Page 41 of The Best Worst Thing

Sunday Night Baseball

Just tell me exactly what I’m supposed to do,” Logan said, staring at a giant block of feta with a dented, decade-old paring knife in his hand.

“Cube it, you moron.”

“Isn’t it already a cube, though?”

Nicole flicked a cherry tomato at him. Logan, laughing, bumped her hip, then proceeded to slice the feta into not-quite-cubes and dump them into some giant bowl she’d found in the back of his oven.

From the open window above his kitchen sink, summer evening slipped through the tattered screen, swirling with the cheers, boos, and called strikes of Sunday Night Baseball.

Nicole was halfway through a fine chop of mint, parsley, and oregano when Logan stepped behind her, swooped his arms around her stomach, and rested his chin on her shoulder.

“I like watching you cook,” he said.

“Why? Are you secretly harboring domestic fantasies about me?”

“Mm.” He slid his mouth down the back of her neck. “Probably.”

She chuckled, then muttered something unimportant as his hands began working their way beneath the waist of her shorts, fiddling with the hem of her underwear.

When her breath caught, he pushed her against the counter, traced the curve of her shoulder with his tongue, and pressed himself between her legs as she blindly dropped a handful of herbs into the bowl.

“We’re not going to make it until September,” she said between shallow little inhales. “We’re not even going to make it to the fourth inning.”

He spun her around so her waist was in his hands and her fingers were clutched onto the edge of the countertop behind her. Her lips parted and her pulse raced.

“I didn’t mean to turn you on,” he said. “It’s just, you taught me how to use a vegetable peeler, and I was so … moved. It’s like my real life started today, like these first forty years—”

Nicole shut him up with a kiss. He seemed to enjoy that quite a bit.

“Oh!” She pulled back. “I almost forgot! I got you the dumbest thing ever! It made me think of you!”

“Did it now?” he said as Nicole tugged him toward the front door, where an oversize canvas tote bag lay beside her kicked-off sandals.

She pulled out a neatly wrapped, blue-and-green polka-dotted box topped with a silver bow.

Logan ripped it open like a toddler, hastily and scrappily and without strategy.

“An ant farm! Nic!”

Nicole’s eyes crinkled as Logan pulled her into him.

“It comes with a voucher for larva and everything,” she said, pressing a few fingers onto his chest as he turned the box over.

“But I figured you wouldn’t want to wait, so I went to the pet store and got you some ants that are ready to go.

They’re kind of in my purse.” Nicole darted over to her bag, handed him a tube of critters, then settled back into his arms. “You can order more, if you want. Antports, too, so you can connect with another habitat later. There’s a whole website with all these accessories and expansion kits. I’m a bit of an expert now.”

“You’re, like, comically thorough,” he said. “It’s amazing. No wonder Brie wanted Quentin to give you her job. I always …”

Logan didn’t finish his sentence because Nicole—arms suddenly limp by her sides—had taken a step back.

“Hey,” he said. “Where’d you go? What’s wrong?”

“Nothing. It’s nothing.”

“You know I was just teasing, right?” He put down the box and insects, then reached for her hand. He settled instead for a few fingers around her lifeless wrist. “I’m sorry. I didn’t know you were sensitive about that.”

“I’m not,” she said. “It’s not like it’s news to me that I blew up my career for nothing. I’ve had lots of time to let that sink in. I don’t really care anymore.”

“Nicole,” he said. “We’re not going to do that again, okay?”

“Do what?”

“Put up walls.”

He led her into the kitchen, grabbed a bottle of wine from the fridge, then nodded toward his patio. Once they were outside, he poured Nicole a drink, did the same for himself, and looked over at her. She was staring out into the warm blue evening like her eyes were made of glass.

“Turning down that job was the dumbest thing I’ve ever done,” she said. “Even dumber than marrying Gabe. You remember, you were there.”

“Listen.” He rocked his chair back an inch, then stopped it with his foot. “You did what you thought was best at the time. Nobody’s judging you for that.”

“Seriously? You’re seriously telling me you didn’t think what I did was dumb?”

“I didn’t think it was my place to give you career advice. You had plenty of other people to bounce decisions off.”

“Well, I kind of wish you had,” she said, biting down on her tongue, trying not to think about those last few weeks at Porter Sloane.

About that second miscarriage. About that Friday night fight with Gabe.

About the Saturday her mother-in-law stopped by for a heart-to-heart.

About the Sunday she decided to resign. It had all happened so fast.

“I meant what I told you,” Logan said, “that night we were in New York.”

Nicole felt that strange little tug again. Except this time, it was stronger. Hot and sharp and noisy. She ignored it, then took a swig of her drink and smirked. “That every time you check into a fancy hotel for work, you kind of wish it was a DoubleTree, because of the cookies?”

“Yes,” he said, squeezing her knee. “But the other thing too. That there’s nothing stupid about going after exactly what you want.”

Nicole took a deep breath and let her mind, just for a moment, drift back to that night.

Thick wool coats and shitty hot chocolate and the whole city, covered in snow.

Of all the memories she’d stowed away, it was this one she’d placed on the very top shelf of her mind.

But it didn’t really make a difference, did it?

Where she’d stored it. How much dust she’d let it collect.

Because even now, two and a half years later, she could play back the whole thing perfectly.

Some memories were like that. They stayed asleep until something roused them.

They didn’t haunt you until you were ready to look back.

“That job,” she said, “meant so much to me. That promotion, all of it. I never loved what I did, at least not at the beginning. It was never my dream—contracts, logistics, whatever. But I was getting really good at it. And people noticed, people knew it. It felt really nice, to be needed. To feel important. To have something that was …”

“Yours?” he said.

