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I see the movement of his Adam’s apple in his throat when he swallows.
Ben reaches out to touch my hair, his fingertips softly grazing the outer rim of my ear. My breath quickens and I feel his breath on my skin when he speaks. “I’ve missed this,” he says. “I’ve missed you.”
He holds my stare, regret in his eyes. His gaze goes to my lips, and I think back to the first time Ben and I kissed. I was seventeen at the time. It wasn’t my first kiss. I had kissed guys in my life by then, though they had been mostly regrettable, mostly drunk at high school parties where I had only hazy memories of guys rubbing against me in the dark, sticking their tongues into my mouth, and me mistaking it for love.
But I had never had a kiss like Ben’s before. That night, his lips were soft and gentle as a breeze at first, sweeping against mine, rousing my senses, so that I lost touch with myself and my surroundings all of a sudden. I was buoyant, floating as we stood together in a dark corner of a parking lot, where the glow from a nearby streetlight couldn’t reach and people driving past couldn’t see us.
“Sienna said that you’ve been seeing someone,” I say, though I almost don’t because I don’t want to know. I don’t want to ruin the moment, but a part of me wonders if there isn’t a woman waiting back at his condo for him, if she isn’t lying alone in Ben’s and my bed and if this isn’t just a courtesy because Sienna asked him to check up on me.
“I was,” he says, running his hands down my hair, “but that’s over.”
“I’m sorry,” I say, but if he’s telling the truth, then I’m not sorry. I’m glad. “What happened?”
“To be honest?” he asks, looking sheepish as he takes another drink from his beer. “She was jealous of you.”
“Of me?” I ask, pulling back, laughing gaily. “But you and I aren’t together anymore. What did she possibly have to be jealous of your ex-wife for?”
“Oh I don’t know,” he says, but it’s teasing, playful. He does know. “Maybe almost two decades and a child together. It’s hard to compete with that. It didn’t help when she found a picture of us in a dresser drawer by accident. I caught her looking at it, and though she said she wasn’t—that she was just curious to know what you looked like—I could see she was mad as hell that I kept it.”
I let it go to my head, both the fact that Ben kept a secret picture of me hidden in his dresser drawer and his girlfriend’s reaction to it. “How could you tell?” I ask. “What did she do?”
“She asked a lot of questions about you. Your name, how we met, what you’re like.”
“What did you tell her?”
“The truth. That you’re selfless, compassionate, but guarded. That you have a tough shell, but that once someone finds a way in, there’s nothing you won’t do for them.” I’m touched. I’ve never heard Ben speak like this, I’ve never heard him put into words how he sees and feels about me. “I didn’t tell her how beautiful you are. I didn’t need to. She could see that for herself,” he says while slipping his hands beneath the hem of my shirt as goose bumps rise up on my arms. He hesitates and then asks, “Have you dated anyone?”
“No,” I say, but I’m distracted by his hands, feeling my body edge closer to his, my heart quickening. “Well, yes. I mean I did. I went on a date with some man I met online. It sounds desperate, right? Online dating.”
“No. People do it all the time. I thought about giving it a try too. It’s not exactly easy to find nice, normal, single women when you’re forty.”
“No, it’s not. Not nice, normal, single men either. They either live with their parents or they’re divorced, which makes you wonder what’s wrong with them.” I laugh then. “If that’s not the pot calling the kettle black, I don’t know what is. Is it strange that we’re talking about this? About dating other people?”
“Yes and no,” Ben says. “It’s something we can relate to, something we have in common, even if it is awful to imagine my wife in bed with another man. Is this okay?” he whispers softly now, his hands moving up my bare ribcage, and I nod, my breath shallow, my heart going wild inside of me. His gaze goes from my eyes to my lips and back up to my eyes as I bite down on my own lower lip, lost in the color of his eyes and the shape of his mouth. Thinking only about how much I want him to kiss me, to lay me back on the sofa, and how I want to feel the weight of him as he lays himself down on me. I want to lose myself in this, in him, to forget about everything that came before this moment. The divorce. Caitlin Beckett. What I’ve done.
“Ex-wife,” I say, “and I wasn’t sleeping with him. It was just dinner and even that wasn’t good. The food, the conversation, all of it.”
“Ouch. Poor guy. What was his name?”
“Alec,” I say, thinking back to how in person he didn’t come close to resembling the man I saw online and how I felt terrible and shallow, but also completely misled. I decided to stay and give him the benefit of the doubt, and ended up regretting it. “What is your girlfriend’s name?”
“Was. She’s not my girlfriend anymore.”
“Sorry. What was your girlfriend’s name?”
“Caitlin,” he says, and I immediately stiffen, coming close to choking on my own saliva. My back arches, lifting up from the sofa’s backrest and I lean forward to set my drink on the coffee table, not trusting myself to hold it. The L goes flying by at the same time and I thank God because it buys me time. I don’t have to speak. I don’t have to respond. The walls of the apartment close in on me, the room suddenly short of oxygen.
Caitlin.
It could be a different Caitlin. There must be tens of thousands of women named Caitlin in the world.
But in my whole life I’ve only ever known one.
“I don’t want to talk about her though. Or Alec,” Ben says with something like disdain as the L disappears and the apartment quiets.
At the same time, my cell phone vibrates against the coffee table, the sound reverberating.
I startle at the noise. “Leave it,” Ben breathes softly into my ear, leaning into me now so that I descend from the physical force of him, tilting back against the sofa, its square arms digging into my back, hurting me.
