Her tears pool and then spill.
“I think I knew that,” she says, nodding. “Not the cause, but you’re different. I thought it was because of what happened with Leah and Estella.”
I flinch.
“I’m so sorry, Jessica.”
“She’s a bitch, Caleb. You know that, right?”
“Jess-”
“No, listen to me. She’s a bad person. She defends bad people. Then out of the blue, she calls you in the middle of the night and wants you to come rescue her. She’s cunning.”
I rub my forehead.
“It’s not like that. She’s not like that. She’s married, Jessica. I don’t get to be with her. I just don’t want to be with anyone else.”
I look at the spoon and then I force myself to look at Jessica.
“I’d want to have children.”
She backs up a step. “You said you didn’t.”
I nod. “Yes, I spoke out of hurt. Because of what happened with … Estella.” It’s the first time I’ve said her name in a very long time. It hurts.
“I’ve always wanted a family. But, I don’t want to be married to someone and pretend I don’t want kids.”
She shakes her head; it starts slowly and then speeds up.
“I have to go,” she says. She runs to the room to grab her things. I don’t stop her. There is no point. Once again, I’ve hurt someone because of my feelings for Olivia. When will it stop? Will it ever stop? I can’t do this to anyone again. It’s got to be Olivia or nothing for me.
Four o’clock, five o’clock, six o’clock, seven. I still wasn’t out of the building. I’d been waiting four hours for papers. Papers! As if the rest of my life depended on me signing my name to a piece of paper. I glanced at the clock. I was supposed to be at Olivia’s an hour ago. I checked my phone. She hadn’t called. Maybe she was still busy packing.
“Caleb,” my co-worker, Neal, stuck his head through the door, “you sticking around for the party?”
I grinned. “No, I have somewhere to be tonight.”
He raised his eyebrows. “You have somewhere better to be than a dinner your boss is throwing for potential clients?”
“My boss is also my stepfather,” I said, typing into my keyboard. “Pretty sure I can swing it.” My secretary popped her head next to Neal’s.
“Caleb, Sidney Orrico is here. She says she has some things for you to sign.”
I jumped out of my chair. “Send her in.”
Neal raised his eyebrows, but his head disappeared and was replaced by Sidney’s.
“Hey you,” she said.
I stood up and walked around the desk to greet her.
Sidney Orrico: brown curls, dimples, blue eyes, long legs. We were neighbors, we went to the same school, and our mothers dragged us along to social events and then forced us to interact. We saw each other regularly, and by force or by nature, we became friends. And then we became more. It started with a kiss on the fourth of July. After the first kiss, we’d hide out in the rec room at my house and make out on the pool table every chance we got. After a few weeks, I worked my way up to second base. By the end of our first summer together, I’d claimed her virginity. When we started school in the fall, things got awkward … really, really awkward.
Sidney wanted a boyfriend. I wanted a friend with benefits. My fifteen-year-old self tried to explain this to her, but she started crying and then I made out with her just to quell the tears. Then we had sex, and then I had to explain the whole no-dating thing to her again. She slapped me across the face and swore that she was never going to talk to me again.
Not true. She wouldn’t stop talking to me. Fifteen-year-old girls are intense — especially when they think they’re in love. When she caught me at a popular ice cream place on a date with another girl, she went postal, dumping an entire bowl of dripping chocolate ice cream on my lap.
Sidney Orrico.
Fortunately, for me, she backed off after the ice cream incident. She dated my brother for a while, and then broke up with him for a quarterback. We saw each other randomly after that — holiday parties, prom, the mall. By the time I was dating Olivia, I hadn’t seen her in at least a year. She had bypassed college and had gone to real estate school. My mother told me she was working for her father’s development company. That’s when things got sticky.
I was building Olivia a house. Our house. It was a decision I’d made as soon as I realized I wanted to marry her. I hired an architect to draw up the plans weeks before I bought the ring and contacted Greg Orrico, Sidney’s father.
