Chapter Fourteen #2
“I’m sorry.” Margo searched for the right words to say. “When I saw the two of you together at your place, you seemed happy. I thought—”
He shook his head. “It’s fine. After you left my place, she started asking about you, about our marriage—” He gave an embarrassed laugh, running his hand through his hair.
“Things were casual between us. We had fun and we liked each other, but I was clear from the beginning that I wasn’t looking for anything serious—wasn’t capable of anything serious—and she wasn’t, either.
It would have burned out eventually because it was never going to be some great love.
Neither one of us was looking for that. I wasn’t going to string her along while I worked things out, and I don’t think she was willing to sign up for it, either.
Not that I blame her. Seeing you again just made me realize I wasn’t ready to be in a relationship, not even a casual one. ”
“I know what you mean,” Margo confessed. “I’ve dated—but—I don’t think I’m ready for anything serious.”
She couldn’t imagine going through the pain of what happened with her and Luke with anyone else ever again.
Was that relief that flashed across Luke’s features? It came and went so quickly, she couldn’t tell.
Luke nodded. “When you and I divorced, my friends all told me that the best way to get over it was to move on with someone else—sometimes that was phrased in some truly horrible euphemisms. They all made it sound so easy, and I just kept thinking that if they’d known what I had and lost, they wouldn’t have thought it was easy at all. ”
What was she supposed to say to that?
He was right, of course. Their marriage had been special.
When they divorced, she knew she wasn’t going to find a love like that again.
No one was that lucky. But she’d also learned undeniably that love wasn’t always enough, that the fairy tale she’d been sold as a child had been a nice story, but it hadn’t been the truth.
The truth was that marriage was hard, and for all those dizzyingly romantic moments between them, their relationship had been defined more by the inability to merge their lives together, by the challenges of the daily give-and-take than by the butterflies.
“I should go,” she murmured. “Try to get some sleep, considering the day we have ahead of us. It’s getting late.”
“I think we passed late hours ago. I’m sorry—I didn’t mean to chase you off.”
For a moment, he looked as frustrated as she was, and she remembered how he had stumbled when he first saw her in the hallway of his flat.
“You didn’t, I’m just tired, and—”
God, she couldn’t keep babbling, staring at the table like a lovestruck schoolgirl. It was ridiculous. She was being ridiculous. She was a businesswoman, in her thirties, and they had been married. It shouldn’t be this hard to face her own ex-husband.
Margo took a deep breath. Once upon a not-so-long-time-ago, she would have bolted to the comfort and privacy of her sleeping carriage, too afraid to confront the tension between them, to acknowledge her own feelings and how vulnerable they made her.
It was a pattern that she’d developed when she was a little girl, when she would find herself uncomfortably thrust in the middle of her parents’ fights, drawn into the problems and pitfalls of a marital relationship she had been far too young to understand and wishing she could somehow escape.
It was a pattern she had repeated in her own marriage, a coping mechanism when things became too hard and she found herself outside of her comfort zone.
It wasn’t until she’d talked about it with her therapist, until she’d confronted those difficult times in her life, that she realized she didn’t want her future to constantly be dictated by her past. The realization wasn’t the hard part; putting it into practice was, particularly in moments like this one.
“It’s awkward. Being together like this.
I don’t know what to say or how to act,” Margo confessed, her heart pounding.
She wished she could explain in a way that he would understand that even this confession, obvious as it was, was as terrifying for her as jumping out of an airplane or swimming in shark-infested waters.
“Everything just feels like I keep hitting a wrong note, although I suppose that’s largely because there isn’t a perfect way to handle a situation like this. ”
“I know. It is awkward. We were always friends, could always talk to each other. Losing that connection is hard. I think that’s what I miss most of all. Just talking to you. Laughing with you. Having our adventures.”
He slid the glass back to her.
“I’ve thought about you a lot since you left,” he added.
“I used to imagine what it would be like when I saw you again. I’d be at work sitting at my desk, and I’d wonder if I was going to run into you on the street one day.
What we would say to each other, what you would look like, what your life would be like. If you were happy.”
