8. Richard
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Richard
I don’t sleep worth a damn.
It’s past midnight and I’m flat on my back in a rented cabin, staring at the ceiling, doing the thing I’ve done for the better part of a decade. Replaying her. Every word, every glance, the half-inch of space on that deck that didn’t close before a pack of drunks blew it apart.
She almost kissed me. She tipped up into it, no hesitation, and I felt her breath go warm against my mouth.
Then the door banged and the whole thing shattered like glass.
I’ve been running it back frame by frame ever since, the half-inch that didn’t close, how she didn’t pull away until the world made her, like maybe she’d been leaning in just as hard as I was.
I should be relieved. She’s still married, technically.
She’s in the worst stretch of her life, gutted by her husband and sold out by her own mother, and the last thing a woman in that spot needs is me crowding her, wanting things, making it about me.
I know all that. I’ve lectured myself on all that.
It doesn’t make me want her any less. It just makes me feel like a bastard for wanting her at all.
So I lie here wanting her and hating myself a little for it, which is a hell of a way to spend a night. Somewhere around two I give up on sleep entirely.
The hell of it is, I keep replaying the wrong moments.
Not the deck. The bus, how she said “all rainbows and unicorns” with that flat little dare in it, like she was trying to provoke me into asking.
The lake, when she wound up and threw her wedding ring out over the water, fierce and shaking and gorgeous.
The look on her face when I asked if Carmen ever went after her, how fast she shut down before she answered.
I have spent the entire night thinking about her mouth. It is a problem.
The truth is I should have said something ten years ago.
Should have been braver. Should have done literally anything other than drive her home in the rain, call her sunshine, and then watch her walk away because I’d convinced myself a girl like that would never look twice at a guy like me.
I had it backward the whole time. She thought she was invisible.
I thought I was out of my depth. We stood three feet apart for an entire year, both of us too scared to close it.
Then she graduated a year behind me and married somebody else, and I spent the years since telling myself it didn’t matter.
It mattered. It’s the only thing that ever did.
Every woman since has been a comparison she didn’t know she was winning, every dinner a quiet exercise in noticing all the ways the woman across the table wasn’t her.
I’m twenty-seven years old and I have arranged my entire adult life around being too busy to think about a girl from high school, and it has not worked for one single day.
Morning comes gray and cold. I’m up before the sun, too wired to lie still, and I pull on a jacket and walk down to the lake.
Our rock, the flat one where she threw her ring and where she told me about her mother, sits empty in the half-light.
I sit on it anyway and watch the water go from black to pewter to a thin morning blue, and I let myself think about her without the usual guardrails, because there’s nobody around to see me be pathetic about it.
I think about the rainy afternoon junior year, the one I’ve never told a soul about, her asleep against the window with the curls coming loose, me taking the long way home just to keep from waking her.
I think about how I drove past her street twice, how I memorized the gray light on her face like there’d be a test. I never told her any of it.
It felt too big, too revealing of exactly how far gone I already was at seventeen.
Ten years later I’m sitting on a rock at dawn doing the same thing I did then, which is wanting her quietly and waiting for the nerve I never seem to find.
By eight the place is waking up. I see Tara cut across toward the lodge on a coffee mission.
I see Carmen’s crew trooping down to the dock with towels, their laughter skating across the water, and I think, not for the first time, about everything Emily told me yesterday, how that girl spent years making other people small.
I think about Carmen sinking her claws into Henry, and Henry being dumb enough to let her, and Emily standing in the wreckage of it with more grace than either of them will ever have.
I should go find her, check she made it through the night after that phone call.
I don’t, because I don’t want to be one more man crowding her, demanding her time, treating her like something I’m owed.
So I stay on the rock and I wait, and I tell myself if she wants company she knows where I am.
Then I hear her behind me.
“Hey.”
I turn. She’s at the head of the path, hair still damp, in a sweater that makes her eyes look impossibly blue, and the sight of her does what it always does, knocks something loose in my chest.
“Hey yourself.”
She comes and sits beside me. Shoulders touching. Neither of us moves away, and we don’t talk for a while, and it’s the easiest silence I’ve had in years.
