Page 34 of Anywhere with You

It was probably a bad choice, a movie about a breakup, even a funny one. Cara and I laughed, sometimes at the wrong parts, but at least we laughed.

I kissed her throughout one sexy scene, the actors’ moans merging with ours.

By the midpoint, it was clear that the characters’ relationship was heading for disaster. I made some popcorn, and Cara curled against me when I returned to the couch.

A familiar actor played the psychologist, and Cara and I tried to place her, eventually giving up on our guesses and searching our phones for the answer. We were wrong on every guess.

“Bridget and I never tried that,” I said at one point, gesturing to the screen with a handful of popcorn. “It was too fast, I guess. I only knew there was a problem when she left.”

Cara was quiet for a minute, then said, softly, “We tried it. Marriage counseling.”

I glanced at her out of the corner of my eye, my attention still mostly on the movie. “I didn’t know that.”

Cara gave a little shrug, a little head shake. “It didn’t do us much good. Our last was right around Valentine’s Day. We were in a session when Lorenzo told me that he was filing for a divorce.”

I nodded. We’d talked about this. Bridget had let me know around the same time.

We hadn’t been in counseling. She’d just told me on the way out the door one Sunday morning.

By the way, I’m leaving you. By the way, I don’t love you anymore.

By the way, I’ve been sleeping with someone else because I’m a lying, cheating slime of a human being who has been lusting after my best friend for years.

Maybe if I’d known, if we’d tried counseling, too. Maybe if we’d tried it long ago, before Bridget had one foot out the door. Maybe it would’ve mattered.

“How long had you been in counseling?” I asked.

“Since…a few months.” She glanced at me, then away.

There was something about it, about the timing, about her expression, about the hesitation in her answer that itched at my thoughts.

I shook my head and tried to pay attention to the movie, but the itch remained.

Couples went to counseling for lots of reasons. Obviously, there were problems in their marriage. Every marriage has problems.

But…

I almost didn’t ask. I almost decided that I was being paranoid, that I was letting the hurt and the anger make me suspicious even when there was no reason.

But Cara still wasn’t looking at me, and she wasn’t watching the movie, either. She was staring at her clenched hands.

“Did you start counseling,” I asked slowly, “before or after he and Bridget got together?”

Cara’s sunburned face lost some of its color.

It was something I’d wondered about, in the back of my mind.

I knew that I worked late in the music store, and Bridget and I had frequent rocky spells.

This one had been particularly long. But she was always there when I got home.

It hadn’t occurred to me that she would cheat.

I had been caught unawares, unpleasantly surprised.

But Cara hadn’t been. Cara left school after teaching all day and went home and her husband wasn’t there, day after day.

She ate dinner alone. She’d said that she rarely saw him at all. Surely, he’d given her some believable excuse. He was working. He was hanging out with friends.

I watched her mouth, her eyes, her hands curled into fists.

She was alone, she’d said. Day after day.

“After,” she admitted, meeting my eyes. The word gutted me.

“You knew,” I said, trying to force the words out, but suddenly, I had no air. “You knew they were together.”

Cara’s head shook slightly, but it wasn’t a denial. She had tears in her eyes, and her voice trembled. “The counseling was helping. We were having conversations that we’d been putting off for ages. I thought…I thought maybe…”

“How long did you know?” I went from staring at her to not being able to look at her at all.

“Months,” she said.

I tried to breathe through the nausea. Months? Months? “You didn’t tell me,” I accused. “Months, and you didn’t tell me.”

I stood and paced the living room, clenching my hands together to stop the trembling.

When she’d come into the store that first day, she’d looked demolished. She’d asked, first thing, if I’d known about Bridget and Lorenzo, and I’d been so wrapped up in how I’d been betrayed, how angry I felt, that I hadn’t even returned the question.

Because of course I hadn’t known. If I’d known, I would’ve been a decent human being and told her.

I put my shaking hands over my face.

And I’d felt guilty . Going to her apartment to apologize for being an ass, I’d regretted not reaching out to her after Lorenzo and Bridget left us. I’d sat at her table, commiserating like she was just another abandoned spouse. I’d apologized to her for not calling.

I had apologized. And all that time, she’d been part of it, part of keeping the secret, part of keeping me in the dark.

All that time. All that time on the road, all those days and nights together, being more open with her than anyone since Bridget, maybe even including the years I spent with Bridget, and Cara had listened and never said a word.

I forced my hands down to my stomach and wrapped my arms around myself, turning to face her. “Why?”

Cara gave one soft gasp, almost a sob, then whispered, “As long as your marriage stayed in one piece, there was a chance mine would, too.”

I walked across the room, unable to be near her. “What are you talking about?”