“The project will take about a year, Caleb. Especially with all of the additional inspections we’ll need to pass a widow’s walk.”
I tapped my pen on the desk. That was fine, as long as the foundation was laid by the time I asked Olivia to marry me. I wanted to be able to take her to see something. The foundation of what we were going to be.
We made plans to meet and sign off on all the paperwork. Before I hung up, Greg told me that Sidney would be my project manager.
“Shit,” I said, cradling the phone. If Sidney was anything like I remembered…
Sidney hugged me and pulled a sheaf of papers from her bag. “Are you nervous?”
“Not at all, I propose to the love of my life every day.”
She smirked and tapped me on the head with the papers. “Well, let’s get to it then.”
We spread everything across my desk, and Sidney talked me through each form. I’d just about signed half of them, when Steve wandered into my office in his tux.
“Sidney!” I watched as he hugged her. “You lost all of your freckles, and what happened to all of that metal you used to wear on your teeth?” Sidney and Steve saw each other on a regular basis, but this was their game. I read through my paperwork and waited for it to be over.
“Is that your way of calling me pretty?”
Steve laughed. “Will you stay for the party?”
For the first time I noticed that Sidney was wearing a dress. It looked to me like she had every intention of staying for the party. My mother must have given her a heads up.
“I am staying,” she said. “I was hoping I could get Caleb to have a drink with me before he speeds off on his steed.”
“Can’t,” I said, without looking up. “Olivia is waiting for me.”
“Caleb,” Steve said. “I need you to make some rounds before you leave. Some of these people are your clients.”
“Steve!”
I slammed my laptop closed and stared at him. “I’m proposing to my girlfriend tonight. You can’t be serious.”
“A few minutes are all I need. Just call Olivia and tell her you’re going to be late.”
“No.” I stood up and grabbed my keys.
Sidney’s head bobbed up from where she was reviewing my paperwork. “You’re going to hate me.”
I sighed. “What did you forget?”
She flushed. “I can just run back to the office and grab it. I’ll be back in fifteen minutes.”
“What is it, Sidney? Can’t it wait until Tuesday?”
She cleared her throat. “The gate keys to the property. You won’t be able to get in.”
I folded both of my lips in and blinked at her in frustration. Calm, keep calm.
“All right. Go! Hurry!” She nodded and jumped up. I turned to Steve. “Thirty minutes, while Sidney is gone. That’s it.” He patted me on the back. I called my secretary who was already wearing her dress for the night.
“Can you call Olivia, tell her I was held up, but I’ll be there as fast as I can?”
She nodded and I went to the small closet in my office where I kept my suit jacket.
I slid my arms into the sleeves, swearing under my breath. This was a bad start to what was supposed to be a huge night. Thirty minutes, that was it. Then I’d be out of here.
By the time she came back, another hour and a half had passed. I’d given up socializing and retreated to my office to wait. I called Olivia twic
e with no answer. She was probably furious with me.
Sidney walked briskly through the door, holding up her skirt and looking apologetic.
“Traffic, Caleb. I’m so sorry.”
I nodded and held out my hand for the key. She looked so forlorn when she dropped it in my palm that I grabbed her wrist before she could pull away.
“Sidney? What’s wrong?”
Her bottom lip quivered. She pulled away from me and walked to my desk, leaning up against the side of it.
“Can I see the ring?”
I cocked my head and resisted the urge to look at my watch. Eventually, I nodded and went to get it from the drawer. I opened the box and showed her. Her eyes grew wide.
“It’s beautiful,” she said. And then she started to cry.
I flipped the box closed and put it in my pocket. “Sidney? What is it? What’s wrong?” I gripped her shoulders, and she looked up at me with mascara running down her face.
“I’m in love with you.”
Her words rocked me. I brought my forefinger and thumb to my forehead. This wasn’t happening right now. I needed to find Olivia. I couldn’t deal with this. I didn’t want to.
