Page 25 of Cruel Summer

FIFTEEN

Now

He’d said it. He’d said it out loud. Her heart was pounding now like it had done that night out on the lanai.

“Logan…”

“I’ve waited. And waited and waited for you to ever acknowledge that.”

“Why? Why would I?” she asked, the words exploding from her.

The absurdity of everything with this man. They’d nearly kissed on a Hawaiian island, and now she was screaming at him in a Texas parking lot.

The complexity, the unwanted complication, spanned a country. Spanned years.

“Because it happened.”

She shook her head. “I just thought…”

“You’re a liar. Most of all to yourself, Samantha Parker.”

She felt like he’d gone and bodily thrown her off the back of the bull himself.

“I… I’m not. I… What I was—am—is a married woman, Logan, and I had a moment of insanity. I had a moment of it, and I didn’t do anything. You… Maybe you misunderstood.”

“Oh, that is bullshit. We both know I didn’t misunderstand anything. We both know you wanted me.”

“The misunderstanding was in the fact that I wasn’t prepared to cheat on my husband. I was tempted , but I didn’t do anything. Even Jesus was tempted. Isn’t that what they always say in church? Temptation isn’t the sin, it’s what you do about it, and I walked away. I think you would have too.”

“Do you? I guess we don’t have a way of knowing that for sure.”

“He’s your best friend.”

“And you’re you .” He said it with such ferocity. Such conviction. Like she mattered.

“Logan…”

“Samantha. For the love of God. I don’t need you to kiss me. I don’t need you to… I just need you to stop lying. To yourself if not to me.”

Panic fluttered in her chest like a trapped bird. “What good does it do?”

She couldn’t say why it scared her so much except it felt like she was holding something back. A wall of understanding. She didn’t want it to give. She didn’t think she wanted to know more.

There was already too much. Life had already changed too much.

It was the ridiculousness of what he’d said earlier that stuck there.

The one you had, or the one you pretend you have?

“I don’t care if it’s good, bad or indifferent, it’s the truth. I don’t understand how you think you’re going to spend this summer away from Will, and go back to a marriage where neither of you knows the other, and it’s just fine.”

“I know him,” she said.

She knew it was a lie, because she’d have never said her husband would ask for an open relationship, and she frankly still didn’t know why he had.

He talked about new experiences and freedom. But why? What did it mean to him? Why was sex freedom?

He doesn’t know you want his best friend.

I do not want him. I almost kissed him once. I am not immune to his good looks, but what woman is?

“Sam,” Logan bit out.

“Fine. I don’t know him. Not how I thought I did.

He doesn’t know everything about me, and I don’t know how…

I don’t know how the hell you’re supposed to have a happy, smooth relationship and share everything.

Like, I was supposed to go to him and say, ‘Will, so I think I maybe almost kissed Logan’? ”

“You could have talked to me about it.”

“You aren’t my husband.”

“I’m clear on that.”

She felt enraged and small. She wanted to curl into the nearest alcove and disappear into a ball of frightened outrage. But given that wasn’t possible, and he was her ride, she had to have the conversation.

Or get an Uber.

She was starting to think that sounded like an okay solution.

“I don’t need this,” she said finally.

“I think you do. I think you need to face what your life actually was, so you can figure out if you want to go back to it. The truth is, you didn’t know what marriage you were in.”

“And you do?”

“I’m saying I fucking do. I didn’t know he wanted to sleep with other women. But I knew you wanted to sleep with me. Three years ago, you wanted me, and if I would have kissed you…”

“I said no,” she said. “I didn’t let you.”

“But if I had.”

The image nearly brought her to her knees. His mouth meeting hers. All that heat and strength wrapped even more tightly around her. What would she have done?

She didn’t have a clear answer to that because she’d been certain she would never be close enough to a man other than Will to be on the verge of kissing him, much less wanting to kiss him. So how could she say for sure what she would have done if he’d actually kissed her?

“It’s a dead-end hypothetical because that’s all it is. A hypothetical.”

“Were you as happy as you think? That’s my question.”

The question didn’t go down easy. It was like a spoonful of frosty dread, going all through her body.

“I was happy,” she insisted. “I will be happy again.”

