Chapter 5 Sleeping Beside a Stranger #2
She apologizes for being late. She says traffic was bad, which is a ridiculous excuse in a town where nothing is more than fifteen minutes from anything else.
She's wearing a fitted top and her hair is down and she looks good.
She always looks good. She's tall and blonde and put together in a way that seems effortless and I used to appreciate that about her.
Now I just notice it.
Hailey gets a drink and settles into the group. She sits on the arm of the couch near Alana and immediately starts talking to Sierra about a new series they've both been watching on Netflix.
Then she turns to me and smiles.
"Lara, have you been watching that new mystery series? The one about the married couple?"
"No, I haven't gotten to it yet."
"Oh you have to. It's incredible. There's this husband who's been lying about everything and you can see the whole thing falling apart from the wife's perspective and it's so well done."
She's describing a show about a man who lies to his wife. She's recommending it to me. She's sitting two feet from the woman whose fiancé she's sleeping with and she's enthusiastically describing a fictional version of what she's doing to me in real life and she doesn't even register the irony.
Or maybe she does. Maybe somewhere behind her smile she knows exactly what she's saying and this is part of the performance.
The casual friend. The normal girl. The woman who could never sleep with her friend's fiancé because look at her, she's right here, drinking wine and recommending TV shows and behaving exactly the way an innocent person would.
I tell her I'll add it to my list.
Then she does something that almost breaks me.
She asks about the wedding.
"So have you guys picked a date yet? I feel like you've been engaged forever. I'm getting impatient."
The blood leaves my face. I can feel it go. For a second I think I might actually be sick right here on Sierra's couch.
Sierra, God bless her, jumps in before I have to form words.
"They're being smart about it," Sierra says. "House first, wedding after. That's what everyone should do."
"I know, I know," Hailey says. "I just love weddings. I already told Lara I want to help with the planning when the time comes."
She wants to help plan my wedding. She wants to look at dresses and pick flowers and sit in a church while I walk down the aisle toward the man who has been lying in her bed.
Something inside me goes very cold. Not angry cold. Not crying cold. A deeper cold. The kind that comes from understanding something so clearly that the understanding itself changes you.
Hailey didn't just sleep with Blake. That would be terrible.
She didn't just betray a friendship, which is its own kind of destruction.
She sat next to me afterward. Repeatedly.
She looked me in the face and smiled at me and asked about my wedding and complimented my hair and acted like she cared about me while knowing that she had spent the previous Tuesday in a motel room with my fiancé.
That isn't just betrayal. That's performance. That's an ongoing decision to look someone in the eye and pretend to love them while participating in the thing that will destroy them.
I watch Hailey for the rest of the evening.
I watch the way she laughs. The way she touches people's arms when she talks.
The way she interacts with Blake, which is carefully measured.
They don't stand too close. They don't make eye contact for too long.
They don't talk to each other any more than they talk to anyone else.
They've rehearsed this. They've perfected the choreography of pretending to be strangers in a room full of people who trust them both.
But once, near the end of the night, Hailey goes to the kitchen to refill her wine.
Blake is already in the kitchen getting another beer.
They're in there together for maybe thirty seconds.
When Hailey comes back to the living room she glances at her phone and smiles at whatever she sees on the screen.
Blake follows a moment later with a fresh beer and an expression that gives away nothing.
Nobody else notices.
I notice everything.
Nathan catches my eye during a quiet moment near the end of the evening.
He's been watching the room from his corner chair the way he always does and something about his expression is different tonight.
Not suspicion. Not curiosity. Something closer to concern.
He looks at me with a question in his eyes that he doesn't ask out loud.
I look away because I can't handle someone being perceptive right now.
Perceptive people see things and I am working very hard to make sure nobody sees what's happening behind my face.
On the drive home Blake is relaxed and talkative.
He's got the window cracked and his left hand on the wheel and he looks content.
He talks about the camping trip Ronnie keeps pushing.
He says he'd go if they pick a spot with good fishing.
He talks about a story Chase told about his neighbor's dog getting loose and ending up at a Taco Bell drive-through.
He talks about a joke Nathan made early in the evening that he didn't understand until five minutes later.
"Nathan's funny but half the time I don't know if he's joking until everyone else starts laughing," Blake says.
"That's what makes him funny," I say.
"I guess. I just never know where I stand with that guy."
He talks about everything and everyone except Hailey. Not a word. Not a mention. He's smart enough to know that bringing her up unprompted after a group night would be careless. So he leaves her name out of the conversation entirely and fills the space with everyone else.
At the apartment I go through the motions. Wash my face. Brush my teeth. Change into pajamas. Get under the covers. Wait.
Blake comes in a few minutes later. He strips down to his boxers and plugs in his phone and gets into bed. He reaches for me in the dark. His hand finds my waist and he pulls me toward him and settles against my back.
"Good night, Lar," he mumbles.
"Good night."
I lie there while he falls asleep behind me. His breathing deepens. His body relaxes. His arm goes heavy across my ribs.
I think about Hailey asking about the wedding.
I think about her smiling at her phone after thirty seconds alone with Blake in Sierra's kitchen.
I think about the thousands of nights I've spent in this bed with this man and I wonder how many of them were real.
Not all of them were lies. I know that. Somewhere inside the mess of what Blake has done there are real moments.
Moments where he loved me. Moments where he meant the things he said.
Years of genuine history that I can't erase just because the ending turned out to be rotten.
But those moments don't matter anymore. You can't build a life on real moments that are surrounded by lies. The good parts don't cancel out the betrayal. They just make the betrayal more painful because they prove he was capable of being the person I needed him to be. He just chose not to be.
I don't sleep for a long time. When I finally drift off I dream about empty rooms. Houses with no furniture and no people. Just walls and floors and windows looking out onto nothing.
When I wake up Blake is already gone. His side of the bed is cold. His phone is not on the nightstand.
He took it with him this time.
I sit up and look around the bedroom. His clothes on the floor. His deodorant on the dresser. A pair of work boots by the door. The ring on my finger.
I look at the ring for a long time. It's a small diamond on a simple gold band. He saved for it. Or at least he told me he saved for it. He gave it to me in the parking lot of the restaurant where we had our first date and I cried and said yes and believed that this ring meant forever.
I take the ring off and set it on the nightstand. I look at my bare finger. There's a faint pale line on my skin where the ring has been blocking the sun for the last year and a half. I put it back on before Blake comes home and sees it missing.
I get up. I get dressed. I go to work. I pretend for another day.
But I can feel the pretending running out.
The reserves of patience and self-control that have been keeping me upright are getting thinner every morning.
Something has to change soon. I either need to tell someone or I need to leave or I need to do both.
I can't keep sleeping beside a stranger and calling him my fiancé.
I can't keep watching Hailey smile at me and talk about weddings and act like we're friends.
I need Raina. I've been putting it off because telling my sister makes it real and real means action and action means everything changes. But everything has already changed. The only person pretending otherwise is me.
Tomorrow. I'll call Raina tomorrow.