Chapter 3
CHAPTER THREE
“That was fast. I figured Casey would be a better ride than that,” Maya says after picking up on the first ring. “Maybe because he’s so tall. I’m always wrongly attributing sexual prowess to tall people. It’s my fatal flaw.”
A lump fills my throat. I hold the phone tightly to my ear and fight the urge to cry. “He had a woman over. An antitrust lawyer with a sexy truckdriver voice. They’re dating.”
The audible smile in Maya’s voice disappears. “Oh, honey. Hold tight. I’m on my way.”
The tears win. They run silently down my cheeks as I sit on the floor in the middle of my loft.
The cold concrete shocks my thighs, zinging my body with chills, so I pull my knees up and hug them.
I don’t even have a cozy area rug to cry on.
Turning this generic space into a home never seemed important.
I have all the warm, homey vibes I need just a few blocks away at Casey’s.
Had, anyway.
I dry my tears on my knees, leaving smudges of mascara on my pants. This is all wrong. Casey can’t be dating! Not when I was so close to finally telling him how I feel.
At first, my crush was a private thing happening inside my body, like an embarrassing medical issue.
It was a secret, and one I planned to keep.
Casey was Ally’s husband, and that was that.
This solid fact kept my feelings from boiling over, like a steady wooden spoon over the pot …
but knowing I’d never act on it eventually had the opposite effect.
It freed me to melt into the fantasy, the attraction slipping around my body like bathwater.
Surely it will pass, I’d tell myself. Surely this is just my grief playing out in an unconventional way.
But in the past year, I’ve started to see little signs that Casey might have feelings for me too.
There was that one walk after dinner last October, when the air was just starting to turn crisp and the leaves were coming alive with color.
Suddenly the skies opened and rain pelted us from all angles.
Casey stopped to help untangle the hood of my rain jacket, but when he lifted it gently overhead, it felt more like a wedding veil.
His eyes dragged down to my lips and his thumbs rubbed raindrops into my jawline, and suddenly I felt very certain that he might kiss me.
Or at least a multiverse existed where he did kiss me.
My heart raced, and my palms got all sweaty and, in my panic, I blurted out that the girls’ bikes were out in the rain and might rust, effectively snapping us out of the moment.
Nothing happened for months. The holidays arrived, and we buzzed around the girls, filling his home with Christmas magic. I lingered under mistletoe on more than one occasion, to no avail. But then, on a dreary February night, it happened again.
We fell asleep on his sofa during a boring documentary.
The fire burned out, and we woke up shivering with our arms wrapped around one another.
His lips were so close to mine, his heart pounding so hard, I could feel it in my own chest. But then I spoiled everything by making a joke about how he was a barnacle when he slept, just like Ally was back in our sleepover days.
The moment I said her name, the romantic moment disappeared like a puff of smoke.
He gave me one of his Disney prince half-smiles and said it was getting late.
God, what is wrong with me? Anytime we get close, my fight-or-flight mode activates, and I throw him off the scent. I can’t help it. It’s like I’m subconsciously sabotaging myself because I feel guilty for wanting something I shouldn’t.
Or maybe it’s the ghost of Ally, punishing me from beyond the grave for lusting after her perfect husband. She was always prone to mischief. The fact that she doesn’t haunt me for fun by drawing penises on my steamy bathroom mirror has me seriously reevaluating my belief in an afterlife.
Ally.
I sink into one of my favorite memories of her—the day I introduced her to Casey. We were day-drinking at an Irish pub, catching up after her semester abroad.
“Honestly, for people who stare at primo naked forms all day, you’d think art history majors would be less boring.
” She watched me glance at the door again, an amused look in her sparkling brown eyes.
“Would you stop worrying?” she said, tying her wavy mane up in a lopsided bun like she was about to wash her face.
It only made her prettier. “You’re acting like I’m meeting your new boyfriend. ”
“No. You’re meeting your new boyfriend.”
Ally rolled her eyes, laughing. “Can’t we just have one visit where you don’t micromanage my life?”
“Why, when I’m so good at it? I knew art history was going to be too stodgy for you, but you didn’t listen, and now you have a bunch of unusable credits. France was a complete waste of time.”
“Nothing’s a waste of time if you enjoyed yourself.”
“You said the students were boring.”
