AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“He’s just this guy, who’s . . . he’s all wrong for me,” I say in a rush. “Just, my pure opposite, everything I thought would bore me to death, but he’s also just really good, you know? I feel good when I’m with him.”
“That’s the sex,” Mom says with a smirk, then quickly mimes zipping her lips and throwing away the key. “Oops.”
“It’s not just the sex,” I admit slowly, trying the words on for size, half expecting lightning to strike.
I take a big breath for courage. “Mom, did you ever . . . has there ever been a guy where you thought you could be really happy with him? Not just for right now, not just in bed, but like, forever?”
“Oh sure,” she says with a laugh.
“Really?” My mom is the poster child for love ’em and leave ’em.
“Of course!” She licks some of the salt off her margarita rim. “When I was young and stupid. It’s all part of growing up, baby girl.”
My heart sinks. “Young and stupid.”
“Not stupid,” she amends quickly. “That’s not what I meant. It’s just . . . one of those things that you learn as you get older. When you’re a kid, you eventually discover there’s no Santa Claus. When you’re an adult, you discover there’s no Prince Charming. It’s bitter-sweet at first, but eventually you just sort of smile at the things young-you believed and accept things as they are.”
“And how are they?”
“They’re . . .” She waves her hand. “Transient. Evolving. That’s the fun of it, baby girl. Enjoy this man you’re with—Thomas, is it? The man I met at your apartment?”
I blink. “How did you know?”
“Because I saw the way he looked at you. Like you intrigued the heck out of him. And he did the same for you. I get it! All that sexy, buttoned-up charisma. I had a guy like that once. Andy something or other.”
“What happened?” I ask, because I’ve heard about lots of her guys, and Andy doesn’t ring a bell.
“We enjoyed each other wildly. He loved my spontaneity, I loved his credit card,” she says with a laugh. “Last I checked on Facebook, he was happily married to a woman—a real estate broker—living in New Jersey with three kids, and commuting to the city, exactly as he should be. And I’m having tequila with my daughter on a Wednesday night, exactly as I should be.”
“I don’t want to be a real estate broker in Jersey,” I say, mostly to myself.
My mom squeezes my hand. “Of course you don’t. But that doesn’t mean you can’t enjoy what you and Thomas have while it’s still good. The key is letting it go before it starts to turn on you.”
I look at her, needing maternal advice like never before. “But how do you know? How do you know when it’s about to turn?”
“Practice,” she says with a wink. “But my advice? The second it stops feeling good, when it starts to feel complicated instead of easy-breezy, that’s your cue to gracefully bow out. At the end of the day, it’s the kindest thing we can do for someone else—letting them go before things turn ugly.”
Later that night, I’m curled up in Thomas’s bed, my head on his shoulder, my conversation with my mom doing perfect, relentless figure eights inside my head.
It’s the kindest thing we can do for someone else—letting them go before things turn ugly . . .
It had made perfect sense in the moment, but now I’m wishing I would have asked her a bit more about knowing when they were about to turn. She’d said practice, but I don’t want Thomas to be practice. I just want him to be . . . mine.
Just a little bit longer.
Thomas’s breathing is slow and rhythmic, the way it is when he sleeps, so I’m surprised when he slides a hand over my bare back, his lips brushing against the top of my head in a kiss. “You want to talk about it?”
“About what?” I wince at the flippancy in my tone, at my knee-jerk reaction to keep him at emotional arm’s length, even when I’m happy to turn over every inch of my physical self.
He doesn’t answer my reflexive question, nor does he push. He just waits, steady and . . . there.
I lift my head. “I hung out with my mom today.”
“Oh yeah?”
I nod. “Just before I came over here.”
Neither of us mentions the fact that I am here. It hadn’t been planned. In fact, I’d specifically told Thomas I had other plans tonight. And yet, when I’d left happy hour, my feet had turned here rather than home. And when he’d opened his front door, there had been no surprise, no question, no hesitation.
He’d been eating popcorn and watching re-runs of some cop show, so that’s what I’d done as well. It was the sort of evening my nightmares were once made out of, a couple so boring they spent all night plopped on the couch, barely speaking. And yet it hadn’t felt like a nightmare at all.
