Page 26 of Cruel Summer

“What if he wants an open marriage at the end? Then you won’t want to be with him. Then there’s a limit on the change.”

“Just stop. Okay?” She closed her eyes. “I like you. I do. You’re right.

I did pull away from you. Because our…friendship strayed into dangerous territory, and I needed to remind myself exactly whose friend you were.

And why I even know you. Really know you.

Because of Will. The fact that I was attracted to you made it impossible for us to be close to each other.

So yes, I dismissed it. More than that, I pretended it never happened because there was no room for it. I figured it was one-sided anyway.”

“Did you really?”

She closed her eyes. “I’m going to be completely honest with you.

I haven’t thought about it. For years. There was a while, right after it happened, during the vacation, my surgery, all of that, I wasn’t myself.

I wasn’t okay. The most okay that I felt was when you…

” She closed her eyes. “When you held me. Part of me was grateful for that. For the way that I felt safe. But it was grief, Logan. I absolutely told myself that I was the one that turned it into something…”

“Sexual,” he pressed.

“A near kiss isn’t sexual .”

“Ours was.”

His voice sent a shiver through her body.

She swallowed, her throat dry. “Yeah. Okay. Ours was. But the thing is… The thing is…in that moment, I had a choice to make, and I chose my life. My real life. Not my life when I was in a crisis point. Not my life when I was feeling outside of my body. You can’t make decisions like that when you’re…

when you’re barely hanging on. You just can’t. ”

Her words resonated between them. Because wasn’t that where she was now? Outside of her life. In a completely different situation than she would normally find herself in. With him.

But he wasn’t offering her comfort this time. He was pushing her.

“Maybe not. But as your friend,” he said, his voice curving oddly around the word, “it would be remiss of me to not ask you to take this as an opportunity to see who the hell you are. To be honest. About what your life was. Because how in the world are you actually going to create a marriage where either of you is satisfied if you don’t actually dig into the bullshit?

You’re just going to go back to right where you were.

Even if he says, ‘Fine, I’m done screwing around.

’ He’ll only go do it again. Unless you figure out what the actual reason is that he thinks he needs something else. ”

She hated that everything he said sounded right. “Are you a psychologist?”

“I’ve been to a fuckton of therapy.”

That stopped her. “Really?”

“ Really. Because when you have a small child and experience a devastating loss, you have to think of people other than yourself and sort your shit out, sometimes by talking to a stranger, even if you would rather die.”

“I just didn’t think that you…”

“I’m a human being, Sam. I’m a husband, even though I don’t have a wife anymore. I’m a father. I have responsibilities.” He shoved his hands into the pockets of his jeans and looked up at the sky like the stars might have answers. “I’m not just around when you’re there.”

That made her feel incredibly guilty. It made her wonder if she had…if she had used him. Because she thought of all the times that she had taken comfort from him…

But then she thought of when she had offered it back. She didn’t think that she used him. Not all the way.

“I know that,” she said. “I know that you’re human being. You’re not just a taciturn, difficult man that I cannot seem to find my footing with.”

“You can’t find your footing with me because you’ve got a blindfold on. It’s hard to see the trail.”

That hurt. Mainly because it wasn’t completely untrue. She hated him for that a little bit. But she also couldn’t deny it.

“Okay. So here I am. My eyes are open.” It was such a dangerous thing to say. There in that neon glow. The devastating nature of his features too much right now. That bad boy date impression not fading away at all.

Except this was real life. And he was Logan.

She had nearly kissed him three years ago, and she had never addressed that. Not really. Certainly not out loud. Certainly not with him.

Maybe she had to.

“Okay. I almost kissed you. I almost let you kiss me. However you want to look at that. I felt very, very alone. You made me feel less alone. I felt like you understood me. Back even further than that, watching you with Becca… I just knew that… I could trust you. That anyone could. I knew that you were a good man. I was drawn to that. Because who wouldn’t be.

You…you had to handle your life after all of that.

I think when I was unraveling on that vacation, it was because I was still carrying all the things. ”

Why did it make her feel guilty? To give voice to this. To the ways in which she’d felt like Will failed her then. She’d tried to lock it away. She’d tried to blame her sensitivity on her grief. But it was there, apparently, because she could call it all up now far too easily.

