”

If he’d kissed me, that would’ve been the end. But he didn’t. He just gave me a look he knew I couldn’t resist, and I guess I wasn’t as interested in being a bitch as I’d thought.

“I love you,” he said into my ear, in too loud a voice to be
a whisper, though he seemed drunk enough to think that’s what he’d done.

Then he and Jamie went out onto the deck, leaving me and Anne to stare at each other across the coffee table. She clicked off the television. I could hear laughter from outside.

“Sorry,” she said. “It has been a long time since they’ve seen each other.”

“A few years, Alex said.”

She hesitated, then nodded slowly. “Yeah. I guess it has been that long.”

My fingers curled into fists, not from anger, but because I had nothing else to do, nowhere else to put my hands. I had no pockets. I didn’t want to be here.

Another burst of laughter filtered through the back door and turned both our heads. Anne sighed again. I tried a sigh and it caught in my throat. She looked at me, then, eyes narrowed.

“They can both be such dicks,” she said.

Her words surprised a laugh out of me. “You think so?”

“Oh, God, yes.” She stood. “It’s bad enough when they’re just talking on the phone, or through the damned Xbox. And don’t get me started on the Connex tags. I swear they’re both fifteen years old.”

“This is…I haven’t seen him like this.”

She nodded after a second. “You want some more tea? Piece of cake? I saved some.”

“I can always eat cake. Yes.” I followed her to the kitchen, where she pulled a chocolate cake from the back of the fridge.

She cut slices while I poured some tea, and we stood at the island where we could both lean and look out onto the back deck, where all I could see of the men was the bright cherry
light of a cigarette being passed back and forth. I cut my fork through the thick chocolate icing, but I didn’t eat it.

“They’re always like this?” I asked.

Anne licked icing from her fork. “I think if they saw each other more often in person, they would not be. Because James isn’t like this with anyone else.”

“Alex is…different here.”

“They’ve been friends a long time,” she said, not for the first time.

I turned to her. “So, what should I do about it?”

She licked more icing and put down her fork. “Do you love him?”

The question didn’t come off as insulting the way it might have from someone else. “I do. Very much.”

“Then you should know…”

“I know enough,” I said.

Anne gave me a long, steady look that made me think she knew a lot more about me than should’ve been possible on such short acquaintance. “Then you could do what I do with James.”

“Which is what?”

She looked out through the glass again as more laughter sifted in the open windows. “You can love him even though sometimes he acts like a dick.”

And then I knew.

It was in what she hadn’t said. In how she hadn’t touched him, not even a handshake earlier. It was in how she’d watched Alex with her husband, both men being boys, and how she’d been so kind to me. And suddenly, sickeningly, it was in a pair of big gray eyes in a toddler’s face.

In the kitchen, everything stopped.

It was a very quiet showdown, and I wasn’t sure whether to draw or hold my fire. I wished desperately for my camera, which I’d left behind in the hotel room. Behind the lens this all might have seemed like just another party. Just another group of people. Anne and James might have been an average married couple. Their son might not have looked like my lover.

But I didn’t have my camera. Everything was right there, punching me in the face, over and over. I drew in a quick, sharp breath.

“I think it’s time for us to go.”

“Olivia,” Anne said quickly, but I was already moving toward the back door, yanking it open.

Alex and Jamie weren’t kissing, but it would have been better if they were. I could’ve ended it there with that as a reason. But they weren’t kissing, they were simply sitting side by side on a big lounge chair, their shoulders touching and their soft laughter speaking of intimacies I didn’t want to hear.

“Alex.”

He didn’t look up at first, and in the long seconds before he did I considered just leaving him there. Then his eyes turned toward me, and he smiled. I saw love on his face, and I wanted to smack it off.

“Let’s go,” I said.

“But, baby…”

“Now.”

Neither he nor Jamie said anything, but Alex got up. I heard Anne’s footsteps behind me pause in the doorway, but she didn’t speak, either. I had no quarrel with her, or with her husband, and I’d have said so out loud if pressed. In the quiet
I heard Cam’s faint cry, and Anne went back inside the house to take care of him. Jamie got off the chair and followed us to the car, where I slid behind the wheel and stared straight ahead while the men said their goodbyes.

