Chapter Twelve
Mallory slips back into her apartment as quietly as possible. The sun is just starting to rise and she doesn’t want to wake Alec.
After plugging her phone into a charger, she sits on the couch, leaning back against the cushions and closing her eyes.
The early morning, bone-tired feeling reminds her of the first trip she took with Alec.
It was their first Valentine’s Day, and they drove to the Poconos.
It was that all-consuming stage of a relationship—more like obsession than any rational emotion.
She later learned that the name for it is limerence.
And limerence made it impossible to fall asleep.
But then, as lovers ultimately do, they fell into a more comfortable, sustainable rhythm, both physically and emotionally.
And now this.
Last night, she tossed and turned for hours on Bette’s couch, wide awake under the photograph of the redhead.
Then when she finally dozed off, she dreamt that she colored her hair red but it came out bright purple.
Then the firm sent her home for the day and told her not to come back until she looked like a lawyer.
But when she arrived home she’d turned into Bette, and Alec told her he could never be in love with a lesbian.
She sits up at the sound of Alec’s alarm in their bedroom.
Predictably, a minute letter, he emerges with tousled bedhead and heads to the coffee machine.
He’s wearing one of his old Penn T-shirts, and she experiences the déjà vu of him puttering around her dorm room.
She wishes that were where they were right now, last night just a dream as surely as the others. But it’s not. It’s very, very real.
“Alec?” she says, startling him.
“Jesus, Mal. Have you been out here all night?”
“No. I just got back.”
He crosses the room and pulls her into a hug. It feels so good to be held against him, to breathe his familiar Alec smell, to feel the brush of his lips against her temple.
“I’m sorry about last night,” he says, sitting next to her. “I was way too harsh. I was thinking about it after you left and I thought about texting you but I decided to let us both have the night to cool down. Where’d you stay? Julie’s?”
In that moment, she really, really wishes the answer to that question was yes.
“I feel terrible about last night.” It’s the most honest thing she can say to him short of the truth.
“It was my fault,” he says. “I know you’re not a quitter. If you’re this unhappy at the firm, let’s talk about it and figure out a way to fix it. I love you. I want you to be as happy in your career as I am in mine.”
“Thank you,” she says. “I know it might seem out of the blue, but the truth is that until I worked full time, I didn’t fully understand what it really meant to be a lawyer.
I love the law, I respect the principles behind it …
I liked learning it. But that doesn’t necessarily mean I should spend my life practicing it.
So a part of me is thinking, if I know this now, why spend another year—two years, five years—going down the wrong path? ”
He considers this.
“Okay. But what else would you want to do?”
“I don’t know.”
“Then I think you should give it some more time. At least until you figure out something else. Until then, try to give this your best shot. And definitely don’t make a decision until after you’ve retaken the bar. I know you’re going to ace it.”
He hugs her again, kissing her forehead, her nose, her lips. He moves his hand under her shirt, and when his fingers brush her nipples she recoils in guilt.
“Alec,” she says.
“It’s fine, baby. We’ll figure it out,” he breathes, kissing her again.
She pulls back.
“Wait. I need to tell you something.”
Now he’s the one to pull away.
“What is it?”
Mallory takes a deep breath.
“Look, I felt really hurt last night. I admitted something to you that was hard for me to even admit to myself. You think I want to feel this way about my career? But instead of listening, instead of helping me think it through, you shamed me for it.”
“I know. I’m apologizing.”
He looks so earnest it just makes things that much more difficult.
“Please, let me finish. So I left here and I tried calling Julie and she didn’t pick up and Allison wasn’t around. I even went down to Allison’s building. I didn’t want to come back here so I thought of calling Bette and, luckily, she was home.”
“You called … Bette Noire?”
“Yeah. I just figured, she’d be an objective ear. Or maybe I just didn’t want to be alone. I don’t know. It was impulsive.”
Alec has an odd look on his face.
“So that’s where you spent the night? With Bette?”
She can tell that he’s waiting for her to tell him nothing happened. But she can’t.
“It’s hard for me to explain, Alec. I was upset—not just about the fight last night, but about the way things have been between us since I got to New York.”
“What do you mean? How have things been between us?”
She hesitates.
“I feel like I’m not enough for you. Part of the reason why I let myself get pulled onstage the night of my birthday is because I knew it would get your attention. And that maybe, after seeing me like that, I’d be enough for you again.”