“Sidney, I-”
She shook her head. “It’s okay. I’ve lived with this for a long time. I’m just emotional because you’re getting ready to propose and all that…”
I ground my teeth and considered how to proceed. All I could see was Olivia. But, Sidney was my friend. I wasn’t in the habit of telling crying women to fuck off. Okay, I could do this quickly. I handed her a tissue and she proceeded to clean up her face.
“Sidney, look at me.”
She did.
“I’ve been lonely. All my life. I was the popular kid. I’ve always been surrounded by tons of people, but I was indescribably lonely. I didn’t know how to cure it. Until the day I saw Olivia. I saw her for the first time standing under this tree.” I laughed and rubbed my jaw, remembering. I hadn’t shaved. I should have shaved. “When I saw her, I knew she was what was missing. It’s crazy, but it’s true. I had this flash in my mind, where I saw her sitting at my kitchen table with me, her hair up in this messy bun, drinking coffee and laughing. Right then, I knew I was going to marry her.”
Sidney was looking at me with such awe I didn’t know if I was doing more harm than good. I had a brief moment when I wished Olivia looked at me like that. I had to fight her to love me. I was in a constant emotional wrestling match with her. I could be with a woman like this, who adored me. I could muster old feelings for Sidney. She was beautiful and kind. I shook my head. Wrap it up, Caleb. I told her what I knew to be true.
“When you find him, his name will course through your veins. Olivia courses through mine. She runs through my heart and my brain and my fingers and my penis.” Sidney laughed through her tears. I grinned.
“You’ll find him, Sidney. But, it’s not me. I belong to someone else.”
I hugged her. She was sitting on my desk and I patted her leg. “Go back to the party, I have to go.”
When I looked up, Olivia was standing in my doorway. I felt a rush of blood to my head. Had she heard what I’d told Sidney? Seen the ring box? I had a moment of panic where I didn’t know what to do.
She said my name. I watched Sidney hop down from the desk and walk quickly out of the room. She darted a look at Olivia over her shoulder before she closed the door.
Olivia’s emotion was frozen on her face. Slowly, it dawned on me what she saw when she walked through the door. How it must have looked. I wrestled with what to tell her. If I explained who Sidney was, I would have to tell her about the ring and the house. I was about to explain the whole thing, anything to get that look off her face, when she told me she loved me for the first time.
“I loved you.”
My heart ached. It should have been one of the happiest moments of my life. But, she wasn’t telling me because she wanted to. She was telling me to hurt me. Because she thought I did something to hurt her.
I heard my mother’s words, about her being too broken. Everything shifted in that moment. I wish it hadn’t, but it did. I couldn’t fix her. I couldn’t love her enough to chip away at the calcified hurt that was affecting everything she did. My thoughts about our life together went from a house in the sunshine and a yard full of children to Olivia crying in a corner, blaming me for rushing her into something she wasn’t ready for.
Then she accused me of being like her father.
The hurt was profound. Especially since I’d spent the last year and a half trying to show her I was nothing like him. When she ran out of my office, thinking that I cheated on her, I didn’t stop her.
I stood frozen, the ring box pressing against my thigh, the room swinging around me.
I leaned both hands on my desk and squeezed my eyes closed, breathing through my mouth. Five minutes. My whole life just changed in five minutes.
She only wanted to see the bad. Maybe it was for the best. Maybe all I saw was my love and I hadn’t weighed the consequences of that love.
Steve walked into my office and stopped short.
“Did I just see Olivia?”
I looked up at him, my eyes burning. He must have seen something on my face.
“What happened?” He pulled the door closed and took a step toward me. I held up a hand to stop him and dropped my head.
“She saw me in here with Sidney. She assumed…”
“Caleb,” Steve said. “Go after her.”
My head snapped up. That’s the last thing I expected to hear. Especially since I wasn’t sure how much my mother had turned him.
“She wants out,” I said. “Since we first got together. She’s always finding a reason for us not to be together. What kind of life can we have if she does that?”
