Chapter Thirty-Four
Kate
"Oh God. Oh God. Ohmygod ohmygod," I whispered.
My heart was beating like hummingbird wings in my chest. My stomach felt like someone had suddenly tightened it in a vise, making the contents jiggle around ominously, threatening to travel back up her constricted throat.
"Hey, alright," Fee tried, voice soothing. "It's okay."
No, it wasn't.
My hands rose, covering my eyes, my thumbs rubbing my temples, trying to calm the panic that was working its way through my system.
This was not okay.
This would never be okay.
This was the worst-case scenario for me.
There was no possible way this could have gone any worse than it had.
Not only did Rush find out, but he found out without me coming clean about it, in a public setting, and confronted me about it.
God, he was so angry too.
I had never seen him like that, not in all the years we worked in the same building.
I’d seen all the others in various moods.
Life didn’t stop ragging on you just because you walked into the office doors.
I’d seen women crying in the break rooms, scolding their children in mom whispers over the phone, angrily texting paragraphs to their spouses.
I’d seen Rush in plenty of moods as well. Tired, frustrated, happy, a little delirious from lack of sleep, making him goofy. I’d seen him a little distracted, distant, maybe even a bit cold while he dealt with something I knew nothing about.
But angry?
No.
It had been unexpected and shocking to see a face that I so typically found happy and smiling with a tight jaw, with flaming eyes.
It had been even more shocking to hear a voice I was so accustomed to hearing say sexy, delicious things or fun, light things, saying harsh words in sharp tones.
I couldn’t blame him.
If someone did to me what I had done to him, I would feel so foolish. Betrayed, even. He had a right to feel that way.
And me?
I was freaking... humiliated.
There was no other word to describe it.
It was worse than any of the bullying I'd experienced in school, any situation when anxiety made me act strange, run from a store gasping for air, or even that one time I had been foolish enough to think that a man was into me, so I found the courage—after weeks of hemming and hawing it—to lean up to kiss him, only to get pushed away then laughed at by his friends.
My life had no shortage of embarrassing moments.
But that one with Rush, that took the cake.
I wanted the earth to open up a portal to hell and suck me down.
I would have preferred an eternity of hot pokers being stabbed through my vital organs than have to live in a world where Rush Rivers knew I had been secretly calling his phone sex line for months because I was lonely.
As if that wasn't bad enough, he now knew I was so hard-up for male attention that I had touched myself while he said filthy things in my ear.
"Oh, God," I whimpered, folding forward, wishing I could shrink down into myself, and disappear entirely.
I was so caught up in my internal freakout that I didn’t even care that I was in a public place, that others were likely watching my breakdown.
And they weren’t even strangers who I would never see again.
These were women I’d known for years who would likely be concerned about me, ask me about what happened when they caught me alone.
But I couldn’t seem to care.
It felt like everything was crashing around me.
Nothing else mattered.
"It was bound to happen," Fee reasoned, her hand pressing down on my shoulder.
I guess a part of me had deluded the other part that if I put enough distance between myself and the calls, as well as the man himself, then there was a chance I could go to my grave without Rush ever finding out about the whole situation.
"He was just surprised," Fiona insisted.
"Rush doesn't really get angry like that.
It was just the heat of the moment. The surprise.
And he's likely putting together the parts about how I trapped you two in a cabin together, so some of that anger might actually be directed at me because I made him feel stupid,” she told me.
A whimpering sound escaped me, not reassured at all.
“Okay. Alright. Go on. Head out," Fee said when I couldn't do anything but stand there, feeling queasy and breathless.
"I'm not done,” I told her, waving a hand at the chaos on my desk. I was still trying to catch up after being out for a few days.
"You're done," she told me. "It's fine. Everything will work itself out. But go home. Take a bath. Have a glass of wine. Try to relax."
"Thanks," I said, not waiting for any further conversation, just shoving my phone and book into my purse, grabbing my keys, and rushing out.
I pulled up to my apartment building without having any memory of driving home.
Back in my apartment, I paced.