Not dealt with. Unexamined. Like so many other things.

She took a sharp breath. “Will is so great at his job. That’s all he does.

He doesn’t manage the household. Or the finances.

The food, the vacations, the packing. All of that is on me, and he didn’t mean to, but he doesn’t know how to handle things when I’m not a hundred percent, and some of that is my fault. ”

That was truer than she’d realized. She was often her own unsupportive partner. The one demanding she push through.

“It is,” she repeated. “It is. I trained him to be that way. I taught him that I would handle all of that stuff. I’ve packed his lunches every day like he was going off to school.

He never learned to do that for himself.

The day that I didn’t pack his lunch after I had my surgery…

he wasn’t mad at me. Don’t… Please don’t get the idea that he’s awful.

He’s not. But he wants everything to be okay.

He wants it so badly that sometimes I don’t feel like he can sit with the brokenness of it all.

I was very broken. You were the only person who offered to try and hold me together. I will always be grateful for that.”

He let out a long breath. “It wasn’t a hardship to be there for you. Just so you know.”

“It wasn’t a hardship to be there for you either. Not that I did much.”

“You watched Chloe. Three days a week. Do you have any idea how long the list is of people I would have let have my daughter for that length of time in the aftermath of her mother’s death? A short list. It’s you and Will. What you did for her was no small thing.”

There was a hoarseness to his voice, and more emotion behind his words than she could dig into. Like there was a wall up in him too, but she didn’t have the strength to contend with what might come out if his crumbled. She was still dealing with the aftermath of her own wall failing.

She just didn’t have it in her.

She just didn’t. So she let it go. She didn’t press. Didn’t ask. Didn’t even come close.

“Thank you,” she said again. “For being there for me now. Because I do appreciate this. I know… I know we’re complicated.”

We.

We’re complicated.

Those words felt wrong, and illicit somehow, and she wanted to deny them and push them away, but that was part of the problem. Part of the issue with what she’d been doing.

She didn’t like things that were sharp or jagged either.

How could she be disdainful of Will’s inability to sit in brokenness when all she wanted to do was round off the edges?

Make them easy. Make them palatable. It was what she did in their life.

In their marriage. It was why she hadn’t been able to tell him she wasn’t okay.

It was why she’d had to fold herself into Logan’s arms and rest there.

Because they made their marriage such a safe space that it couldn’t support anything difficult.

It couldn’t support her not fulfilling her role. Couldn’t support despair, or doubt or too much change.

She didn’t know who she was apart from it either. She wasn’t blameless. As much as Will’s expectations had been too much for her to handle back then, her own had been the same.

She would have needed something from Will that she couldn’t even give to herself, and it had taken somebody outside of that union to look at her and see that she was falling apart.

That was all it was.

When the quiet desperation was coming from inside the house, neither of the people in it could truly hear it. They were too used to it at that point. Too accustomed to ignoring things.

“I will always be there for you,” he said. “Even when you are being a stubborn asshole and causing bar fights.”

“I like to think that I do neither of those things all that often. That was, in fact, the very first bar fight I even witnessed, much less caused.”

“But stubborn asshole is on-brand.”

“It is not! I am a lady.” She sniffed. “I keep my head down, and I make things easier and smoother for all. As Patricia Kent taught me to do.”

When she thought of her mom now, it was no longer the sharpest pain. In fact, it made her happy. Though there were things that she still wished she could say to her, and if ever the pain was sharp, it was because of that.

“You,” he said, “are a stubborn little cuss, who finds ways to get what she wants. Are you not out here on this road trip because you didn’t accept what Will told you?”

“Well,” she said, “sure. But…”

“Yeah. I thought so.”

“He is also off having sex with other women,” she pointed out.

Gross. She hadn’t really thought about that for a couple of days. She had put it behind her. And suddenly, a strange thought occurred to her. “Are you in touch with him?”

He shrugged. “As much as I ever am.”

“He’s texting you.”

“Yes. Occasionally.”

“About what I’m…doing?”

“No. Believe me. I have practice not talking to Will about you.”