I seethed as I drove back to the hotel, but with Alex saying nothing in the passenger seat, I bit my tongue bloody. He disappeared into the bathroom when we got back, pissed forever, and then stumbled into the bed without undressing or brushing his teeth. I stayed in the shower a long, long time, and when I came out, my stomach knotted and twisted, I spent the night in the armchair with the spare blanket from the closet to keep me warm, and no pillow to cradle my head.

It was a long, long drive home.

W
e got home late and went right to bed. I left Alex sleeping there the next morning when I woke early and went upstairs to catch up on everything I’d put on hold for the weekend. I lost myself in the soothing minutiae of touching up a series of photographs I was using in a brochure for a local day spa. I’d taken several shots of Sarah in various poses and superimposed her on different backgrounds, trying to give the impression that spending money at this particular spa was the equivalent of a deluxe vacation at an exotic resort. Compared to the vacation I’d just had, anything looked exotic and luxurious.

I was scheduled to work at Foto Folks for the evening shift. I had a mound of laundry to take care of, errands to run. My week to organize. The thought of it, the list of simple tasks I wouldn’t have thought twice about last week, now paralyzed
me with indecision. I stared at my computer monitor and my fingers tapped the keys, but I couldn’t focus.

I believe it’s possible to look back and pinpoint the moment when something good turns to shit in front of you. I know for a fact it’s also possible to know it’s going to happen even before it does. I didn’t want this to end. I didn’t want to lose Alex—and I didn’t want to give him up.

But I knew I was going to.

He brought me coffee, and I almost said nothing. He kissed the top of my head and nuzzled my neck, and I almost said nothing. I closed my eyes and felt his touch, heard the soft whisper of his breath. I pulled away.

His sigh turned harsh. Resigned. “You’re pissed off.”

I clicked carefully with my mouse to close my project. A dialogue box popped up. Changes have been detected in your document. Do you want to save? Yes or No.

I’d spent a few hours working on this piece, and it was still crap—worse off than it had been before, as a matter of fact. Time wasted, but a lesson learned.

I clicked No.

I swiveled slowly around in my chair to face him. “We need to talk.”

Alex’s eyes narrowed the tiniest amount, followed by the smallest tightening of his mouth. He nodded, though, and pulled up the straight-backed chair to sit in front of me. He hadn’t yet dressed or even showered, and his rumpled hair and low-hanging pajama bottoms invited my caress.

Everything about him still seduced me, and I had to look away.

“I’m sorry,” Alex said. “I know my father is an asshole. I’m sorry.”

My breath actually hitched at his words, my throat closing so tightly I thought for a moment I wouldn’t be able to breathe. My head whipped up so fast my hair slapped my cheeks. I thought he was fucking with me, but one look at Alex’s face told me he really had no clue.

“I don’t give a flying fuck about your dad, Alex.”

“So…then what are you pissed off about?”

I stood to get away from him. To move. To give my body reason and focus, so I didn’t give in totally to anger. I faced him, but from a safe distance. He couldn’t reach me—I couldn’t touch him.

“How could you take me to that house, to meet those people, without telling me the truth?” Each word bit out, jagged and sharp. “How could you stand there and introduce me to her without telling me in advance who she was?”

I’d seen him be many things, but never stupid. Even so, no matter what else he was, Alex was still a man. And any woman who’s ever had one knows how smart men are doesn’t have much to do with their IQs.

“Who?”

“Anne,” I said tightly.

His face went a little blank—not as much as I’d seen it in the past, but enough to show me I’d poked him someplace tender.

“Anne is Jamie’s wife.” He put the emphasis on “wife.”

“And Jamie,” I said. “Christ, Alex. Did you think I wouldn’t see? Did you really think I wouldn’t figure it out?”

“Jamie’s my friend.” He didn’t look away from me, though the intensity of his gaze made me wish he had. “My best friend.”

“And what about her? Anne? What is she?” Without
waiting for him to finish, I stepped forward. He retreated. “You took me to their house and you pushed me in front of her without telling me you’d slept with her, and then you dropped me to run off with your BFF. Do you know what an idiot I felt like? Do you even understand why it might have been important for you to tell me that hey, by the way, I fucked my best friend’s wife?”

His mouth opened. Then shut. Alex straightened, his shoulders going impossibly broad as he put his hands on his hips. “I’m sorry. It wasn’t like…that.”

I pulled in a breath that hurt my throat. “What was it like, then?”

