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“I think we’ve clearly established that.”
“No, I mean it’salltoo good. Not only the sex.” Sure, she’d writtenmultiple orgasms foreveron a scrap of paper and burned it into her wish jar after she’d gotten home from his cabin last night. But that hadn’t been the only wish about Cole she’d turned to ash. There was alsoalways feeling warmandlaughing myself to sleep. “It’s everything. And I can’t have everything.”
“Why, though?” Jen asked, suddenly serious. “Why can’t you have everything?”
“Because he’s leaving in two weeks. Because I can already tell how much it’s going to hurt when he’s not here anymore.”
Reaching across the counter, Jen squeezed her fingers. “Why can’t you still be together, though? I know long distance isn’t ideal, but it kind of sounds like he might be worth it.”
“I don’t think I can do long distance. I’ve got too much holding me here. He’d always have to come visit me. He’d always have to be the one making the trip, making the effort, leaving his life so we could be together. It would be completely unfair, and I don’t think I could ask someone else to do that for me. Jen, what are you doing?” Mira asked while Jen leaned over the counter, looking to Mira’s right side, then her left.
“I’m trying to find the chains holding you behind that counter. They must be invisible or something, because I don’t see them.”
“Hysterical.”
“I’m serious, Mira. You have always been someone who makes sacrifices so that everyone else in your life is safe. Remember in fifth grade when Timothy Green started following me home and pushing my face into the snow, and you dropped out of the school play to walk with me every day so he’d leave me alone?”
“That guy was such a prick.”
“Still is, if you ask me,” Jen said. “Being good at selling RVs isn’t a personality trait, dude.”
Mira nodded her agreement.
“My point is, you’re always looking out for everyone else. But you’re allowed to look out for yourself too. You’re allowed to have a life.”
Jen might have been right, in some ideological sense, but she didn’t understand. Mira wasn’t being a Good Samaritan, a good mother, a good daughter, because of some altruistic sense of duty. Her interests were completely selfish. If she ever decided to put herself first, and something happened when she wasn’t there, the guilt would crush her.
“Speaking of having a life,” Mira said, whipping the conversation around the nearest turn. “How are things with the firefighter?”
Jen’s sigh was audible. “That mercury is, sadly, no longer in fucktrograde.”
“What happened? I thought you two were having fun.”
“We were, at first. But I think he’s too young. Or maybe I’m too old. And”—her shoulder hitched—“you know.”
“Scott?” Mira guessed, because even though Jen’s estranged husband had made his bed and was now sleeping—or drinking—in it, she knew Jen still missed him.
“One thing they never tell you when your marriage falls apart is that no matter how bad it got, no matter how miserable the last few years might have been, it’s really hard to pretend the twenty amazing years that came before them never existed.”
Before Mira could respond, her phone chimed on the counter, her screen lighting up.
“Who is it?” Jen asked, looking sideways at Mira’s caller ID. “Is it the G-spot whisperer?”
“No, his ringtone is ‘I Will Always Love You.’”
Like a broken mailbox, Jen’s mouth flipped open. “You gave him his own ringtone? And it’sthatsong?”
“It’s not what you think,” Mira said, waving off her concern. “It’s only his heart song.”
“His what what?”
Accepting the call, Mira said, “Glazed and Confused. How can I help you?” in her overly chipper bakery phone voice.
“Hello,” a woman said over the line. “My name is Beth Montgomery, and I’m an aide for Senator Jon Richardson.”
“Is it election season again already?” Mira asked Jen with a hand over the phone.
Jen shook her head, finishing off her scone.