“It doesn’t matter to you at all that this is an intellectually bankrupt exercise?

” His words were just so…hard. There was no attempt at ease or companionability or niceness.

It was all just truth. Unvarnished. Awful.

“You’re using your separation as an opportunity to double down on everything that was wrong before. ”

“You don’t know. You don’t…”

But she couldn’t argue. She found herself angry mostly at herself.

Because she knew the truth. The truth was, you did not let a man get that close to you when you were married if there wasn’t something wrong.

She had confided in Logan because she didn’t feel like she could confide in Will, and that meant nothing good. That meant something was wrong.

She saw it. The first crack in the dam. That little bit of water bursting out. The truth. Then it all just began to crumble. All of it. All the little things that she had ignored. All the ways in which they hadn’t been able to communicate.

She was flexible. So flexible.

But just because she could didn’t mean that she should be contorting herself into all of those shapes.

Will wasn’t awful. She couldn’t rewrite that.

She didn’t want to. He was a wonderful father.

He was a good husband. Somewhere along the way, she had gotten so obsessed with being a good wife for him that she hadn’t remembered to be the right woman for herself.

Hadn’t remembered to look after herself and her own needs in any regard.

She had surrendered her hold on what she wanted so long ago that she didn’t even know what it was.

When her mother died, she hadn’t known how to speak up for herself.

Hadn’t known how to not be okay because it was so imperative to her that she be perfect.

Because Will’s wife was perfect. She handled everything.

He had an important job, and she was the type A homemaker.

She had a job that fit around raising kids than was more of a showcase for her skills as a homemaker that it was anything else.

Will was endlessly proud of that. That he had a wife who was smart enough to turn homemaking into an income stream.

But it was all bending. Bending to fit. Into a mold that she had fit perfectly when she was eighteen, but that she didn’t even know…

Suddenly she felt like she was standing out there alone, a tumbleweed in the middle of the parking lot. What would she have been if she hadn’t put herself inside that box when she was eighteen years old?

Like a goldfish in a bowl. Who could only grow as big as the bowl she’d leaped into when she’d been too young to know there was a sea out there.

She had loved the bowl.

She did love it.

She had chosen it.

But she had chosen it at a very specific time in her life. What did that mean for her now?

Well, clearly what it meant for Will was breaking it.

What he was doing didn’t fit neatly into the fishbowl life.

He’d clearly known—seen, felt—the issues in their relationship much more clearly than she had.

How long? She had been so angry that he had blindsided her with that, but how was that fair?

She had nearly kissed Logan. That should have been a clue.

It should have been, and if she had kissed him, it would have been undeniable. But she hadn’t kissed him. She’d wanted to. Her whole body had been heavy with her desire to do it, and she hadn’t done it.

Because what she and Will had was more important to her than physical lust.

Suddenly a spark of fury ignited in her gut.

“You know what,” she said, realizing that while conversationally, she might be on the same highway, she was making a left turn.

“It just makes me want to punch him in the face. Because I do know what it’s like.

I know what it’s like to feel like I want someone else.

I said no. I said no because we were married. We are married.”

“Well. Presumably he said no until the moment that he decided he would rather risk your anger to get the sex that he wanted.”

Again, it was like a slap. Why was he so…him?

“Are you defending him now?”

“You’re acting like I’m trying to manipulate the situation, and I’m not.

I’m just making you look at it instead of pulling a blanket over your head.

Something happened between us, and more than that, we were friends.

You acting like you don’t like me and you don’t get why is some high-level bullshit, Sam.

You know what happened between us. Pretending that you don’t takes denial to a whole new place.

And you know what, I was content to let you sit in the denial of your marriage.

But the thing about denial is it all blows apart eventually. Look at you and Will.”

“We’re not blown apart,” she said, pressing her hand to her chest. “We’re separated.”

A sharp groove carved itself between his eyebrows. “Why is it so important to you? Why is being with him so important to you?”

“Because I love him. He’s the father of my children. He is…the love of my life.”

“Right. Still.”

“That’s the thing about being with somebody for a long time. Things happen. They aren’t always perfect. They change. You change. But in the end, you make the decision that it’s worth being together.”