For the first time during our conversation, he dropped his gaze.

I stepped back, my stomach sick. My heart sore. “You…love her.”

“No,” he said at once. “Not anymore. And not like you.”

I swallowed bitter bile. “Is that supposed to make me feel better?”

“Yes!”

I could’ve stretched out my hand and he his, and we might’ve touched. But we didn’t. Vastness stretched between us, and there was more to come.

“That you loved another woman you’ve never mentioned, not once. You gave me a laundry list of just about every other person you ever fucked, but you never once mentioned her. The one you
loved.
”

“I just…” He shrugged, looking helpless. He scrubbed at his hair, making it wild. “Does it matter who I loved first, so long as you’re who I love last?”

This went deeper than an ex-girlfriend. “Does your bestie know you fucked his wife?”

“Yes. He knows.”

I swallowed again, hard. Alex had told me many times he would tell me the truth, if I asked, and I’d spent too much time not asking. “Look at me.”

He did. Many times I’d seen my Alex with blank eyes and smile, putting on a face for the world. He didn’t do that now. He gave me everything I hadn’t asked for, and I couldn’t pretend I didn’t see it.

I thought of two men, standing too close for friendship. I thought of Anne, whose gaze had followed them, knowing and accepting…and loving despite what she knew.

I could not be that woman.

And I could no longer not ask.

“The three of you?”

He nodded. “Yes.”

“For how long?”

“A few months. Years ago. It’s over, Olivia. I swear to you, it’s over.”

I knew that without him telling me. I’d seen it in Anne’s face when she’d looked at him, and heard it in her voice when she’d told me to love him anyway.

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

He ran a hand through his hair. “Because I didn’t think you’d understand.”

“Is she the reason you didn’t go home for so long?”

He opened his mouth and I waited for the lie, but then he nodded. “Yeah. The shit with my family isn’t ever going to go away. But what happened with Jamie…”

“And Anne,” I said, my tone challenging him to say her name in front of me.

“Yes. With Anne. I didn’t think I should go back. But then I met you, and everything seemed different. Olivia,” Alex said, “I love you. I want to make a life with you. And I don’t want to never see Jamie again…but…I won’t, if you don’t want me to.”

I couldn’t ask him to do that. I swallowed again, my throat sore from holding back screams and tears. “You should’ve told me anyway. I’d have been upset, but it would’ve been better than finding out the way I did. I felt stupid, Alex.”

“I know. I’m sorry. I’m really sorry.”

I believed him, but that didn’t matter. I looked at the ring sparkling on my finger and twisted it back and forth from underneath with the pad of my thumb. I wouldn’t have minded crying, but though I felt the tears in my throat, behind my eyes, nothing would come. I looked at him with clear eyes—nothing blurred, nothing out of focus. I saw Alex for real, with nothing but truth between us.

“Do you love him?”

He hesitated again. “Yes. But I never fucked him, Olivia. I swear to you.”

“Do you want to?”

He moved closer then. “No. Not anymore.”

“Does he want to fuck you?”

“Jamie,” Alex said, “knows when to stop. Look, Olivia, Jamie and me…we’re a pair of douche bags when we get together. I know we can be fucktards.”

I’d seen them together and knew there was something more than friendship between them. There’d always been; it
seemed there would always be. And unlike Anne, I wasn’t sure I could ever just watch it happen.

“Is Cam yours?”

Alex said nothing, though his jaw dropped. He shook his head and ran a hand through his hair to cup it at the back of his neck. He paced. “No. How…Fuck, no. That boy’s Jamie’s, through and through.”

“He looks like you.”

Alex whirled to face me. “He’s not mine.”

“Are you sure?”

“I’d have to count the months,” he said, his voice on the verge of sarcasm, “but yeah, I’m pretty sure. And even if he were mine, Olivia…that kid isn’t my son.”

My breath caught on a small squeak. “How can you say that?”

“You of all people,” he said, “ought to know.”

Then the tears came, sliding down my face in thick, wet streaks. Alarm twisted his features. This time he was the one who moved, I was the one retreating.

“Olivia—”

“I can’t do this, Alex. I thought I could. I thought it wouldn’t matter to me, but it does.”

His breath hissed out. “I don’t understand.”