My normal gut instinct was to call my mother. She was my rock. If there was anyone who could talk me down off a ledge, it was her.
But I couldn't tell her.
About the calls.
About the secrecy.
About the confrontation.
This was the sort of situation you needed to have friends for.
But I found myself wholly lacking any of those.
So until I could get in to see my therapist again, I had to work this out on my own.
I considered all of my options.
Like approaching him like the rational adult I was, explaining, apologizing for crossing the line. I could ask him to forgive me, so we could both move on with our lives.
But, let's face it, there was about a snowball's chance in hell of that one happening.
Even if I could find the nerve to approach his desk, I couldn't imagine I could force the words out of my mouth.
What if he wanted to know specifics? Had questions that I hadn't prepared to answer in the script I would write in my head?
Worse yet, what if he teased me about it? About being so pathetic that I couldn't get a normal man? That I had to pay for it?
I didn't want to think of Rush as cruel, but you never knew what someone was capable of when they were angry.
So that was out.
Option two was to go about work life as though nothing had happened. It was much riskier. It could all blow up. And in a very public way. But if it didn’t, it allowed me to keep my head down, save my pride.
Lastly, I could avoid him entirely. Start going to work earlier, working through lunch, so that I could get out of the office before Rush showed up.
Sure, it was the most cowardly route. But no one had ever accused me of being brave, of looking chaos in the face and saying, “Bring it on.”
I was almost universally known for taking the safest route, for sidestepping anything in my path.
I typically tried not to let my personal life or my anxiety issues mess with work.
But Fee would understand.
Especially because she had a hand in the whole situation getting worse.
If not for the whole cabin thing, I might not have ever been found out. Rush and I likely wouldn’t have talked so much. He wouldn’t have gotten to know my voice so well. He wouldn’t have put the pieces together.
But she’d trapped us. We’d talked. He’d noticed something in my voice when I was on the phone with my ex. And he’d figured it all out.
Being the coward I knew myself to be, I, of course, decided on the third solution pretty quickly.
It would just be better all around.
He would cool off while I got to avoid confrontation.
It was the definition of a win-win.
But even coming to that decision didn't help the anxiety that raged through my system, making it hard to stand still, but when I got up to pace, made me feel light-headed and short of breath.
It was just the adrenaline, I reminded myself. Once my body burned it off, I would feel better. I just had to stop feeding it, thinking about it.
But how could I think about anything else?
My phone rang on the counter, making me sigh, walking over to find Blake’s name on my screen.
"I know you're not at work now," he said as soon as I answered, knowing he wouldn't stop until he said what he wanted to say.
How did I never notice when we were together how irritating his voice was? A little high pitched and nasal, it sounded whiny to my ears.
"No, I'm not. But you got me in trouble at work today," I told him, finding that, since the divorce, anger came more easily to me with regard to him. Maybe it was all the therapy, the analyzing of my unsuccessful relationship, that made me see that Blake was, well, an asshole.
"I wouldn't have had to call if you had answered my text,” he shot back, anger already rearing its ugly head. He’d always had a hair trigger. I’d always been gun shy. But time had given me armor against his words that used to riddle me with holes, leaving me leaking my self-esteem.
"You could have waited for me to answer the text after work."
"When did you start being such a bitch?” he snapped as I flipped on my tea kettle.
To that, I sighed. "I guess when I realized that your anger has nothing to do with me," I told him, shrugging even though he couldn't see me.
"I'm angry because you don't have the decency to respond to me. I just needed five minutes."
"I don't owe you five minutes, Blake,” I told him. I added silently That's the beauty of divorce. "But since we're both here now, what did you want?”
"I was thinking, since I let you have the car," he started, making me take a deep breath, releasing it slowly, feeling the anger bubble up.
"It was my car to start with," I reminded him. I’d worked my ass off to buy that car, to keep making the payments. I’d been completely in charge of taking it into the shop when we were married even though Blake knew that the mechanic gave me extra anxiety since I always felt like I was being suckered into fixes that weren’t necessary, but wasn’t strong enough or in-the-know enough to object to it.