9. The Watered-Down Version #2
She almost laughed, but caught it.
"I deserve whatever you throw at me right now, Madeline, and I'm not saying that to soothe you.
" I made myself hold her eyes through the whole thing.
"I really messed this up. I hurt you. This whole thing is a mess that I created.
From the bottom of my heart, I'm sorry. I mean that with everything in me. "
I took a breath before the next part, because it mattered that she heard it clean.
"And none of this is Aurelia's fault. She didn't know I was seeing anybody, much less that there was somebody standing in the way of what she came here to fix.
This is all me. I handled some of it wrong, and some of it worse than wrong, but I promise you, Madeline, there's somebody out there who's gonna do right by you.
Somebody who's gonna see everything I saw in you, and be ready to receive all of it when it's offered to him. Whether Aurelia showed up on my porch or not, I was never going to be that man for you. Not because there's something wrong with you. It’s just that…”
Aurelia's face suddenly popped into my head.
Some fundraiser or another my mother was hosting, one of them nights I only half wanted to be at, and Aurelia was standing next to me in a dress the color of trouble, laughing so hard at something I said about Mayor Beauregard's wife and her fresh face full of overdone botox that she had to grab my arm to stay standing.
I don't joke like that with just anybody.
Don't let many people see me laugh for real either. But I did with her, every time.
Thought of us in my living room doing some stupid ass TikTok trend I made her promise not to post, just keep it in drafts for her own entertainment, even though she kept yelling at me saying I wasn't getting the words right.
Thought about the night we made love. How sweet forbidden fruit tasted going down.
How she felt dripping down my thigh, biting into my ear while I pumped in and out of her, in no rush, finally inside the one woman I wanted more than I wanted my next breath.
Only for her to tell me after that it was a mistake.
And even knowing that, even reading the text over and over hoping it would say something else, she was still all I wanted.
Thought about that first day we met, when I cooked for her and we started getting to know one another. Had no idea then what awaited seven years down the road.
"There's already somebody who's the one for me," I finished.
She looked at me a long moment. Up and down, slow, the way she'd look at a plate before deciding whether to send it back.
"In the house with me though?" She shook her head, stabbed at her plate without eating. "How cruel could you be? You couldn't even take me home before you —"
"I didn't — " I shut my mouth, because it didn't matter.
"So what is it you'd like me to believe?
That you walk around your best friend with your privates out as a matter of habit?
That the two of you have some sick ritual where you lotion your face and your chest in each others release for sport?
" She set her fork down. "I spent six years at Le Rosey and four more at Brown.
I am not a stupid woman, Dillon. What I'd like to understand is what happens to you at this particular table that makes you think I am. "
Technically, I hadn't been inside Aurelia.
But what we'd done still required a whole lot of cleaning and disinfectant and a shower.
Sitting there trying to argue semantics with a woman who'd caught me with another woman wrapped around me in my own kitchen felt like the kind of defense that would only make things worse.
I chose to keep my mouth shut and give her floor.
"Despite all of this, now that I've slept on it, I don't think you're a bad man, Dillion.
" All the heat had drained out of her voice, replaced with something softer.
"I think you're just a man who already spent his whole heart before I ever got here.
I was never going to get a piece nobody had claimed. There wasn't one left to give."
I didn't have anything to put against that. It was the truest sentence anybody had said about me all week, mine included, and I sat there and let it land the way you let a verdict land.
"I thought you had some kind of block. Something broken that kept a woman from getting all the way in. I told myself that on the ferry too, anything that wasn't just the plain truth, because I could not understand how a man like you isn't off the market."
She slowly shook her head.
"But you're not broken, Dillion. You belong to Aurelia..
Every bit of what you've got left, it's already got her name on it.
Has for years, probably." She looked at me, no anger left in it, just something tired and clear as glass.
"There's nothing wrong with a man who loves like that.
There's just nothing left over for whoever's standing behind her in line. Aurelia's who you love completely."
I nodded my head, in a silent agreement.
"I hope she's worth what it's costing you to finally say it. Because from where I'm standing, it's costing you plenty."
And that's when I looked at Madeline Dubois and understood something she'd gotten wrong.
First thing all morning. Because whatever wreckage I'd caused, whatever it had cost everybody standing in this kitchen, it hadn't cost me a thing.
It had done the opposite. It put the facade down.
Stopped me from taking a step I'd spent all week talking myself into.
Set something loose in my chest that had been locked since February.
I didn't have to pretend anymore. Didn't have to act like I wasn't in love with Aurelia, like I didn't miss her every day I woke up without hearing her voice. All of it was finally out in the light where I couldn't manage it anymore.
The only real price of this morning was Madeline seeing me plain.
No article, no tattoos that read as dangerous, no chef whites read as command.
Just a man, flawed the way the Duckworth men have always been flawed, superhuman in a kitchen and ordinary everywhere else, same as my father, same as his.
That cost something, being seen like that. I won't pretend it didn't sting some.
But as fine a woman as Madeline was, and it would've been a privilege, a real one, to have her, losing her cost me less than one single morning of missing Aurelia ever had.
Less than one text that said how you doing when I needed the whole voice.
Less than one fundraiser, eleven minutes, three subjects, not one of them us.
She wasn't wrong about the spending. She was wrong about the price.
"Take me home now, Chef." Her voice had already started closing the door on it, gentle, final. "Breakfast was perfect. You weren’t."
I turned into the driveway of Madeline's family summer home with more feelings in my chest than I had names for.
Part of me felt like the lowest kind of man God ever let walk upright.
Another part of me was already back at the house, five miles south, waiting to see what Aurelia had decided to do with the daylight.
She'd been out cold when I slipped away that morning, worn down to nothing.
I'd left a note on the counter by the coffee maker. Eat something. I'll see you soon.
I brought the car to a stop at the bottom of the drive, top still down, salt air heavy the way it gets the morning after a bad storm, like the whole coast was still catching its breath. I got out and came around to her side.
Madeline put her hand out for me to help her up and stepped out with those big sunglasses on, hiding whatever her eyes had left to say. Our shoes crunched over the shell path as I walked her to the front steps of a beach house that made my family's place look like a shoebox.
"I guess this is goodbye," she said, once we hit the wrap around porch.
"I'm sorry." Again.
"No more apologizing. You're a grown, intelligent and successful man. You knew what you were doing."
I smiled, because it was the only honest thing left for my face to do. "One of the things I like about you. You're always honest with me."
"Wish I could say the same about you." She turned those sunglasses toward me, and even behind the dark lens I could feel her looking clean through what was left of me.
I pinched the bridge of my nose, took the shot, and made myself stand there and take the next one too, because knowing I'd hurt her that bad meant I owed her this. Owed her the embarrassment I wasn’t sure I’d ever get over.
"But something tells me, when you get back to that house, it's gonna be worth it to you." She smiled, though it looked full of sadness.
I looked past her, out to where the water was still working itself calm, gray easing into blue the further out it went.
"She might not choose me." It came out before I could stop it.
And then I heard myself. Heard what I'd just done, standing on this woman's porch after everything I'd put her through, making even this moment somehow about my own uncertainty.