Chapter 3 Then
I’m perched on Alex’s back stoop, palms pressed against the cool concrete, eyes shut, as I replay the most surreal evening of my life. It feels like a chapter of a book that caught me so off guard, I need a reread to be sure I know what actually happened.
Thea Meyer stood at the foot of her old home’s porch, spiraling as Alex Bruscato took her astronomical lie and blew it up to planetary proportions.
As he did, Thea decided it was a good thing she was looking at Alex rather than their exes, because her eyes widening to saucers was hopefully much less noticeable in profile than it would have been head-on.
A stunned silence followed, before Jen said, “Oh… I see.” Ethan said nothing.
Somehow, Thea managed not to go even more bug-eyed when Alex smoothly fibbed that she and Mia were heading back to his place for dinner, so they had to get going.
And then, mercifully, Thea and Alex made their exit—Argos by the leash held tight in Thea’s hand, Mia in Alex’s arms, her small yellow backpack thrown over his shoulder.
I flop onto the stoop, the concrete cool against my sweaty back and arms, as the little narrator in my head continues,
Fifteen minutes later, after a car ride filled with Mia’s one-sided chatter with Argos making up for Thea’s and Alex’s incredibly awkward silence, Thea found herself walking through a fenced-in backyard leading to a quaint redbrick and cream-trim Craftsman bungalow.
Mia skipped ahead, clutching Argos’s leash as he dashed across the grass.
Thea turned to Alex and said, “I really don’t have to stay for dinner.”
And Alex said to her, “No, you don’t. But you’re welcome to.”
Inside Alex’s tidy kitchen, Thea sat, watching Alex make Mia dinner—the fanciest grilled cheese she’d ever seen, a fruit and veggie smiley face of hummus and carrot-coin eyes, a grape nose, a mouth of green and black olives, and raspberry hair.
Mia’s meal finished, a homemade frozen-yogurt popsicle for dessert, chased by a few yawns, Mia told Thea good night as Alex carried her up the stairs.
Then, five minutes later, Thea found herself coming up the stairs, too, at the request of a certain overtired four-year-old who wanted her to sing the “I Am Here” StoryTime song so she could fall asleep.
Halfway through her third encore, Thea watched Mia’s eyelids droop, then peacefully drift shut.
It had been a truly bad day, but singing a sweet little girl to sleep hadn’t been a bad way to end it.
I open my eyes slowly, returning to reality, the crickets singing, the intermittent whir of cars passing on the street, Argos’s happy snuffle as he pokes around the yard, finally worn out from an hour of zoomies.
“It all really happened,” I mutter to the sky.
“It did indeed,” Alex says.
I glance his way as he lowers beside me, a baby monitor in one hand, a cigarette in the other.
“I was doing a reread,” I tell him.
Understandably, he seems confused.
Sitting up, I brush off the tiny concrete pebbles stuck to my palms, and explain, “I had to double-check that everything I thought happened actually did.”
“Ah,” he says, placing the cigarette in his mouth and lighting it. “Trying to wake up from the nightmare?”
“I just… needed to process, I guess.”
He peers my way, exhaling out of the far side of his mouth, so the smoke doesn’t come toward me. “Fair enough.” After a beat of silence, he says, “Sure you’re not hungry?”
I shake my head. “Thanks, though.”
He nods and taps the ash of his cigarette into the dirt of an otherwise empty planter beside him.
I have a lot of questions rolling around in my head. What did we get ourselves into? What do we do about it? But what comes out first is, “Why’d you call me Ted?”
He shrugs, eyes on his cigarette. “You look like a Ted.”
“No one’s ever called me that.”
“I have,” he says.
I smile faintly. “Besides you.”
“Theodora is your full name, I’m guessing?”
I nod.
“Theodora,” he says. “Thea. Ted. Just seemed right. Like… a good reduction.”
“A what?”
He peers my way again. “Like a sauce.” At my blank look, he adds, “In cooking?”
“I don’t cook,” I explain.
“At all?” he asks.
I shake my head.
He looks concerned. “And you eat… how?”
“Poorly.”
Alex sighs. “Right.”
“So the reduction?” I remind him.
“In a reduction,” he explains, “the flavors are… richer. It’s everything you had to begin with, just intensified. Theodora to Ted… felt like that.”
“Ted.” I tip my head. “I think I like it.”
“I think it was a bad cooking metaphor,” he mutters, peering out at the lawn, where Argos is sniffing around. “Thanks,” he says, “for singing to Mia.”
“Happy to.” I don’t tell him that singing his kid to sleep was the best part of this awful day, that singing my own kid to sleep has been something I’ve wanted to be the best part of my day for years. But I almost want to.
He glances my way and like a mind reader asks, “You have any kids?”
