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“It didn’t feel like that to me,” Dawson said, topping me up for the fourth time. “Stevie never complained. Even when she was packing her things and leaving, she said it wasn’t my fault.”
“Did she tell you why she was going?”
“No.” He shook his head. “I asked her, but she never gave me a reason, except to say she’d fallen in love.”
“That had to hurt.”
“It did. I thought she was in love with me.”
“At least Sabrina didn’t mention love. It was just about sex for her.”
He leaned over the bar, resting on his elbows. “I’ve never asked you this before, but were you still having regular sex with her… when you found out what she was doing, I mean?”
“Not the second time, no. There was nothing regular about our relationship then. But the first time, yes, I was.” Looking back, it was more than regular, it was frequent.
He nodded. “It was the same with me and Stevie,” he said, leaning back again. “Thinking about it, though, I’m not sure it was quite the same. She didn’t used to get into it so much…”
“Sabrina did,” I said. “There was honestly no difference in her the first time around… except that she was fucking Mitch Bradshaw behind my back.”
He frowned. “Do you think it was going on before she started remodeling his house?”
“I don’t think so. Once she’d told me about the affair, I don’t see why she’d have lied about the timing, and she was adamant that it had only started after she began working for him.”
“What made you want to give it another try?” he asked. “I know I wouldn’t have wanted to with Stevie, even if she’d given me the option. We were done as far as I was concerned. The thought of having her in my bed again was…” He stopped talking, shaking his head, and I nodded mine, because I knew how he felt.
“I get that,” I said. “But I had to think about Nash. I might have felt belittled and humiliated, and more angry than I’ve ever been in my life, but Sabrina promised me it was over between her and Mitch. She gave me her word she wouldn’t stray again, and that she’d put our marriage and our family first.”
“And you believed her?”
“I wanted to, for Nash’s sake, but it wasn’t until Mitch married Laurel Williams that I started to think she might have been telling the truth.”
“I felt sorry for Laurel when I heard about their marriage,” he said, his brow furrowing. “Mitch might have been older than us, but we all knew what he was like.”
“And he hadn’t changed, if the timing of Addison’s birth was anything to go by. You can’t tell me Laurel wasn’t pregnant when they got married.”
“She was. Everyone knows that. But at least he behaved himself after their wedding.”
“Or he got better at keeping it quiet,” I said, and he tilted his head.
“You think?”
“Who knows? You can’t expect me to think of the guy as husband of the year material after what he did.”
“No, I guess not.” He rested his elbows on the bar again and leaned on his upturned hand. “His marriage made you feel safer, though?”
I shrugged my shoulders. “I still questioned every look, every word, every phone call, so the safety was limited by my own suspicions, and Sabrina’s nature, I guess.”
“It sounds like hell.”
“It was… and as for our sex life…” I let my voice fade and he leaned in again.
“What was it like?” he asked. “Was it the same?”
“No. Aside from the fact that it took ages for me to even want to touch her again, nothing felt the same. She’d given herself to another man, and all I could think about was the two of them together. I think what made it worse was that I knew him. I knew Mitch, and had done all my life, so I could picture him doing all kinds of things with her.”
“I can understand that,” he said. “I felt the same. Obviously, I didn’t know Peony’s ex as well as we knew Mitch, but I’d still met the guy. I knew what he looked like, and even if I wasn’t trying to rebuild a relationship with Stevie, I was still haunted by her and… and him… and what they did.”
I finished my fourth glass of wine and called it a night.
