The Wife of Reilly (6 page)

“This one doesn’t fit either?” the saleswoman would ask impatiently. “You didn’t like the little snake belt that goes with it? Humpf. I thought the Bond Girl get-up was cute on you.”

It wasn’t a Bond Girl outfit. It was the anti-Bond Girl. Why am I misunderstood even in my own head? Why are saleswomen embarrassing me with the “Are you going to ever buy anything” look?

The question wasn’t really whether I was going to buy it. Was Matt?

Snapping back to reality, I heard Matt saying more of exactly what I needed to hear. “You’re the sexiest woman I’ve ever been with.” God, superlatives are validating.

Sexiest he’s ever been with, or known? ’Cause “been with” is a much smaller universe than “known.” Have there been others that were simply too sexy for him, out of his league, and he’d forever wish he could’ve been with them, but had to settle for me?

“Thanks,” I said as if it were the third time I’d heard this today. The Supermodel Bored with the Adoration of Men. When in doubt, feign indifference. If Calvin Klein could bottle the scent, he’d make a fortune. Indifference for Women. A much better seller than Obsession.

“I don’t know what I was thinking letting you get away from me,” he smiled.

How could he know so much?

Was that Matt’s revision of our history together? He let me get away from him? Not exactly the way I remembered it, but the sexiest woman Matt’s ever been with wouldn’t snivel and correct him.
“Oh yes, about that dumping-me disappearance bit you pulled fourteen years ago. What was that about? I’ve been stewing about it ever since.”

The crowd in the stadium roared. I heard the familiar jingling of keys that fans shook every time the team was about to attempt a key play.

No, sexy women like me shrug and act as if we can’t remember how the whole thing played out. After all, it was long ago and so many more important things had happened since that it all seemed like a big blur now. “Yeah, what
were
you thinking letting me get away?” I smirked.
I’ll try the Coy Flirt in a size two please.

He smiled that cocky, crooked smile. He absolutely saw through me. Was he laughing at the transparency of my attempt to reinvent myself as the renegade accountant? What did his smile mean? I dare not ask, I reminded myself. Matt always hated when I asked him to explain every facial expression.

“What are you smiling at?” slipped.
Shit! Can’t you follow a simple script?
shouted my Inner Director.
This is live, half-wit. We can’t re-shoot!

Department stores and movie sets were the backdrop of my life. Jennifer had finally made her indelible mark on my psyche.

Matt looked at me as if he were drinking me through a straw. “I’m thinking I was a pretty dumb kid to let you go,” he said.

Here’s the real story: Matt and I planned to spend the summer after graduation in Europe before I went to Wharton and he moved to Los Angeles to attend USC film school. Ever since my sophomore year, my mother promised a trip to Europe would be my gift. One minor caveat. “Unless my stocks take a dive,” she warned. Sure enough, mom’s investments — along with the rest of the country’s — plunged and she was unable to finance the trip.

“Go without me,” I assured Matt. “This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for you.” And the bastard did.

When Matt returned, I was spending the summer with my mother and her husband, getting ready to leave for business school. I called him a few times at home, but after hearing his mother tell me three times, “Okay, honey, I’ll let him know you called again,” it became clear that I was being dumped.

“Sweetheart, I don’t want to seem rude, but he’s never going to call you back. This is his way of breaking up with you,”
his mother’s voice clearly communicated. Her words took a message, but her tone apologized and handed me a tissue.

Now we were on the cusp of middle age, sitting on the stadium lawn with our legs tangled around each other’s. Matt picked at the fraying denim above the knee of his jeans as we talked. I wondered if those jeans knew how lucky they were.

“Do you ever wish things had gone differently between us?” I asked.

I wish you would follow the goddamn script!
shouted the director who lived in my head. It’s really very simple.
Read the words that come after SEXY COOL CHICK:.

“Malone, I wish everything had gone differently for us,” Matt resigned.

What did that mean? Is he saying that nothing was good with me, or that he didn’t like the way things ended?

“I know exactly what you mean,” I mimicked his tone. “So, did you ever get married?” I asked him.

“Nah,” Matt answered. “Guess I just never found the right one.”

