Page 75 of Center of Gravity
“You need to.” I sat next to him, watching as he took a slow sip of coffee. “Why’d you do it?”
“I don’t love her.”
It hurt to hear now, even still. I wanted to askwhy now? Why not before his lie came out, why not before there was a baby involved? Before the multiple losses. He was clearly still grieving. I wasn’t sure if he knew it. But what did the whys matter now anyway? It stung, yes, but only my pride.
“Don’t say it,” he pleaded, as if he could read what was behind my eyes.
I shook my head. “I won’t.” I wasn’t that cruel.
Sean looked out of the window, then back to his coffee mug where his thumb rubbed up and down along the smooth ceramic side. “I thought we might pick up where we left off.” When he let out a bitter chuckle, I joined in.
It was almost humorous, really. In a wide world view of things, in a way that seemed as if fate and fortune were having a good laugh at my expense. Or maybe not. The thought occurred as my laughter trailed off. I’d never considered it before, but maybe if Sean really had left his wife for me, I’d always wonder when it would be my turn for him to leave me.
“I’m sorry for coming out,” Sean said once we were into our second round of coffee. “I’ll go in a bit, just let me stay a while and…breathe.” He sighed and rubbed his forehead. “We never should have been together in the first place.”
At first, I thought Sean meant us, which I would have agreed with, but he kept going, misery painted in dark lines over his face. “Our marriage has been broken for so long, but the idea of a family—I thought that was what I wanted. I thought it would fix us. Fix me. It didn’t.”
I didn’t know what to say, so I said nothing, and after a moment he shook his head and changed the subject, much to my relief.
We finished the pot of coffee, talking intermittently about the office, about my plans for the house, what he’d do next. The silences that fell were companionable. If we’d never been lovers, we might have been friends. Maybe we still could be, I didn’t know, but it sure as hell would make going to work more pleasant.
The front dooropened again before I’d registered the two sharp knocks that preceded it. Alex called out my name and came to a halt in the doorway just as I glanced up from my coffee. I’m sure I appeared caught off guard, which he might have read as guilt.
“I left my bag,” Alex said, his tone businesslike and cool. I’d never seen his face so stony.
His eyes flicked back and forth between us. I thought about what he was seeing. Sean sprawled in the chair at the head of the table, me in the one adjacent, one leg kicked up on the opposite chair, our knees almost brushing. There was nothing incriminating about the moment or what was happening. It wasn’t as if we were in bed together, but I felt a senseless twinge of guilt for the history between us. Alex’s expression shifted from confusion to anger as he made his own assumptions.
Sean glanced between me and Alex expectantly, but Alex turned on his heel before I could figure out how to make introductions.
In the span of a second we’d landed smack in the middle of complicated. The very thing I’d been trying to avoid. Fuck.
“Alex,” I called out after him as I pushed away from the table and stood, following him back to the entryway
“Tom’s waiting on me.” As soon as he’d scooped up his bag, he was out the door.
I should have chased him right then and I didn’t. Like the night he’d left me in the kitchen aching with my own want. I just let him go when I should have reacted. It was the opposite of muscle memory. Muscle inaction. I pinched the bridge of my nose and looked at the back of the door he’d just disappeared through.
I’d always thought of myself as steady and deliberate. Now I realized I was just a defensive coward. I started to pull my shoes on, then remembered Sean and went back to the kitchen. He’d put his mug in the sink and was leaning against the counter.
“Who was that?” he asked, folding his arms over his chest and staring at me in a way that was far too curious and shrewd for my liking.
“Alex,” I replied vaguely and gestured toward the door. “You’ve got to go.I’vegot to go.”
It wasn’t too late. I could chase after Alex and tell him everything I’d been saving for tonight. It shouldn’t be all that hard to find the orange truck and flag it down. So what if it wasn’t according to my grand romantic plan? Summer had been right about plans. I should have been banned from making them. They always went wrong.
Still confused, Sean moved like molasses in the winter toward the door, opened it, and then lingered in the opening. The autumn breeze swept in, lifting a sheaf of my papers on the nearby table.
“Rob.”
“Shut the door!” I grabbed my keys from the counter and rushed forward, but not before Winslow made his jailbreak, skittering madcap through the opening. I dashed after him, reassured that Alex would have closed the gate. But he hadn’t.
Winslow bounded across the yard and through the open gate as if I’d been holding him hostage and starving him for months.
“Goddammit,” I shouted, running down my stairs and twisting my bad ankle in the process because, of fucking course. “Go home!” I yelled to Sean over my shoulder as I limped through the yard and to the sidewalk. I set off in the direction I’d last seen Winslow and cursed a mile as I went. This would have to be the day he finally got out.
Ignoring the pain in my ankle, I jogged down Primrose, Mulberry, Pataqua, and Sage, through graveled alleyways and the sedate breeze stirring the palms. I called for Winslow, stopping at points to listen for the scampering of his feet.
After a half hour, I’d gone down all the streets in the neighborhood with no luck, talked to two neighbors who might or might not have caught sight of him, and was circling back in the direction of the house when I saw him. Or part of him; a tuft of his fur, the shadow of his body peeking out in front of a car stopped in the middle of my street.