Page 78 of Happy After All

“I’ve known you for three years,” I say. Almost three years. Two and a half. Close enough. This is ridiculous. It’s ridiculous for him to act like I haven’t seen him every summer for three years, and now again just four months after he was here last. It is ridiculous for him to act like after we slept together, after we spent the day together yesterday, that I won’t care about him.

“I’m just a guy you fucked,” he says. “Once.”

I know him in many ways. That’s the thing.

And I’m tired of pretending that I don’t.

I’m tired of pretending I feelnothingfor him just because this is temporary and at the end of the month he’s leaving and not coming back. He’s the one being absurd, not me.

Not only could I write this, I would write it. The hero pushing someone away, holding them at a distance by reducing what they shared—this beautiful, revelatory experience—tofucking once.

He’s trying to hurt me. I won’t let him.

“No. You’re not.” I want to say more. I want to do something to bridge this yawning gap between us. I shouldn’t. Because he is a customer. That should be all. It just isn’t.

Maybe it’s my own pain recognizing his.

Or maybe it’s my overactive imagination. Or maybe it really is just that he’s handsome.

I can’t be sure. But what I do know is that I know a man in pain when I see him.

I know what it’s like to feel like you’re drowning and have nobody there to grab hold of. So even though he isn’t reaching out, I can’t leave him thrashing there.

I just can’t.

I sit on the edge of his bed, and I set my cake off to the side. “Why do you come back here every year? You said you didn’t choose it, but I have no idea what that means.”

I recognize that he wouldn’t answer this question if he weren’t drunker than the armadillos we don’t have here in the California desert.

But I don’t care.

I want to know.

He looks away and sets the cake plate down on his desk. Then he sits heavily in the chair, his legs spread wide, large hands on his muscular thighs. He is frozen like that for a long moment.

And then he finally looks up at me.

“Because I didn’t choose this place. My wife chose it.”

Chapter Eighteen

The Dark Secret—one or both protagonists commonly have a deep wound that may be hidden from those around them. The revelation of the dark secret can bring the protagonists closer or tear them further apart.

My entire world crumbles.

Hiswife.

That is the last thing I ever expected him to say. That is the last thing I expected to be ... possible.

A wife.

Does he have children? I can’t imagine it.

Or maybe I can. I think of the way his mouth softened into a smile when he watched Emma, Sofia, and Angel running around in the yard. When Emma called him a pirate.

Am I so stupid? Did I miss a thousand obvious signs?

I try to imagine him going to bed with the same woman every night and holding her close, but it makes me sick.

---