When Matt smiled, I wondered whether he was thinking that I was the right one. Or maybe it was just me desperately hoping that was what he was thinking.

“You want a hot dog?” Matt asked.

Definitely just me hoping.

“Sure, I love hot dogs,” I piped.

Settle down on the hot dogs. No one gets this excited about snack food.

I decided it would be a good time to take a break from the vegetarianism. And what better way to ease back into the world of meat than with rolled, um, what the hell is in a hot dog anyway? We walked to the empty concession stand, and Matt ordered two hot dogs for us. He leaned in toward me to tell me a secret. As his hand brushed the hair away from my ear, I think my scalp may have actually had an orgasm.

His ice cream and beer breath delivered the following words: “Malone, if I could do things over, I’d’ve stayed with you that summer,” Matt said. “Europe sucked without you.”

Sweat. Panic. Exhilaration. Nausea. Euphoria.

Yeah, well the past is the past, I contemplated saying.

Oh well, it all worked out for the best,
I rehearsed.

Before I could respond, Matt asked if I wanted mustard on my hot dog.

“No thanks.”

He squinted and smiled. “It’s so good to see you again. Relish?”

“Absolutely.”

We closed the restaurant that night. Then we closed a piano bar where a young music student played songs from
The Big Chill
as geezers like us happily crooned along. Since the movie is about Michigan alumni, one of the unofficial admissions requirements is that every incoming freshman must be able to sing at least two songs from
The Big Chill.

As Matt and I walked back to my hotel room, he said there was something he still owed me from years ago. “What’s that?” I asked, hoping to hell it was some sort of physical contact.

“This,” he said, mischievously pushing me into a doorway of the Chemistry Building and unbuttoning my pants. He tore my underwear with his teeth and began to rip them off my body, gripping my hips with his hands. This was the first time I’d been with a guy when the first kiss was on my stomach. Definitely different. Definitely unreal. Definitely worth remembering, so I closed my eyes and began frenetically taking mental notes, urging parts of my body to savor each sensation so I could later recall the experience.

“You’ve never forgiven me for ruining your briefs that night, have you?” I teased.

“No I haven’t,” he smiled clutching a torn strip of my red panties in his teeth like a matador holds a rose. “And tonight is my revenge,” he said, flinging the silk scrap over his shoulder.

Whoever said revenge was sweet knew what she was talking about.

I have never had sex like this before, not even with him. I felt physical sensation everywhere, including my elbows. The feeling of his unshaven face scratching my breast, and the cold night air that instantly snapped onto his residual saliva, was the height of erotic pleasure. I think I may have momentarily fainted at the feeling of his flat palms against the bare small of my back.

The leaves crunched beneath our running feet and we exhaled clouds of cold night air as we hurried back to my room at the Campus Inn. The elevator ride was painfully long despite a wonderful and urgent seven-flight kiss. When he grabbed a fistful of my hair, I knew, most definitely, that I was there. Like some sort of erotic existential affirmation. I stopped myself from thanking him only because it would seem too needy. Something about a woman weeping with gratitude as she’s about to get pounded into a hotel headboard seemed just a smidge pathetic, even to me.

I woke up to a sword of light peeking through a crack in the curtain. For a moment I’d forgotten where I was until the familiar arm draped over my stomach led a trail to Matt’s sleeping face. Though I had no regrets about my night with Matt, I immediately regretted the circumstances. I can usually contain my tears, and decided that I would need to for fear Matt would wake up and press for answers I was not ready to give him. My eyes remained dry and my breathing completely normal, but as I lay beside Matt watching him sleep, I sobbed. Partly because I felt horrible that I was simultaneously lying to the two men I loved most. Partly because I was just plain exhausted. But mostly because I thought that the following morning, this would all be over. I assumed I’d wake up next to Reilly Monday morning and life would go back to normal. A moth in the darkness without a flicker of light anywhere.

“Hey, Malone,” an adorably sleepy voice interrupted. “What’s on the agenda for you today?”

I’m being dismissed.

“I’m just going to pick up some t-shirts and hang out on campus for a few hours,” I said casually. “What about you? Anything exciting planned?”

