Chapter 10 Ethan
Ethan
The house in Littleton is dark when I pull into the driveway. The carriage lights need new bulbs—one of many things I need to take care of before Rachel and Sophia move in this weekend.
Paul called late last night to let me know that Rachel signed the lease, but she needed to push the move-in date up to Saturday. This Saturday. As in, tomorrow.
It’s not ideal, but I have to make it work.
I slide my key into the lock and open the front door.
The living room is filled with stuff: boxes stacked high, a sofa set still wrapped in plastic pushed up against the wall.
I didn’t want to get ahead of myself. Sure, buying a house to rent out to my ex-wife is arguably getting way ahead of myself, but I reasoned that I could always rent it out to someone else if this fell through.
It’s a popular neighborhood, apparently with very high rental rates, and it’s not like I’m hurting for money if I didn’t find a tenant right away.
But now that the move-in date is set, I have to let myself believe that this is really happening. Which means pulling an all-nighter to get this place ready. I blow out a deep breath and decide to start by unboxing the cookware since it seems like an easy enough task.
It isn’t.
Every single piece is wrapped in layers of cardboard, plastic, and Styrofoam, leaving tiny white beads clinging to everything.
All of this needs to be washed and dried before it’s put away.
Cookware, plates, forks, knives, glasses, cooking utensils…
the list goes on and on. It’ll take me an hour just to do that.
Instead, I line it all up on the kitchen counter and decide to come back to it later.
Back in the living room, I survey the boxes for a more productive task.
The IKEA boxes catch my eye, and my thoughts drift to Margot’s date.
I don’t have a great feeling about Pony Boy, but I can’t tell her that.
She’s determined to move on. I get that, but part of me wishes I could spare her the inevitable letdowns.
Maybe I should have done more to warn her, even if she wouldn’t have listened.
To the rest of the world, it probably seems like my life is a stream of great dates and amazing sex.
But to be honest, most of it just blurs together.
It’s the same drinks, the same conversations, even the same sex.
I’ve learned to weed out the truly disastrous dates, but what’s left can be monotonous.
Don’t get me wrong, I still enjoy it, but it’s hardly fireworks every time.
More like a pan set on simmer. It’s steady, predictable, it gets the job done.
After everything that happened with Rachel, I don’t know when I’ll be ready for another committed relationship. Maybe never.
For the first time ever, I find that thought sort of depressing. I redirect my attention to the task at hand: assembling a dining room table and four chairs.
My phone chimes as I’m screwing the last leg onto the table. When I reach for it, there’s a text from Margot waiting. It contains one word: Home.
It’s barely eight o’clock. Her date didn’t even last an hour?
Without thinking, I tap the button to call her. She answers on the second ring.
“Bad date?” I ask.
Margot’s heavy sigh comes through the phone as static. “We just didn’t click.”
It’s the same conversation we had a couple weeks ago in my living room, but in reverse. I smile, not at her misfortune, but at the shared memory.
My amusement is short-lived though when I think of Margot sitting in her empty apartment on a Friday night, probably overanalyzing what went wrong.
“Did you eat already?” I ask.
Scoffing, she gives me a resounding, “No.”
Sounds like there’s a story there, and I’m dying to hear it. It’s not every day I get to hear a woman’s perspective on the absurdity of this whole online dating thing.
“So, you know how you don’t have any furniture?” I say.
“I have a bed… and a chair,” she objects.
“Right. Well, I currently have a lot of furniture, and it all needs to be assembled by tomorrow morning. I could use some help, if you want to get out of your apartment for a while.”
“Yeah, that sounds good, actually.”
“Okay, I’ll order a pizza and text you the address. You can regale me with the tale of Pony Boy when you get here.”
Before she can object to my choice of wording, I hang up, order a pizza, and get back to work on the table.
Half an hour later, Margot rings the doorbell. When I answer, she’s standing there in a pair of jeans and an oversized gray sweater, holding a six-pack of beer.
“I’ve never seen you drink beer before,” I say, stepping aside to let her in.
“It’s just some fancy cider. Alcohol hasn’t been kind to me lately, and I doubt it would be conducive to assembling furniture.”