This whole time she had been doing the same, never knowing he thought about it, too.
Luke tossed her a rueful smile. “Somehow, I didn’t account for the possibility that you would barge into my apartment one night with blood all over your face. I should have, though, considering the way we met.”
Margo blinked, more than a little distracted by the image he had painted of him sitting at work, thinking about her, much as she’d thought about him despite her best efforts.
“What do you mean ‘considering the way we met’?” she asked.
“That day at the pub that you stopped by and joined everyone for a drink, I was there to meet someone else. George had invited me out because he thought I’d hit it off with one of his girlfriend’s friends—Aimee.”
Margo shouldn’t feel indignation over something that happened years ago, and yet the idea that Luke had been intended for someone else that day, that if she had decided not to meet her classmates for a drink, things might have turned out very differently, rocked her.
Or maybe it wouldn’t have changed anything at all.
Perhaps they were always meant to be together.
“She was nice—Aimee,” Margo said, recalling a pretty brunette who’d always been generous with sharing notes and organizing group study sessions. “She’s working at the V&A now, I think.”
“She is.”
“Keep in touch, do you?” Margo asked, careful to keep her voice light.
She wasn’t jealous, not when she didn’t have any right to be, but it still stung more than she cared to admit.
She had been a ghost of herself after the divorce, her world narrowed to work and nothing else.
It wasn’t that she wanted Luke to be miserable.
Part of why she’d left in the beginning was the realization that they wanted different things, that all the love that had existed between them hadn’t been enough in the face of their problems.
Luke groaned. “One of George’s attempts to get me ‘back in the saddle’ after the divorce. He was relentless.” He shrugged. “He meant well. I can’t blame him—I was a disaster. He thought if I dated enough, I might get over the fact that you’d left me.”
“I didn’t leave you,” Margo protested, even as her heart lurched. She fumbled for the right words to describe the single most painful loss she’d ever been through. “We left each other. That’s what it felt like, at least.”
He was silent for a moment, his expression inscrutable. “I guess we did.”
“I take it Aimee wasn’t meant to be, then?”
He laughed. “I have no doubt Aimee is still recounting the horror that was our one and only date.” He flushed. “There may have been tears involved.”
“You made her cry?” She couldn’t imagine it.
“I wasn’t that bad of a date. No, I’m afraid the tears were mine.”
Margo gaped at him.
“What?” he asked.
“You never cry.”
Even on their wedding day. His smile had been beaming like hers, but there hadn’t been any tears.
“Apparently, I do,” Luke replied, his voice dry.
“She asked me what happened, whereas everyone else just sort of shot me this awkward look as though they’d rather have any conversation other than that one.
I think I was so caught off guard by the question, by my attempt to answer it, that my control just slipped.
At least I was spared George trying to set me up after that.
I properly horrified him and cast aspersions on his matchmaking ability for all eternity. ”
Margo searched for the right words, something to say to fill the silence between them, but nothing came.
“I’m not devoid of emotion, you know,” he replied, as though reading the surprised expression on her face. “We were in love, we were married, and then we weren’t. You can’t expect that I came out of it entirely unscathed. It rocked me. You rocked me.”
“I’m not suggesting that. I just—I never—” Margo took a deep breath.
“Toward the end, I kept waiting for a sign that there was something worth fighting for, that you cared, that I wasn’t alone in our marriage, and it just seemed like you were ready to be done with the entire business.
Ready to be done with me. I figured you would be relieved to be on your own again.
I thought I had come in and wrecked your perfectly ordered life. ”
“Relieved? Are you joking? Relieved to have lost my wife?”
“When I told you I wanted a divorce, do you know what you did? You nodded. You looked relieved.”
“I was trying not to cry. What did you expect me to do? Argue with you? Tell you that you didn’t want the thing you were professing to need? Try to convince you when you were so clearly miserable? I loved you. I wanted you to be happy. Even if that meant that I wasn’t.”
“I wasn’t miserable—” she interjected. “I was just—”
“What? What were you? I never could figure it out. You never told me.”
“You never asked. I thought it was obvious. I tried to tell you how I felt. Tried to talk to you.”