“If you knew they were together,” she explained, tears running down her cheeks that I wanted to kiss away, even now with anger rising up so strong in me that I could feel it in my throat, “if you knew, then you and Bridget would split up. Bridget would be free to be with Lorenzo. Then…then there would be no reason for him to stay with me.”

I tried to listen and to process her words.

She went on, “It’s all I had, that chance that Bridget would decide to fix her marriage. Lorenzo didn’t care about his.” Tears ran down her face. “You don’t have to tell me it’s pathetic. I know.”

“Pathetic,” I murmured, but it wasn’t agreement or disagreement, just a word among a hundred words that made little sense to me at the moment.

“Yeah,” she agreed. “I didn’t want to face what was happening to me, but I should…I should’ve—”

I shook my head, holding up a hand for her to stop, but I was surprised when she actually did. I looked at her, this unbelievably sexy and funny and lovable woman, tears running down her face, her eyes wide and sad.

I’m sorry , I’d said to her, that day in her kitchen, out of sympathy for the collapse of our marriages, our plans, what had felt, at the moment, like our lives.

I’m sorry, too , she’d said.

And maybe she had been. Maybe she was now. But last night, I’d held on to her as though our lives were starting over again, and she had still been lying.

I felt temporarily zapped of emotion, as though my brain had overloaded and needed to cool down and restart.

“I…I’m going for a walk.” I was impressed with how calm I sounded.

“Honey,” she said as I slid my feet into my shoes and walked out the back door.

I didn’t stop.

I started walking down the path to the hot springs, then turned back, disgusted. I walked around the house instead, heading down the gravel road.

I wanted to think about what Cara had said, and at the same time, I never wanted to relive that conversation, ever again.

Cara had let me believe that my marriage was fine, that my wife wasn’t sleeping with anyone but me, when I’d been sharing her for months.

I stopped and threw up in some tall grass at the side of the road.

All I could see was my past self, standing behind the register at work, while somewhere Bridget was off fucking Lorenzo, and Cara was at home knowing .

Home…by herself, which meant that Bridget and Lorenzo had probably been at my house, in our bed, next to the picture of the two of us on our wedding day, me in my beautiful purple dress, Bridget beaming, radiant in blush and tulle.

I’d never thought to wonder before where, exactly, my wife was located when she was fucking someone else. I’d have brushed it off as a minor detail, maybe because it wouldn’t have occurred to me that she was getting dick in our bed.

Not the couch. No, that would be way too uncomfortable, and Bridget was all about the comfort. No floor or shower or dining room table sex for her. She needed a mattress with a memory foam topper.

Though, what did I know? Maybe if there were testicles in the equation, she’d be happy on the floor.

I shook my head at my own pettiness. Besides, testicles didn’t have the power to change someone’s nature.

Weirdly, I thought of Tamara and her blue Kool-Aid lips, how I’d adored her for so long, obsessed with her, and how she’d turned out to be someone completely different than the person I thought she was.

Could I even trust my own observations? Did I see people wrong? Or was everyone but me so good at hiding their true selves that they could pretend, for years, until one day it was just too exhausting to fake it?

I didn’t know if I believed any of that, or I wanted to believe it, even if it was true.

I thought of my parents, who were complex and sometimes contradictory, but who were always their true selves, even when I was a teenager and their true selves pissed me off daily.

And me? Was I always out there, for everyone, never pretending? I spent a lot of days working retail, so no, that wasn’t entirely the case. But with my friends, my family, people I cared about and respected? Yes. I didn’t pretend. I wasn’t even sure I knew how.

I kneeled and wiped the sweat and tears from my face with my T-shirt before covering my eyes with my hands and trying to breathe. I kept gasping, and it took effort to pull air all the way in and push it all the way out.

I did it a few more times, then stood and kept walking.

Okay.

My thoughts had derailed, and I let them. I was used to being mad at Bridget. This was just one more drop in the bucket.

I wasn’t used to being mad at Cara, and I was surprised by the sharpness of the pain and how deep it went.

I don’t know how long I walked or how far. I tried to tell myself that I was overreacting, and in the next moment, tried to convince myself that I was underreacting. I wanted a drink and sleep and my guitar, and most of all, I wanted to rewind to an hour ago and just be happy.

I’d been happy with Cara. This whole trip had been fun, but the last twenty-four hours had been more than that. We’d had one truly incredible day together.

But it had just been one day.

And now?

Now I wanted to be with my goddamned stupid dog.

Eventually, I realized my phone was in my pocket. I didn’t have a strong signal, but I had one. Just enough.

I held my finger over the call button for a full thirty seconds before I pressed it.

“Lane,” I said, as soon as they answered. “When is your boss going to Phoenix? I need a ride.”