“Sleep okay?” I ask.
“Not really.” A pause. “You?”
“Same.”
We’re both quiet, both pretending the reason we didn’t sleep isn’t sitting right next to us. I’m about three seconds from saying something I can’t take back when the morning detonates.
“WHERE IS SHE?”
The voice carries clear across the water from the direction of the lodge, raw and ragged, and Emily goes white beside me.
“Oh God.” Her hand closes hard on my arm. “That’s Henry. Why is he... shit, my mom. She must have called him the second I hung up.”
We’re on our feet and heading up the path before I’ve decided to move, and by the time we reach the clearing in front of the lodge there’s already a crowd spilling out the doors, drawn by the noise, phones coming out.
And there in the middle of it is a man I’ve never met but would know anywhere, brown hair wild, eyes red, clothes like he drove through the whole night without stopping.
Henry Penrose. He spots Emily and his whole face crumples.
And then he does something I did not see coming.
He drops to his knees. On the gravel, in front of everybody, he goes straight down onto his knees and throws his hands out toward her.
“Emily. Emily, please.” His voice cracks, loud and theatrical, pitched to carry. “I made one mistake. One. I know I hurt you, baby, I know, but I can’t lose you, I won’t survive losing you, please don’t do this to us...”
It’s grotesque. Every head in that clearing swivels between him and Emily, the whispers already rising, somebody’s phone definitely filming, and I watch her stand there absolutely rigid while her cheating husband puts on a show of heartbreak for an audience.
My hands curl into fists. I want to haul him up off the ground by his collar.
I don’t, because this is hers, and she needs to be the one standing.
And even through the red haze of wanting to put him through a wall, something about it rings fake.
The tears are too big. The voice is pitched to carry.
He keeps glancing at the crowd to check who’s watching.
He’s not falling apart over Emily. He’s putting on a show, and he wants an audience for it.
I don’t know exactly what he’s after, but I know it isn’t her.
“Get up,” she says. Not loud, but it cuts clean across the whole clearing, sharp with disgust. “You look ridiculous.”
“Not until you hear me out. I love you. I love you, and I’m begging you...”
“I don’t care.” Her voice doesn’t shake, not once. “I don’t care about any of it. I want a divorce, you cheating son of a bitch.”
Something in Henry’s face changes. The pleading drains out of it all at once, the wet eyes going hard and mean. He lurches up off his knees, and just like that the show’s over, the real man underneath it stepping out.
“You ungrateful...” He’s loud now, vicious.
“You think you can do this? You think you can walk away from me? You’ve got nothing, Emily.
No job, no money, no skills, nothing. You’d be living in a gutter if it wasn’t for me.
You’ll be crawling back inside a month, begging me to take you, and I swear to God I’ll think about whether you’re worth the trouble. ..”
“That’s enough,” I say.
He barely looks at me. “Stay out of this.”
He takes a step toward her, his hand coming up, jabbing at the air between them, his whole body tight with rage, and Emily flinches back half a step. That half-step is all it takes.
I move. I get an arm around her and turn so I’m angled between them, close enough that he’d have to go through me, but I don’t shove her behind me, because she wouldn’t thank me for that.
Henry pulls up short. “Who the hell are you?”
“Who I am doesn’t matter,” I tell him, calm and quiet, which I can see pisses him off more than yelling would. “You’re making a scene in front of her whole graduating class. Just go home, man.”
“This is between me and my wife...”
And then Emily does something that makes me want to laugh out loud and kiss her at the same time. She steps into my side, deliberate, and loops her arm clean through mine, and tips her chin up at Henry like a queen.
“Here’s the thing, Henry.” Her voice rings out now, for the whole clearing. “We’re done. We are so done. And honestly? Standing here, I’m realizing I’ve got plenty of other options.”
I don’t miss a beat. I take her hand where it’s tucked against my arm, lace my fingers through hers, and let every single person watching see me do it. “She definitely does.”
Henry’s face goes a shade of purple I’ve only seen on men about to have a medical event. He looks at her, at me, at our hands, at the crowd drinking down every second of it.