My stomach knots sharply. “No.” I watch Argos roll onto his back, pawing at a firefly. “I wanted them. Ethan didn’t. ‘Not yet,’ he said.”
Alex taps the cigarette against the planter’s edge again. “You’d be a good mom.”
My heart lodges right up in my throat. I swallow thickly. “What makes you say that?”
“Mia,” he says, “is an excellent judge of character. She doesn’t ask just anyone to sing her to sleep. And she sure as shit doesn’t go to sleep for just anyone, either.”
I smile faintly. “Well, I’m flattered.”
For a moment, we sit in silence, watching Argos being weird, as he froggy crawls across the grass, a not-so-stealthily prowl toward who knows what.
“Hey,” Alex says, “remember how I told you I didn’t care about our exes banging each other?”
I groan. “I was trying not to think about that.”
He takes a drag on his cigarette, then blows out. “I do care.”
“Of course you do. You were married to her. For…”
“Eight years,” Alex says.
“Thirteen for me,” I tell him.
His eyebrows lift. “That’s a long time.”
I nod. Then, for some reason, maybe because he’s the first person I’ve met whom I can freely talk to about this, I ask, “How’d yours end?”
He peers my way. “Slowly. And painfully. Yours?”
“Quickly. And painfully.”
“So… it’s new,” he says. “Things being bad between you. I mean, bad enough to end the marriage.”
I stare up at the sky. “I think it had been bad for a while… I was just in denial about that for a long time.”
“Still,” he says gently, “makes sense, you being upset that Jen was there, when it hasn’t been that long.”
“I’m not jealous that Ethan already wants someone other than me. I’m just… mad at him. For a lot of things. And I’m tired of being mad. But I can’t seem to stop being mad, either.” I peer over at Alex. “What about you? How do feel about all of this?”
Alex’s gaze drops to the ground. “Also not jealous. Also mad. Jen being with someone already is going to make things harder for Mia.”
My heart twinges. “That makes sense.”
“Maybe I am jealous,” he adds, his voice quieter. “Of both of them. That they’re just… fine, apparently. Or, at least, fine enough to be with someone like that again.”
A sigh gusts out of me. “Yeah. I’m jealous of that, too.”
“I can’t imagine wanting that right now,” he says, “being in a relationship, no matter how casual.”
“Same. I’d be way too in my head.” I also haven’t ever found casual relationships to be something I enjoy, but admitting that has always left me feeling oddly vulnerable, and also just…
odd. Anyone I’ve talked to about this seems to enjoy the thrill and no-strings, unstructured nature of casual relationships.
But to me, the desire for a relationship has always been about longing for comfort, connection, that unique sense and sensuality of belonging just to each other. “I couldn’t do it.”
Alex grunts in agreement. “I can barely keep my head above water, as it is. The last thing I need is the added weight of trying not to fuck up another relationship.”
I stare at him for a moment as he rakes a hand through his disheveled hair and sighs heavily. He looks so forlorn.
I nudge him with my knee. “It’s not like you couldn’t find someone else right now, if you wanted, though. You’ve got strong DILF energy.”
He slants a look my way, something like surprise flashing in his eyes. A faint smile tugs at the corner of his mouth that he tries to hide behind a draw on his cigarette. “Shut up.”
“You’re like Prince Eric,” I tell him. “With a solid tan. And dark-blue eyes… And a stronger nose.”
“Broke it,” he explains through an exhaled plume of smoke. “Twice. And you’re full of shit about the Prince Eric thing.”
“Am not.”
He shakes his head as he drags on his cigarette again, another faint smile peeking out. “My sisters had the biggest crush on him when we were kids.”
“So did I. And on Aladdin. The Beast-slash-prince. Robin Hood—”
“Robin Hood, the fox?”
“An anthropomorphized fox.”
“Which of those was your first crush?” he asks.
I make a prim face. I’m not telling him it was Prince Eric. “A bit personal for conversation with a stranger, isn’t it?”
That gets me a sidelong glance. “I thought we were old friends.”
“Not to mention first loves,” I say pointedly.
Alex grimaces as he flicks ash off the end of his cigarette, staring at its red-orange ember glowing in the darkness. “Guess we should talk about that at some point.” He clears his throat. “Obviously, I got a little carried away.”
“I got it started,” I concede.
“Yeah, but I dialed it up to an eleven. I do that a lot, dial myself up to an eleven.” He sucks hard on the cigarette and exhales a stream of smoke up into the night sky. “It’s my fatal flaw.”
“Mine is dialing myself down to a one.”
He glances my way. I expect him to say something, like, Why would you do that? the way others have before, like there’s a simple answer—like, if I just tried harder, I could change how small I’ve learned to make myself.
But he doesn’t. He simply nods, flicking the cigarette’s ash in the planter.
“Well, Ted,” he says, “we’ve backed ourselves into a pretty tight corner.”