AllFreeNovel
Share Us
"I dressed up because you're here." Ruby grins back at him. "Can I come in?"
"Absolutely."
Ruby walks over to the perfectly-made bed and lays across it, propping her head up on her fist as she watches Dexter gaze at her long, tanned legs.
"I was reading the diary from 2018," she says without preamble. "And before you tell me not to talk about it in bed,"Ruby says, gesturing at the bed she's laying on, "this one doesn't count. Only the one we sleep in."
"Of course," Dexter says, nodding as he turns his body fully in the chair and faces her.
"Anyway, Jack was talking about how he stood on stage at the inauguration and thought about Etienne as I stood there beside him."
"Mmm," Dexter says. He sounds noncommittal, as he often does while she's puzzling through something.
"And for the first time, I honestly didn't feel too much."
"What do you mean?"
"Well, normally when I'm reading his writing and he says something that stabs me in the gut, I feel it, you know? Like a sharp pain. I lose my breath for a minute. It hurts. But this time...I just didn't. I'm sure he sat with me a million times and thought about her. Hell, he probably laid next to me in bed every night and missed her."
Dexter is watching her carefully. "Perhaps," he allows. "And I think that's just human nature. The mind can be in more than one place at once." He's unfailingly honest, and Ruby loves this about him.
"Oh, for sure." Ruby rolls over so that she's laying flat on her back, looking at the ceiling. She laces her hands together behind her head. "But it didn't hurt me this time to read it. I think I've finally accepted the reality of our lives." She stares unblinkingly at the chandelier overhead for a long minute. "And the reality is that Jack didn't love me enough. He loved me, but I wasn't enough for him. He needed more. And weirdly, I'm okay with that. I truly feel like that was a Jack problem, and not a me problem. Do you understand?"
Ruby rolls over and sits up completely, pulling her bare feet under her as she sits on the middle of the bed.
"I do." Dexter watches her. "You are a fully-realized woman, Ruby. Successful in your own right, and a wonderful mother and friend. Whatever Jack did or didn't do was of his own choosing, and was meant to enhance his own life, not to take away from yours. You're a smart woman, and I can see how you've come to that realization. Definitely."
Ruby exhales, and it feels like her body is a deflating balloon. "It takes a lot of weight off of me to know that it's not one thing that I did. It wasn't me taking Athena to California as a newborn, and it wasn't me getting too involved in mothering, or charity work. Jack never said he wasn't attracted to my physically, or that I was a terrible person. He simply wanted more, and unlike most of us, he thought he deserved it all, so he took it."
Dexter stands up and pushes in the desk chair, stretching his arms overhead and then taking off his glasses and setting them on top of his closed laptop.
"Hey, I have an idea," he says, walking across the room and sitting on the bed so that he and Ruby are just inches apart. "How about if we stop talking about the journals for tonight and then this bed becomes a place where we can do other things."
Ruby laughs out loud and looks around the room: it's a lovely guest room, painted a pale yellow, with the single wall behind the bed covered in a yellow chinoiserie wallpaper. The bed is a gorgeous Pottery Barn sleigh bed in white wood with simple, crisp white linens, and the desk is also white with clean lines. Ruby loves this room, and she's pretty sure that Dexter is about to make her love it even more.
She lays back on the bed as Dexter crawls across the mattress slowly, positioning himself over her so that he's holding up his body weight with just his arms as he looks into her eyes.
"You're a beauty," he says, lowering himself slowly. "I'm completely captivated by you."
Ruby says nothing else, but her entire body thrums as she pulls Dexter close. Maybe Jack had it in him to live two lives at once, but she's perfectly happy to have ended one life and started another.
"I'm pretty smitten by you myself," she says, wrapping her arms around his neck. "I think you're the bee's knees."
Dexter disentangles himself just enough to lean over and turn off the lamp next to the bed.
Dexter
Regardless of his feelings for Ruby--and his feelings for her are strong--Dexter has misgivings.
He's up early and running on the beach, sweat pouring from his temples on what is already a humid and sticky morning, pounding against the hard sand where the water washes onto shore.
The night before he'd lain next to Ruby in the guest room, watching her profile in the moonlight, and a feeling had passed over him. At first the feeling was one of pure contentment, but it had quickly changed to a creeping suspicion that he was committing a cardinal sin for a journalist: he was falling in love with his subject. Or, if not his direct subject, his source.
To make matters worse, he'd woken up that morning to an email from his editor at the publishing house, with comments on the pages he'd sent the day before. The gist of the email had been clear, and Benjamin Haggis's words are still ringing in Dexter's ears: "There's something lacking here. You've gone soft on this project. Where is your edge, North?"
"Where is my edge?" Dexter mutters out loud as he runs on the sand. He's disappointed in himself to find that he's turnedsome sort of a corner on the book and can't find his way back to the main road. The subject is a solid one: a modern president serving during an interesting time in history, as seen through the eyes of the woman who stood by his side for decades. The president in question dies a tragic, intentional death, and when he does, the world finds out about his long-time mistress and their son, and that the president had been diagnosed with a fatal neurological disease. How could he possibly go wrong?
"Oh, maybe by falling in love with the president's widow, you jackass," Dexter says to himself, slowing his pace and coming to a stop. He bends forward at the waist to catch his breath and sweat runs into his eyes, stinging and burning them. Dexter is furious with himself, and there's no way around the fact that everything he's feeling in this moment is entirely his own fault.
