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“Frozen fries. Why are you even asking? I had a burger and fries for lunch. But make them the sweet potato ones. Here, I picked them up on the way home.”
“Aren’t those chips in your hand? That’s a lot of starch for one day.”
“Look at my face. You do not understand the severity of this hangover.”
Rob shook his head and took the other grocery bag from me. He put the beer in the fridge after taking one for himself. “Dinner will be ready in a half hour.”
“I’m going to take a quick shower.”
“Good idea. I can’t believe you were at work stinking that bad. I’m surprised no one noticed and tried to spray you down with air freshener.”
After punching him gently on the shoulder as I passed, I made my way into our bedroom. Collapsing onto the bed, I finally pulled off my tights, which were almost cutting off the circulation to my midriff. My mind wandered like it did at the end of every workday. Did I delete all of Garrett’s goofy messages from my BlackBerry? How was I going to tell Rob that my sister was pregnant without bringing up the dreaded what do you want from our future, Kelly, conversation. On top of that I had to explain that Marianne and Cash were also coming for dinner. The one thing I couldn’t tell him was that finding out that Garrett didn’t think about me nearly as much as I did about him broke my heart this afternoon.
“I don’t hear the shower!” Rob shouted.
“I’m going!”
But our bed was just too comfortable. What felt like moments later, Rob squished the backs of my legs to wake me up. “Come and eat, you drunken fool. We need to talk about Christmas. My mother will have a coronary if we don’t come over for dinner tomorrow night. She spent the last twenty minutes on the phone telling me so.”
* * *
With dinner out of the way, Rob and I spent a blissful evening watching bad holiday television, my legs in his lap, his hands resting on my knees. Moments like this were tailor-made for guilt because I was home and comfortable, and I loved him. We fit together perfectly on our couch, and I adored that his clothes always smelled a bit like the bleach he used on his undershirts. Part of me wanted to tell Rob everything about the holiday party, from start to finish. How close I danced with Garrett. How close we came to stepping over the line at the strip club (from what I can remember). Because I couldn’t admit the part about ending up at The Landing Strip with Garrett, I decided to spin some other gossip instead.
“Apparently Siobhan made out with the head of marketing at the holiday party,” I said.
Rob paused the television show. “I thought she was married.”
“I’m confused on that point,” I said. “She’s still got her ring on but I’m not sure if they’ve separated.”
“She’s a piece of work.”
“Yes.” I laughed. “Yes, she is.”
But I was a piece of work too. Especially awful, and playing, rewinding, playing again in my mind was the part when I sat on Garrett’s lap as a half-naked, barely legal, somewhat gnarly looking girl gyrated in front of us. Garrett had taken it all in stride. He had giggled in that high-pitched, superintense way he had throughout the whole thing. And wasn’t that crossing the line? Wasn’t it cheating to see a naked woman with anyone other than my long-term boyfriend? I didn’t know. I really didn’t.
The phone rang at about nine-thirty, and Rob said, “That’ll be my mother again. I told her we’d talk about tomorrow night.”
“It’s fine, we should go. My mother will understand. We can split up the day, spend Christmas Eve and then morning with your family and have dinner over in Etobicoke with mine.”
Rob brushed my legs off his lap and jumped up to answer the phone on the very last ring before the machine picked up. “Hey, Mom.”
“Oh, by the way,” I whispered, “our dinner party next week got a whole lot more crowded.”
The fact that he couldn’t hear me was the point; I would break that news to him later. It wasn’t like Rob would care either way about Marianne and Cash coming to dinner. He’d listened to me complain about her, but he was kind and only judged people after meeting them, not based on my (sometimes) baseless opinions. Having Marianne around was pressure for me, not him. I would have to work immensely hard to keep it together in front of her because Marianne didn’t know what not to say. It wasn’t like I was hiding my friendship with Garrett. And yet there was no way to know what Rob might think if he had a thorough, complete picture of our day-to-day interactions.
Was it possible to be completely in love with two different people at once? Because I felt that way. Rob was home; he was comfortable, safe, secure, all the things that I wasn’t. His future was organized, and he already knew exactly what he wanted to do with it. Mine was not so clear. Deep down, I knew enough to admit I was miserable, my stomach a pit as deep as a coal mine. The job wasn’t going anywhere and the direction it did go wasn’t for me. The only times I felt better were when I was halfway through a bottle of white wine, crawling through the pubs with my work friends after five o’clock, hanging off Garrett and waiting for him to realize that he was kind of in love with me too.
Rob. Garrett. Rob. Garrett.
The whole point of a work boyfriend was supposed to be fun and frivolous. Separate from your spouse at the door, and you never invite them to a party. Now, in five days, my worlds were going to collapse into one. Marianne could naïvely spill the beans about the endless lunches, the countless conversations in his office, my cube, and she would do it in that way of hers. “Oh, Rob, you didn’t know? They’re so, like, totally besties at work!” And he would be taken off guard and hurt because the two of us had always put each other first.
Sure, he had female friends and ex-girlfriends, of course he did, but this was different. We always had said that if actual feelings got involved in a work friendship we would step back. Because it had happened once with a woman at Rob’s firm. He wasn’t perfect, and a young woman, Lily, the daughter of one of the senior account managers, grew attached to him. The way he explained it, he had thought she was looking for a mentor. But I think she liked him from the start and didn’t care that he had a girlfriend. It was okay; I’d been that girl. I knew how it went. I made a vow a long time ago not to blame other women when things went wrong. To take the high ground. We didn’t need to hate each other—feelings were complicated. People were complicated.
When he first started as a full trader on the floor, he used to go out almost every night after work. It’s a stressful job, and competitive, with drinking, drugs, and late nights. And when Lily showed up to a party, fresh, excited, smart, and blond, the tone changed. She knew who he was, who his parents were, where they lived in the city. She instinctively understood what the combination of all that information could mean for her, and she unleashed a not-so-secret campaign to break us up, culminating in one really awful night when they made out in the back of a cab hurtling back to her place on Eglinton Avenue. Rob showed up at home, woke me up, and confessed. Things weren’t good between us for months. So we made a pact to be together. To tell each other honestly if it wasn’t working. And to confess if any friendship with the opposite sex slipped into something more serious.
Now, with Garrett, actual feelings were involved, and it was a mess. I wasn’t brave like Rob; I couldn’t confess.
Maybe I was cutting it close to the edge, but I’d never technically cheated on Rob. Aside from sitting on Garrett’s lap at the strip club, I had never so much as drunkenly slobbered over another man the entire time we’d been together. Not even in the last two years at university when it would have been easy, forgivable even, for us to cheat on each other. Not even when we were living in different cities for the six months between when he left Kingston and when I did. It was a relief to be with him, to feel loved, and to love in return. It felt right to come home after a night out with my co-workers and climb into bed with him, day after day.