Nicole nodded. “I see you, Mari, Gabe, my sister … You guys all have these careers. Your lives keep getting bigger. Opportunity after opportunity. That job was the last thing in my life that belonged to me. And I didn’t even fight for it.

The minute things got hard, I just gave up. I just let it go.

“Even my podcast turned out to be bullshit. All it did was feed that obsession with getting pregnant. I’d work on it all day.

Nine, ten hours. More, sometimes, if Gabe was out late.

I’d hang on every comment, every new listener.

It was supposed to be all mine, something that made my life mean something.

But then, last month, I just stopped. Just like last time, I gave up.

I can’t even face it. I’ve barely stepped foot in my office.

I’ve probably lost half my audience. I have one sponsor—they’re gone, I’m sure. ”

“You’re so hard on yourself. Why are you punishing yourself like this?”

“Because,” she said, fingering the rim of her wineglass.

They were quite nice—stemless, oversize.

She made a mental note to ask which of his exes had bought them for him some other time when the mood was lighter.

“I had this chance to prove I was more than some poor little rich girl, more than some finance guy’s barren wife, and I got it all wrong.

I got it wrong a hundred different times. ”

“Come on, Nicole. Nobody who actually cares about you thinks that. It is not a moral failing to want a child or trust your partner. People make those choices all the time, and it doesn’t define them.

You are so much more than the guy you married.

You are so much more than a girl who quit her job or couldn’t get pregnant. ”

She closed her eyes. “I want to believe you. I know that you’re probably right.

But there’s this voice inside my head that keeps telling me, if I was really more than that, wouldn’t I have done something with my life?

Wouldn’t I not be in the position I’m in now, where divorce attorneys have to tell me point-blank not to fuck up my settlement by getting a job?

Wouldn’t I have something to show for myself besides an abandoned pet project? ”

Logan put his drink down and looked right at her. “Can I just listen to this thing? Please?”

“It’s really a lot of Gabe …”

“If you don’t care,” he said, “I don’t care.”

Nicole nodded, then took a long last sip of her wine and let Logan lead her upstairs into his extra bedroom.

He opened his laptop, sat himself down in a rolling chair at a thick walnut desk littered with version after version of the same pitch deck, then pulled her onto his lap.

He pushed his lips into the back of her shoulder, then draped his arm over hers, kissing her gently as she brought up her podcast’s page.

“Which one are you most proud of?” he said.

Nicole ran her finger across the trackpad until the cursor landed on an episode she’d recorded after Valerie’s second transfer failed. “This one, I think.”

Logan grabbed a pair of headphones from his drawer, then picked Nicole up and set her down on the sofa. He opened his closet, grabbed a box of books, then dropped it beside her.

“You read,” he said. “I’ll listen. Then we’ll regroup.”

Nicole reached for a copy of City of Thieves and headed downstairs.

Zero chance she could sit in that office and watch Logan kick his feet up while she talked about Gabe’s sperm count for the whole world to hear.

Forty-two minutes, three trips to Logan’s junk food drawer, and five chapters later, he emerged with a smile on his face.

“You’re so fucking funny,” he said, padding down the stairs. “I don’t know how you make bad news so entertaining. It’s very cool.”

“Thanks,” she said, tucked into the corner of the same sofa he’d almost railed her on fifteen days ago. “I may have accidentally consumed all your candy.”

He laughed from his bottom step, then plopped down next to her and pulled her into his arms, telling her there was no way they were eating that fancy salad, that they deserved real food.

And then, for the next hour, they just lay there, drinking, discussing Nicole’s podcast. What she loved about it and what she wished she’d done differently. What felt right and what felt wrong.

“I like that it’s funny,” she said. “I really do. But looking back, it was all to control the narrative. Every time something bad happened, I’d turn the whole thing into some drawn-out joke before anyone could beat me to the punch. I’m not sure that’s something I want to do anymore.”

“Then start over,” he said. “Do it the way you want to do it. Figure out what that looks like for you and go for it.”

Nicole sat up as Logan traced her arms, her shoulders, her spine.

She’d been so sure she’d never see this place again.

Now here she was, letting him in—but in this other, kind of extraordinary way.

One that only came from taking your time.

From keeping your hands to yourself. From telling the goddamn truth.

“On Thursday,” she said, “when I was in Virginia for Valerie’s ultrasound, we had this conversation that blew me away.

We’re really different, but we have this connection.

Always have. And her perspective on motherhood is incredible.

She’s been through a lot. She lost her mom superyoung.

She’s raising two kids while her husband is deployed.

Plus the whole having-a-baby-for-someone-else thing. ”

Logan nodded. He was still touching her. Just sitting there, listening. The night, dark. The ball game, hushed. His living room, aglow.

“I was thinking, what if she and I did it together? What if we started using all that humor and all the bad shit that’s happened to us to have real conversations?

To talk to other women? To start telling the truth?

I mean, I don’t know if she’d want to, if she’d even have the time or energy, but I think it could really work.

That we could really scratch the surface of something. ”

Logan lit up. “Do it,” he said, just as the doorbell buzzed. “Ask her.”

He rose to his feet, grabbed their dinner off his stoop, then slid back onto the couch.

The truth was, Nicole had come here tonight to make a dumb salad, give Logan some absurd gift, and see if maybe she could convince him to screw her a little sooner.

Instead, she was fully clothed and inches from him, eating garlic naan, watching the Mariners blank the Rangers, and letting him begin to crack her heart right open.