“Mallory, you’ve always been enough for me. Since the day we met.”
“That’s obviously not true. Asking to bring another woman into it is the definition of me not being enough.” She hugs herself. Somehow, she’s enraged at him and ashamed of herself at the same time and it’s awful.
“Those conversations were never a reflection of my feelings for you or about our relationship. I just have this … fantasy. One I’d like to experience with you. If it doesn’t happen, it’s not a big deal.”
“It feels like a big deal.”
“You’re overthinking it,” he says.
“That’s such a gaslight, Alec.”
He runs his hand through his hair. “What do you want me to say, Mal? I’m sorry for asking, okay? Let’s just pretend I never mentioned it. Can we please reset and put this whole issue behind us?”
It’s a little late for that.
“Alec, I have to tell you something. It’s nothing, really. But … Bette and I sort of hooked up.”
Alec slowly shakes his head.
“What does that mean, exactly?”
The low, distressed pitch of his voice tells her that she should have listened to Bette and kept it a secret. Honesty, in this case, was a mistake.
Alec looks at her like she’s a stranger.
“It’s wasn’t … it’s not what you think,” she says.
“Okay. Because for a minute there it sounded like you fucked her.”
Mallory thinks of being blindfolded, of Bette unbuttoning her blouse …
“No. She just kissed me.”
“I can’t believe you. You got upset because I dared to admit to you that I fantasize about bringing another woman into bed with us—us being the operative word here, Mallory—and then you run off and let another woman fuck you the minute we have an argument?”
“We didn’t … she didn’t fuck me. It wasn’t sex. She just touched me. It was nothing.”
“Did you come?”
“What?”
“Did you have an orgasm?”
“I mean, yeah, but …”
Alec turns his back to her and returns to the bedroom, slamming the door.
Mallory puts her head in her hands. This is so stupid.
Okay, she never should have done it. But Bette isn’t a threat to her relationship with Alec.
And it’s definitely not the same as if she’d slept with another man.
Her fascination with Bette—and yes, her attraction—is completely different from the love she feels for Alec.
What happened with Bette was nothing. Plus, she wasn’t the one asking to experiment with other people; she’d always been focused on him alone.
And he’d judged her for it. Hasn’t he been the one urging her to be adventurous—let’s go to the Slit.
Be open-minded—let me try to get Bette in bed with us.
Be more interesting—let me fuck you in a public bathroom.
But the second she acts on the adventurousness he asked her to embrace, he freaks.
She follows him into the bedroom.
“You’re a hypocrite,” she says. “You ask me to do things that are way out of my comfort zone. You take me to see women take off their clothes on my birthday, an experience you have no idea if I’ll even like and clearly that wasn’t a big concern of yours; you tell me to dance for you as if I need to step it up a notch to be worthy of your interest. You kiss another woman in front of me, ask me to be open to having sex with her, fuck me in a bathroom because god forbid we just come back here and do something pedestrian like have sex in our home.
And then I have the opportunity to push my own boundaries a little and you can’t handle it! ”
He shakes his head. “You don’t get it. All those things were about us, Mallory. What you did last night was about you.”
She opens her mouth but realizes she has nothing to say to that.
“I really didn’t think you’d be this upset.”
“You … didn’t think I’d be upset?” Now he’s not angry, he’s hurt. His eyes express a pain she never imagined she’d inflict on another person, never mind the man she loves.
She feels a ripple of fear that this won’t be fixable.
“No, I really didn’t.”
“Then maybe we don’t have what I thought we did.”
He opens the closet and pulls out the suitcase tucked behind a rack of hanging clothes.
“What are you doing?” she says, even though it’s obvious.
“I think we need some time apart.”
Mallory hugs herself. “You want to break up over this?”
He whirls around. “What do you define as ‘this’? The fact that you slept with someone else? Or the fact that you thought I wouldn’t care?”
Her anger and resentment come flooding back.
“You started this. Whatever happened last night … you’re just looking for an excuse to break up.”
“I can’t believe you really think that,” he says calmly. “But if you do, it explains why you handed me the perfect reason to do it.”
In that moment, her entire New York life feels like a mistake. She never should have moved in with him.
“You know what? You stay. I’ll go. After all, it’s your apartment.”
Maybe it’s time Mallory figures out a place of her own.
Her place in the world.