“The professor wasn’t,” she said, opening a menu and hiding behind it.
“Oh my god, you are literally impossible,” I said, yanking down the menu to see her dissolving into giggles. Something dissolved in me, too, the way it always did with Ally. My shell of seriousness melted like chocolate, making everything sweeter. Making me more like everyone else, in a good way.
Casey walked in with a small pyramid of books balanced in his hands. He smiled at me, but when his eyes clicked over to Ally, he dropped his books. Literally dropped them! Like the sight of her red-lipped, dark-haired casual beauty snipped all control he had over his forearms.
“So, tell me. Have you guys slept together?” Ally asked once we were all tucked into the wooden booth, our beers refilled.
Casey nearly choked on his lager. My whole body tensed.
“Ignore her,” I said, steering my voice to neutral. “Ally was shown too much love as a child and, as a result, has lost all sense of decorum.”
“Sorry, but look at him,” Ally said, gesturing to Casey sitting next to her. “No offense, but you’re, like, eighties-teen-movie-villain gorgeous. Someone John Hughes would cast as the rich bully.”
“Um, thank you?” Casey smiled, rubbing the back of his neck.
“It’s a compliment,” she confirmed. “And Lauren is super hot, too, even though she hasn’t realized it yet.
Ugly duckling syndrome. Throw in a long road trip and things tend to happen.
” Ally sipped her beer and glanced back and forth between us expectantly.
Then she shut her eyes tight. “Oh god, am I being rude? I can never tell. Lauren is pathologically private, so I have this habit of making up the good parts about her life myself. Sometimes I get carried away.”
“She’s like that with me too,” Casey said with a nod, turning to face her. “We hang out all the time, but sometimes it feels like she still thinks I’m a serial killer.”
“Don’t take it personally,” Ally said, waving the air in front of her.
“She thinks everyone is a serial killer. Her dad was a public defender and let her proofread criminal case documents at a formative age. She has an unhealthy mistrust of just about everybody. Do you know we’ve been friends since the third grade, and I still have no idea when or where she lost her virginity? ”
They both looked at me across the table, waiting.
“If you guys are done psychoanalyzing me,” I said, forcing a smile, “the answer is no. Casey and I have never slept together.”
Casey watched me, his face unreadable. Ally took down her bun and scooted closer to him in the booth, as if my words had unlocked her own attraction, allowing it to flourish, just as I had expected they would.
It was the only lie I ever told her.
Why is this memory finding me now?
It’s my subconscious, kicking me when I’m down. Like when it cues up embarrassing moments from middle school when I can’t sleep, or whispers paranoia-laden phrases that only make things worse.
He’s probably kissing Helena’s plump lips this very second, it tells me now. Slipping his hand up that high slit in her green silk dress.
A close-up image of Casey’s mouth pressing gently against Helena’s washes through my brain, making my room tilt. A wave of nausea follows and my stomach muscles clench. I wish they’d do me a favor and throw up this awful feeling, relieve my system of it like poison.
God, why did this have to happen? I curl into a fetal position, pressing my cheek against cool concrete.
Breathe in … two, three, four.
How are they so far along? I mean, introducing her to his girls already? He only started mentioning her name a month ago.
Breathe out … two, three, four.
They must have been seeing each other quietly at work.
I roll onto my back and examine his interaction with other women over the last several weeks. Nothing seemed different. He hadn’t so much as shared prolonged eye contact with the gaggle of divorcees and their overly perfumed cleavage at Zoe’s softball games.
And now he’s, what, in a relationship? Is Helena his new girlfriend?
I cover my eyes and press down hard until maroon paisleys fill my vision.
This can’t be happening. Ally should be here, raising her daughters.
Loving her husband. I should have a different life.
If she hadn’t gotten sick, I wouldn’t have moved north of the lake and spent so much alone time with Casey.
If she hadn’t died, I wouldn’t have fallen for him.
“Just a bit of bleeding,” she said while sipping an IPA at our regular Ballard brewery, newborn Emma asleep at her breast while Zoe drew with chalk in the courtyard.
“My doctor says it’s probably just my emorroidi.
” She was always pronouncing it “emma-ROY-di” because she thought the word “hemorrhoid” sounded lovely in Italian.
