Page 12 of I Do With You

“Bad news, babe. I’ve got to work late,” he says, not sounding sorry at all. This is becoming a more-than-occasional occurrence. I think he’s worked late more nights than not for at least the past six months.

Schooling my face so the girls don’t notice anything amiss, I sigh. “I get it. Not like the banker gets to work bankers’ hours, right?”

“You know it. See you later.”

I start to tell Roy that I’ll put his plate in the microwave so he can have dinner when he gets home, but he’s already hung up.

“All right, Girls’ Dinner tonight!” I tell them, feigning excitement. “You know what that means!”

“Toothpicks instead of forks!” they tell each other happily. I don’t know why, but they love it when I cut up their dinner and they can stab every morsel with a toothpick instead of a utensil. Whatever floats their boat, I guess, and it makes getting dinner in their bellies easier on me, so that’s a win in my book.

I grab the shaker of toothpicks and rattle it a bit with a forced smile.

After dinner, baths, and two bedtime stories, I’m alone in the living room when I hear the garage door opening. Roy comes in, looking exhaustedand disheveled. “Hey, dinner in the kitchen?” He walks in front of the TV and straight for the plate I left him. No kiss—not even ahello,really.

I sigh, not surprised. I know. I’ve known for a while now. Months ago, I “ran into” one of Roy’s bank tellers at the grocery store, and she oh-so-casually mentioned the “new girl” who’d started at the bank. Even as she gently and subtly tried to warn me, I already knew. I just hadn’t decided what to do about it then. I still haven’t.

Everything’s perfect, except it isn’t.

“How was work?” I ask, following him into the kitchen. I’m almost begging him to tell me the truth. Or maybe daring him to.

“I swear, the tellers can’t fucking count. They know their numbers have to match before closing out the day, but they never do. If they were smarter, I’d think they were embezzling or something since they’re always wrong and I have to fix their shit.” He eats the dinner I made without comment or compliment as he blames the tellers—who’ve mostly worked at the bank longer than he has—for his late nights and time away.

He doesn’t ask about my day, about the girls, or anything else. We’re ships floating in the same sea, but I’m a cargo ship weighed down with responsibilities, to-do lists, and baggage, and he’s a speedboat zipping in and out of the harbor before rushing back out to do his own thing.

“I’m gonna shower,” he tells me after he’s finished eating. He puts his empty plate in the sink, and on some level, I feel like I should be thankful for that teeny-tiny gift, like it’s something he did for me. He walks past me but then takes a step back and presses a quick, dry kiss to my forehead. Wordlessly, he’s gone again.

Scrubbing the damn plate, I stare at the water running from the faucet until it blurs from the tears in my eyes. How did this happen to us? This isn’t what life was supposed to be like. As I stare at the water, something happens. It doesn’t look ... right. It’s not wrong in the way Roy and I are, but itiswrong. Like gravity doesn’t exist and the flow is going the opposite way from what it should be. I press against the fixture, trying to see if there’s something stuck to it, but it feels okay. I blink, feeling strange as I glance around the kitchen.

Things are wavy, like I’m going to faint. Or like it’s a time-warp scene in a movie. Like ... a dream ...

“Aaaah!”I sit straight up in bed, panting hard, my heart racing. “What the hell was that?” I mumble to myself. It was a dream, but it felt so real. I can still hear Sage and Olive singing, can feel Roy’s lips on my forehead, can taste the bile in my throat at the unexpected twists life sometimes takes.

“You okay?” a sleep-gruff voice says next to me.

I jerk my head to the side and see a dark-haired man who is definitely not Roy in bed with me. His sharp jaw is covered in scruff, his brows are furrowed down low, and one eye is slit open as he peers at me grumpily like I disturbed his sleep. Notably, he’s shirtless, exposing the bumpy ridges of his toned stomach and flat, brown man-nipples.

Screaming loud enough to rattle the stuff on the walls, I leap from the bed in panic. “Who are you? Why are you in my bed?” I demand as my feet hit the floor. Realizing I’m half-naked in only a T-shirt that grazes my thighs, I grab the blanket on the bed, forcefully yanking it toward me, which somehow makes the man tumble off the far side of the mattress.

He lands on the floor with a heavy thud as I wrap the blanket around me, covering as much of myself as possible with it. “Fuuuck. What the hell?” he groans.

“Oh my God! Did we have sex?” I whisper, though I’m not sure who’d hear me.

Confusion swirls through my head like fog over the lake on a fall morning. Where am I? Who am I? What’s happening?

The man peeks over the edge of the bed and holds his hands up, palms toward me in a calming motion. “Chill out, Hope. You had a nightmare. I came in to check on you, and you asked me to stay, which I did—on top of the covers. We didn’t have sex. I’m not exactly thetype of guy who takes advantage like that. You’re okay; you’re safe. The neighbors probably called the cops after that scream, though.” His lips lift in a teasing smile. He’s making jokes, but his voice is still rough, and that somehow settles me as my brain finally starts firing on all cylinders and remembers ... everything.

Roy. The wedding. The running. Ben. The pickles. The music. And also, the dream? Was it all a dream? I feel the loss of Sage and Olive viscerally, like they were real. But I also feel the loneliness I had in that kitchen. It was just as real too.

How could my brain do that to me?

I collapse to the bed, curling my legs underneath me. “It felt—” Whatever I was going to say is cut off as Ben stands up and comes around to sit on the edge of the bed, keeping a respectable distance between us, though the bed sinks beneath his weight, making me lean in closer to him. I look at his hands, which are clasped between his knees like he’s keeping them visible for my benefit. “I dreamed years into the future. Roy and I were married, with two daughters. He was cheating with a bank teller, and I was all alone.”

“Prophetic warning?” he suggests.

“Maybe.” I blink, seeing it all in my mind again. I’m not sure what to make of the dream—no, nightmare. The girls were a dream, but the rest was definitely something else entirely.

Realizing that I threw Ben to the floor in my attempt at escaping from the bed, I ask, “You okay?” I crinkle my nose as I look toward the far side of the bed. “I kinda forgot where I was and what’d happened for a second there.”

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