Page 9 of The False Flat

He was used to my—Aurora’s—apartment in Minneapolis. In general, I had enough energy to pour into my appearance and job, which left nothing for the interior of my home or body. Since Aurora wasn’t in Nashville—thank goodness—my living space reflected me instead of her.

“I’m ecstatic.” The words fell flat.

He walked into the living room, past the closet under the stairs that held, like a shrine, a box of my brother’s old things. “You’ve been in Nashville three weeks.” Then he looked down at the rumpled blankets splayed out on the brownish carpet and back at me as if I owed him an explanation for having nothing cushy to rest his sculpted ass on. “And there’s nothing here.”

Three weeks, two days, and twelve hours.

“There’s a TV.” I pointed to the fifty-inch on the floor opposite the blankets.

I smiled, satisfaction warming me as I noticed the Dorito-dust stain on the front of his shirt. He wouldn’t like that when he realized.

“Your five minutes is up. Thanks for coming to insult my first home purchase. Let me show you to my favorite part of the house.” I moved to the front door, just off the living room. “You’ll notice the paint is peeling here, too, but the blinds are new; be sure to admire those on your way out.”

“Come on. Please don’t be like this.” He stood close enough for me to smell the clean yet rugged notes in his cologne, close enough to see real pain in his eyes.

That look extinguished a few flames of the fire I’d been stoking ever since I’d found him in my driveway. It reminded me of the night we’d met; that animal magnetism had drawn us together and made my body react whether I’d wanted it to or not.

“I’m sorry I didn’t tell you about Vicki, but I was afraid of losing you. I never should’ve married her.”

“But you did.” An uncomfortable coil tightened in my chest. I had to remember to be angry.

He ran his hand through his hair again, and I was momentarily taken aback by the turmoil brewing on his chiseled face.

He grabbed my hand, led me to the blankets, and pulled me down onto them, taking my hands in his.

I ripped my arms back. I might be foolish enough to give him a chance to say his piece, but there would be no physical contact.

“Fair,” he said, nodding and clasping his hands together in front of him. “And you’re right. I did marry her. But it was a mistake. And I know that’s not an excuse. Can I just . . . can I tell you how we got here?”

“I know how we got here. You pretended you weren’t married and started a relationship with me. Then you continued that relationship for six months! For six months you made me and your wife a statistic. You did that. No one forced you.”

He buried his face in his hands. “I’m so sorry.” His words were slightly muffled and edged with emotion. “I made a mistake, a horrible one. But I’m doing everything I can to fix it.”

“You can’t fix it.”

His head snapped up, his storm-coming-over-the-horizon eyes shiny in the dim light. I’d never seen him cry, not that he was crying now, but his regret felt real, not the attorney determined to get his way in a courtroom, but a screwed-up human who was suffering because of his own asinine choices. I knew that feeling, and so I had to close my own eyes and shove away the sympathy that was ridiculously rising on his behalf. Because this was different.

“You know how I am,” he said. “I’m competitive, and if someone says I can’t have something, I consider it my personal duty to prove them wrong. It’s stupid, but that’s why I married Vicki. We grew up together. She said our families’ lives were too intertwined, and we’d ruin things by dating. And of course, I saw that as a challenge. We were attracted to each other, and we had fun together, but I was blinded by the conquest and didn’t see that we had nothing in common until we had rings on our fingers.”

He paused and took several deep breaths, his jaw shifting, like admitting this about himself and his life was hard.

I said nothing, torn between feeling sorry for him and feeling delighted that he was suffering, because he deserved all the pain, didn’t he?

He swallowed hard, his Adam’s apple bobbing, and then turned back toward me. “When I met you, I saw what I was missing with Vicki. You and I are on the same page. We’re both career driven, and we have the same sense of humor, and I like that you’re unique, and the chemistry . . . that’s undeniable.”

His gaze was too intense; I had to look away.

“And I know it was wrong,” he continued, “but I felt so good when I was with you, so right, that I compartmentalized. I didn’t want to admit to everyone that I’d made a mistake, and so I made the biggest mistake of all.”

My head whipped back to him, a burning anger rising in my chest. “So what was your plan? I don’t understand why you let it go on for so long, how you could be so duplicitous. That takes a special kind of person.”

His answer came more quickly than I would’ve expected. “If I’d told you I was married, what would’ve happened the night we met? If halfway through our conversation on investing, when I was having more fun talking to you about the stock market than I’d had in months with my wife, what would you have done if you’d found out I was married?”

“I would’ve left,” I whispered, picking at a loose thread at the corner of the blanket we were on.

He nodded, like I’d just answered my own question. “It wasn’t right, but letting you walk away didn’t feel right either. And then it spiraled, and I didn’t know what to do. Every time I thought about coming clean, I’d picture you bolting. Because the more I got to know you, the more I realized that’s exactly what you’d do.”

“It is what I’d do. You wanna know why? Because that’s what a decent person would do. And I have a lot of issues, but I am not a cheater. And you made me one. I watched my dad cheat on my mom when I was a teenager, and it didn’t matter what his reasons were to me. It was not okay.”