“And they’re sure it’s nothing serious?” I asked, familiar pricks of adrenaline needling my good time.
“You worry too much, Lauren,” she said, flipping her hair over one shoulder. “When you worry, you suffer twice. How many times do I have to tell you? The world is going to spin—just breathe and spin along with it.”
But the world didn’t spin. It tilted sickeningly off its axis, letting our Ally slip off the side, the rest of us bound by gravity that stopped working for her.
We both lost her, Casey and me. But over the years, the rot of our shared grief turned to soil. Feelings have been growing there all this time, and they were just about to breach the surface.
Now, Helena is here, deadheading them.
What would I tell a client in this situation? I close my eyes, trying to separate myself from my emotions long enough to view this problem more objectively.
The first thing I would do is remind them that setbacks are temporary. Then I’d encourage them to use the three step WOOP model for goal attainment by Gollwitzer & Oettingen (a personal favorite).
Step 1: Wish for something you’d like to achieve.
That’s easy. I wish to achieve a romantic relationship with Casey.
Step 2: Imagine a good Outcome.
Oh, I’ve imagined it a million times. Me, confessing my love. Casey, brushing a strand of hair from my cheek. Our lips finally pressing together after a lifetime apart. Things get very naked after that, so I pause there for the purpose of this exercise.
Step 3: Examine the Obstacles that might get in your way.
Fucking Helena, matching her dress to her eyes, snaking her way into our lives.
Step 4: Come up with a Plan for overcoming those obstacles.
I sit up and knuckle the tears from my eyes, bringing my room back into focus. All I need is a plan and a little dose of optimism. To reframe this setback as a positive.
Maybe Casey is merely testing the waters. Helena could be a low-risk way to ascertain if he’s ready to move on romantically after losing Ally. Maybe she’s just the first canary into the coal mine.
Maybe I can still “make it so.”
I fire up my laptop and start a fresh spreadsheet. The tidy little boxes standing at attention do more to calm my flip-flopping pulse than any breathing exercise. I get right to work filling them in.
“God, this place is depressing,” Maya says, crashing through my front door.
“Would it kill you to buy a plant?” She leans over my shoulder, placing glasses on her nose for reading.
“Ah, it seems I missed your wallowing period, and we’ve moved straight on to maniacal plotting. Sorry, there was traffic.”
“I’m getting him back, Maya.”
“Hate to say it, babes, but you never really had him.”
“I’m getting the chance of him back, then. And I’ll be damned,” I say, my fingers flying across the keyboard, “if some petite attorney with Weimaraner nails and vocal fry is going to swoop in and take him away from me without a fight.”
I angle the laptop to show Maya.
“What is this exactly?” she asks.
“It’s my tiered action plan to win Casey back.”
“ ‘Step one,’ ” Maya reads. “ ‘Hook up with someone new.’ ”
“Like you said. Get under a new man to clear my head, and to get the scent of desperation off me,” I say. “It’s been way too long, and I think it’s actually messing with my pheromones.”
“Step two, ‘unleash the tantrums’?”
“To make Helena realize she isn’t ready to date a man with children. I’m thinking we go full Parent Trap on her. Have her take the girls somewhere demanding of good behavior—a fancy museum?—where they get bored and tired and meltdowns occur and hopefully some priceless art breaks.”
“Lauren,” Maya says, shaking her head. “The fact that he’s dating someone new doesn’t change my advice for you. Just tell the man you love him.”
“I can’t. Now it’s way too risky.” I think of how the girls jump into my arms when I come over after work, Casey smiling and pouring me a glass of wine.
The four of us settling in for a movie or a board game.
The secure routine of it all and knowing that I’m always welcome.
Because when you’re part of a family, being included is a given.
“My life with them means everything,” I continue. “I won’t jeopardize it.”
“But, honey, if you tell him how you feel, you can finally have a real romance. Either with Casey or with someone else.”
“Someone else? Who would that even be?”
“I dunno. Maybe someone you haven’t met yet.”
“No,” I say, crossing my arms at my waist. “This will work. I just need to get Helena out of the picture so Casey can finally see what’s been in front of him all along.”
“A neurotic weirdo who schedules one-night stands on a spreadsheet?”
“The next love of his life. You still have those UFC tickets? Tonight, we check off step one.”