He stretched his body, yawned and smiled. “Nothing I can’t blow off to hang with you.”

“Okay,” I said too quickly.

“You know what I’m in the mood for right now?”

Me?!

He reached his arm around my waist and pulled me closer toward him. “You. A shower. Then a sandwich at Zingerman’s. Let me see if I remember. Pat and Dick’s Honeymooner. Number 27. Extra honey mustard, right?”

I was blown away. Fourteen years and he still remembered my sandwich.

“Yeah, hey, good call.” I turned away so he wouldn’t see me smile.

Matt and I stopped at Ulrich’s, the campus bookstore, and bought Michigan t-shirts and sweatshirts. I picked up a pair of boxer shorts and held them up. “See, I could have just bought you these and we would’ve been even,” I teased.

He smiled and raised his eyebrows. Then he looked at his watch.

“Not on your life,” I laughed. “It’s broad daylight.”

“Like that’s ever stopped you before,” he said.

I smiled, a bit embarrassed. Matt was referring to the time we drove to his house while his parents were out of town for the weekend. We had sex about a dozen times in a twenty-four-hour period. Twice in his bed. Once in his parents’ bed. Twice in their shower. Once in the kitchen. Once on the staircase directly under a framed painting of Jesus with a twisted palm beneath it. Three times in the family room. Once more in his bed. Then on the drive back to Ann Arbor, we pulled over in the middle of the afternoon and had hair-pulling drunken sailor sex on the periphery of a cow farm.

Fourteen years later, we were together again, holding hands as we crossed the street of our old campus. Matt looked at the arch of the West Engineering Building. “I was done for the night we kissed here. Remember that, Malone?”

Smooth and calm, Malone. You can do this.

“Oh yeah,” I faked recalling. “I do remember that.”

Good girl.

“Malone. Prudence,” he stopped. “This is gonna sound weird, but this weekend, it was like, you know, the best.”

Go on.

“I’m not usually into fate, but running into you this weekend, I don’t think it was a mistake, you know? I let you go once and this weekend was a wake-up call, like, look you dumb fuck, here’s a second chance, don’t drop the ball, man. You know what I’m saying?”

“God, yes” escaped.

He put his hands straight into his pockets, which made his shoulders rise toward his ears, creating an impish little-boy look. I must take mental photographs for my hot sex scrapbook.

“I guess what I’m trying to say is this.” He paused. “Malone, the first time our timing was off, you know? We were young, we were both headed to different coasts, but I loved you, and” — he paused to gauge my reaction to his proclamation — “and, I guess what I’m really trying to get at here is, I still love you and I don’t want things to end between us here.”

You don’t? If you think we had bad timing the first go-around, you have no idea what we’re up against now.

Matt got down on his knee right there on the sidewalk, and smiled at me tentatively, not his usual cocky grin. “Prudence Malone, will you marry me?”

Mmmmmmmarry you? Did you just say you want me to marry you?

“Okay,” slipped out. “Yes, yes Matt, I will marry you,” I smiled.

Just as soon as I figure out what to do with my not-so-dead husband Reilly.

Chapter 6

Cindy was supposed to leave early Sunday afternoon, so I was surprised to find her waiting for me in Evie’s hotel room. It was clear the moment I walked in that I was in trouble. Cindy tapped a small pad of paper on the glass-top desk where she was sitting. Would she take notes? Issue a citation?

Evie was in the soft chair, but did not look one bit casual. It was an intervention.

“Get in the car,” Cindy commanded.

I laughed. “What are you talking about?”

“Get. In. The. Car,” she said. “We’re both taking you to the airport.”

Why am I frightened that we’re not going to the airport at all?

“Okay, but do you mind if I ask what this is all about?”

Gee, I wonder, half-wit.

“Look, I’m not one to piss around, so why don’t we get right to it,” Cindy said, while Evie held my arm and led me to the car. I was being taken down to the station. Shit, why couldn’t I enjoy the first two hours of my engagement? “You slept with Matt last night, didn’t you?”

“Why are you asking me this?” I stalled, knowing this would not be the time to suggest a celebratory round of drinks. “That’s kind of a, wow, I don’t know. Why do you want to know?”