Margot’s gaze swings from me to the room in front of her, and her jaw drops. “This is so much stuff, Ethan. How are you going to finish all of this by tomorrow morning?”
“By bribing my assistant with pizza and hoping she’s comfortable with a power drill?” I joke.
Calling her my assistant feels strange now. It’s too formal, too distant. Over the past few weeks, our friendship has transformed from something murky that only exists within the confines of the office to something that feels real and solid.
We sit on the dining room floor, eating pizza and assembling chairs, before I ease into asking about her date.
“So, tell me about Pony Boy,” I finally say.
Margot keeps her eyes on the chair, twisting a screw into place with a little more force than necessary. “He brought me a unicorn, one of those little plastic ones from the dollar store.”
“Okay…”
She’s obviously not happy about this. Was she expecting an actual pony?
“But then he took it back when he realized that I was wearing closed-toed shoes.”
I frown at her, but she’s too busy taking her anger out on the screw to notice. “What does that mean?”
Finally, Margot looks up at me. She sits back on her heels and sighs, giving the poor screwdriver a break.
“When we were messaging back and forth, he suggested that I wear sandals on our date. It was a little weird, but I figured it was just a joke or something.” She pauses, her cheeks heating with color.
“It wasn’t. Apparently, he has a foot fetish, which the entire movie theater lobby was made aware of when he lost his mind over my choice of shoes. It was pretty embarrassing.”
“I’m sorry,” I say softly. “That’s a terrible first date.”
“I’d hardly call standing in the lobby of a theater while a grown man waves a toy unicorn around in a fit of rage a date. I walked out and went home right after that.”
“Good girl.”
The words slip out of my mouth. Normally, I would never say them to a woman outside of the bedroom, and only if I sensed that she was into that sort of thing.
But judging by the way Margot’s spine straightens and her fingers fumble with the screwdriver, I would say she’s into it, whether she knew it before or not.
I wonder if her blue aliens have something to do with that.
Her eyes flick up to mine, pupils blown wide, then she quickly looks away. The blush in her cheeks grows a shade darker.
Whether we define ourselves as co-workers or friends, one thing is clear: I’m amassing too much knowledge of Margot’s sexual preferences. And because my dry spell has lingered on for another week with no end in sight, it’s getting to me.
I’m not normally like this with women. I know what to say.
I know how to be charming. It’s not disingenuous either.
On some level, I care about every woman that I sleep with.
I want them to enjoy it—not just the sex, but the date, the conversation, everything that leads up to it.
I try to be the best date that I can be, as long as the woman I’m with understands that one date is all I can ever be to them.
But Margot is different. First of all, we’re not dating… obviously. Second of all, there’s no bullshitting her. She knows me far too well.
“What about you?” Margot asks after a long stretch of silence. “Do you have any dates lined up for the weekend?”
I shake my head. “No, I figured I’d be pretty busy getting this place set up and helping them move in.”
Margot looks up at me, giving me a hesitant smile. “It’s really nice of you to do all this for your sister-in-law.”
There’s an unspoken question behind her words. It takes me a minute to decide how to answer it, or if I want to answer it at all. If I don’t, it might just lead to more questions.
“My brother, Silas… he’s had some problems,” I say.
Margot’s only response is a soft, sympathetic “oh.” Her lack of surprise tells me that she already knows something. Emma has probably mentioned Silas at some point. I just hope she didn’t say too much.
Part of me wants Margot to know everything. It would be nice to have someone to talk to about it besides Garrett, who isn’t exactly the most insightful human. But the other part of me hates the idea of her knowing about my messy past.
The situation is complicated, and quite frankly, a little embarrassing.
When everything happened, I left my old job and started working at True North.
It wasn’t necessarily because of what happened, but the timing was serendipitous, to say the least. For obvious reasons, I had never explained to my old co-workers that I married Rachel because she was pregnant with my brother’s baby and needed health insurance.
As far as they knew, our marriage was real.
So when she moved away with Sophia, there was no simple explanation.
Doing a disappearing act of my own was easier, so that’s exactly what I did.
When I started at True North, I never mentioned it. I tried to erase that part of my life and move on. The only person at the company who knew about my marriage was my brother, and Garrett isn’t exactly a chatterbox. He’d keep my secret without me having to ask.