I took the ring off and held it in my palm. He stared. I watched his throat work as he swallowed, hard, and his mouth slipped open, wordless. He made no move to take the ring, and it glittered and shone on my palm the way it had on my finger.

“I thought it would be different with you. I wanted it to be.”

“It is different with me,” Alex said in a low voice. “You know it is.”

“Not different enough.” I put the ring on the desk. I crossed my arms tight over my stomach, gripping my elbows. It was the way Anne had stood in her kitchen, and I understood why.

“You’re breaking up with me?”

Everything about him went hard. His shoulders, his jaw. His eyes went to ice. His fingers curled into fists at his sides. “Because of what someone else did to you? Because of the lies someone else told you? I should fucking pay for someone else’s sins?”

It was my turn to say I was sorry, though the words slashed my throat and left the taste of blood on my tongue.

“I never lied to you,” Alex said in a stiff, cold voice. “You knew everything about me. And I thought…I thought you would understand. You, especially, would understand.”

“Because I loved Patrick,” I said flatly. “You thought I could love another gay man? That it would just be that easy?”

“I thought,” he said, “that you could love
me.
”

“I would always wonder,” I told him, “if I was…enough.”

I wasn’t proud to see my words had broken him. Alex took a step backward, toward the door. The hem of his jeans dragged on the floor. I couldn’t stand to look at his naked feet.

Everything about us was suddenly, terribly naked.

He paused with his hand on the door. “Fucking men doesn’t make me gay any more than fucking women makes me straight. You can either trust me or you can’t. There’s nothing I can do but love you, Olivia.”

“I envy you,” I said. It wasn’t what I thought I was going to say.

“Why?”

“Because you know exactly who you are. And I have no idea who I am.”

“But how could you ever think you aren’t enough?”

“Because I’ve never been enough,” I said. “Never enough of one thing or another. I don’t know how to be enough, Alex. I don’t know who I am, or who I should be.”

Alex crossed to the desk, where he picked up the ring. He put it in my hand and closed my fingers over it. “Then let me help you find out.”

Shadow and light. Truth and lies. I didn’t want this to end, and neither did he.

“You don’t have to choose, you know.” He said this into my ear before kissing my throat, my collarbone, the slopes of my breasts. He tugged a nipple between his lips, and I sighed. “You don’t have to be any one thing, Olivia.”

“I’m not sure I could be if I tried.” I ran my hands through his hair, always just a little too long. “But what about you?”

He smiled and pushed himself up on one elbow. He ran a hand over my naked belly. “I choose you. I’ve been an asshole for most of my life, Olivia, but I swear to you I will be a faithful asshole.”

I laughed and cried at the same time. My ring flashed as I ran my hand again through his hair. “I do trust you.”

“Good.”

“But the rest of it…about getting married in a church, or…”

“We’ll get married wherever you want to get married. Whatever you decide. I’m easy that way.”

I gave a playful peek at the cock tent made in the sheets. “You’re just plain easy.”

“Yes.” He kissed me softly, then a little harder, hands roaming.

I stopped him long enough to cup his face, to look into his eyes. “Remember when you said you thought this would be easier?”

“Yeah.”

“I’m sorry it’s not.”

Alex traced a pattern on my belly with a fingertip, then laid his hand flat upon it. “I’m not.”

“No?”

He shook his head and looked at me. “Nope. Nothing worth having is easy and all that shit.”

“You’re such a philosopher.”

He kissed my belly in the place he’d just traced. “Let’s just say I spent a lot of time fucking up. I don’t want to do that anymore. I want to make this work with you.”

“I want to make it work with you, too.”

He kissed me again, lightly, just over my belly button. “It’s a deal.”

“I like that,” I whispered. “Do it again, a little lower.”

He obliged. Then lower still, until he nuzzled at my thigh. He nipped. He laughed. He licked my clit and made me squirm, then held me still while he kissed and stroked and sucked. But he didn’t let me come.

That he saved for when he was inside me, propped on his hands to keep from crushing me. I tasted sweat when I kissed him. It tasted good.

Later, when we had finished but weren’t done—I thought maybe we’d never be done, Alex and me, and that was just fine—I rolled onto my back and stared at the ceiling, where once he’d pointed out the shape of an angel.

“I love you, Alex.”

He sounded sleepy when he answered. “I love you, too. It’s going to be all right, Olivia. No matter what happens. Okay?”