Steve shook his head. “Some people take more work than others. You fell in love with a really complicated woman. You can weigh how hard things can and will be for the two of you, but what you really need to consider is if you can live without her.”
I was out the door a second later. No. No, I couldn’t live without her.
I took the stairs. She’d made a left out of my office instead of going to the elevators. I took them two at a time. By the time I burst through the exit doors, it was dark outside. God, how had I let this day get away from me? If I’d just left when I was supposed to…
Her car was gone. I had to go back upstairs to get my keys. She probably wasn’t going to let me explain. If I went to her apartment while she was like this, she wouldn’t even open the door. But, if I let the idea that I was cheating sit in her head for too long, it would solidify. She’d believe it, and that would be that. So, what could I do? How did I handle this situation? I paced my office. She wasn’t like other women. I couldn’t show up and talk her out of her thoughts.
Fuck. This was bad. I had to figure out a way to reach her.
Cammie.
“She’s with me,” Cammie said, when I called her.
“Let me talk to her, Cammie. Please.”
“No, she doesn’t want to talk to you. You need to let her cool off.”
I’d hung up, thinking that was what I was going to do. But, after a few hours, I was driving to Cammie’s. When I got there and didn’t see Olivia’s car, I knew she’d been lying to me. So I went to the hotel.
It’s all shadows without Olivia. I feel myself constantly wanting for her light. I haven’t heard from her since I left her condo the night she told me about Noah. It’s been a month, and I don’t know what she’s decided. I know what I’ve decided.
I send her a text.
Divorced?
Her text comes back almost immediately.
O: Fuck off.
You at work?
O: Yes!
I’ll be there in ten
O: No!
I turn my phone off and wait. I was already in the parking lot when I sent the first text. I linger in my car for a minute, running my finger over my bottom lip. I know what she’
s going to do next, so when I see her walking quickly out of the building, I smirk. She’s trying to leave before I show up. I jump out of the car and walk toward her. She doesn’t see me until the last minute. She has her car keys out and her heels are snapping on the concrete as she tries to make her escape.
“Going somewhere?”
Her shoulders jerk and she spins around.
“Why are you always so goddamn early?”
“Why are you trying to run away?”
She gives me a dirty look, her eyes darting left and right, as if she’s trying to find a way to escape me.
I hold out my hand. “Come on, Duchess.”
She tosses a quick glance over her shoulder before she places her hand in mine. I pull her toward me and her little birdlike steps skip to keep up with mine. I don’t let go of her hand, and she doesn’t try to pull away. When I look down at her, she’s biting her lip. She looks terrified. She should.
I stop to open her door then shoot around to mine. She’s wearing a red dress with white polka dots. The neckline dips low. She hasn’t looked at me since she got in the car; instead she’s focused on her feet. Red stilettos, red toenails peeking through. Nice. Her style is a combination of Jacqueline Kennedy and a gypsy — my beautiful contradiction. Her hair is twisted up in a bun, and there is a pen holding it in place. I reach over and slip the pen out. Her hair tumbles around her like black water.
She doesn’t ask where we are going. I drive to the beach and pull into a spot a block away. She waits until I walk around to open her door and takes my hand as I help her out. We walk connected, until we reach the sand. She stops there to slip off her shoes, using my shoulder to keep balance. They dangle on the tips of her fingers as she reaches for me with her free hand. I take it and we lace fingers. It is considered winter in Florida, so there is only a handful of sunbathers, most of them from the North and with white hair. The area of beach we are on belongs to a hotel. There are canvas-covered gazebos with lawn chairs underneath them. We find an empty one and I sit down and stretch out my legs. Olivia makes to take the one next to me, but I pull her on my chair. She sits between my legs and leans back against my chest. I put one arm around her and sling the other on top of my head. My heart is racing. I haven’t had her in my arms in a long time. It feels so natural to be like this with her. I say her name just to see how it sounds. She jabs me in the ribs with her elbow.