“You’ll regret this,” he spits at her. “When he’s done with you, don’t come running to me. I won’t take you back so easy next time.”
“There isn’t going to be a next time,” Emily says. “That’s the whole point.”
He stands there one more second, fists working, and I let myself hope he swings, because I would genuinely enjoy it. He doesn’t. Whatever’s left of his sense wins out. He turns and storms off toward the lot. A minute later an engine guns, gravel sprays, and he’s gone.
The clearing lets out a collective breath. The whispers swell, the phones lower, people start drifting back inside with a story they’ll be telling for years.
Emily lets go of my arm and blows out a long, shaky breath. “Thanks, Reed.”
“Anytime, sunshine.”
She huffs something that’s almost a laugh, and then it’s gone, because when I look down at her the steel’s gone out of her all at once and she’s shaking, fine little tremors running through her whole body.
“Hey.” I turn into her and get both arms around her properly now. She comes against my chest, grabs two fistfuls of my shirt, and holds on. “I’ve got you. You did it. You were incredible.”
“I don’t feel incredible.” Her voice is muffled against me. “I feel like I’m going to be sick.”
“That’s allowed too.” I hold on, my chin against the top of her head.
She’s warm and soft against me, and she smells like the lake, like her shampoo.
I hate that I’m noticing it now, here, with her still shaking and a clearing full of people drifting off.
Worst possible moment, and I want her anyway.
And here’s the ugly part of me talking: she’s right here, pressed against my chest, holding onto me like I’m the only good thing in a bad morning.
She’s softened, open in a way she never lets herself be.
Part of me wants to tip her chin up and kiss her stupid right now while her guard is down, because who knows if I get another shot at this.
Eight years I got nothing. Two more days and she’s gone back to the city and I’m just a guy she used to know.
A move now might be the only one I ever get.
Then I feel her shaking again, and the want curdles into something I like better in myself.
Not like this. Not while she’s wrecked from her ex screaming at her in a parking lot, not as something she’d second-guess the second her head cleared.
If I’m getting her, I’m getting her clearheaded, choosing it.
So I just hold on, and I keep my mouth shut, and I let it be enough to be the thing she’s holding onto.
“He’s not coming back,” I tell her quietly. “Guys like that only do that with people watching. You didn’t give him anything to work with. He’ll be too embarrassed to show his face here again, trust me.”
“You sound very sure.”
“I’m good at reading people. Comes in handy.” I feel her huff a small laugh against my chest, and it loosens something in me that’s been knotted tight since I heard him bellow her name across the water. “There. That’s better.”
“I can’t believe he cried.” Her voice is still muffled against my shirt. “On his knees. In front of everyone.”
“I know.”
“He’s never cried in two years. Not once. And he picks the parking lot of my high school reunion to start.”
“Because it wasn’t real,” I say. “None of it. He didn’t drive out here because he’s heartbroken, Em. He drove out here because somebody told him you were leaving and he couldn’t stand it. That’s not love. That’s a guy who hates losing.”
She’s quiet a second. “No,” she says finally. “I guess it’s not.”
The crowd thins around us until it’s just the two of us standing in the gravel in the cold morning light, her heart slamming against mine, her fists slowly unclenching from my shirt.
I don’t let go. Neither does she. And I think, with a certainty that scares me a little: I am never letting this woman get away from me again. Whatever it takes. However long.
She pulls back just far enough to look up at me, eyes red-rimmed but dry, jaw set in that stubborn line I’d know anywhere.
“Thank you,” she says. “For not letting me do that alone.”
“You weren’t alone.” I tuck a curl behind her ear before I can stop myself, same as I did last night standing at her cabin door. “And you’re not going to be, not if I have anything to say about it.”
She holds my eyes a beat too long, and the air between us goes tight and warm and a little dangerous, which is the last thing either of us needs in a parking lot full of our old classmates.
Then she steps back, scrubs both hands over her face, and pulls herself together, and it just about kills me to watch her do it.
“I need to sit down somewhere that isn’t here,” she says.
“I know a rock.”
That earns me a real laugh, watery and surprised, and I’ll take it. I’ll take any piece of her she’s willing to hand over.