Page 31 of Sleepover

Chapter 14

Elle

It’s Friday afternoon. Madden is up in his room packing a bag for a weekend with his dad. I’m working on a profile of a local nurse midwife, sitting at the dining room table with my laptop.

Well, I’m supposed to be working on that profile.

I’ve got a second file open, and I’m working on my super-secret project. It’s so secret that it will probably never see the light of day. It’s a book about divorce. At first it was just me writing down things that happened, like notes to myself so I wouldn’t forget, but then I realized it had turned into kind of a memoir crossed with a self-help book.

It was so damn therapeutic to write about how it felt to find out the truth. How I nudged the mouse on Trevor’s computer one day while searching for a tax form I needed, and his computer sprang to life, open to a long Facebook Messenger exchange between him and Helen. How I tried not to read it, but words kept jumping off the screen at me. How much longer do you think until you can tell her?

Not too much longer.

When I saw that, I thought about movies where the Other Woman kept wanting her lover to leave his wife, and he kept not doing it. Maybe this is like that, I thought. Maybe if I don’t say anything, eventually Trevor will just come back to me.

Then I realized how pathetic that was, keeping quiet and hoping I’d win in the end, and I couldn’t do it. I had to tell him what I’d seen. But even then, there was a part of me that hoped he’d tell me it didn’t mean what it looked like.

That didn’t happen.

I cried for weeks before I made the decision to stop crying and embrace who I was now. A single mom sharing custody of her great son, a woman who was lucky enough to have a career to come back to when her marriage fell apart. I didn’t make myself sound like a hero. I wrote it as truthfully as I could, detailing how the first days after I stopped crying I still felt like I was dragging around a corpse behind me (except the corpse was me, my actual body; it just felt that heavy). And then gradually I got lighter and started to actually enjoy myself. Until finally some things—like Trevor’s yappiness—were funny.

Today I’m writing about the night I slept with Sawyer.

Because weird as it is to say, I think something turned around that night. I reclaimed another piece of myself, the sexy part. The fun part. And even if nothing ever happens again with Sawyer, I’ll always know he gave me that back.

Writing about that night means, of course, thinking about that night, and I find myself dreamily recalling the moment when he reached his hand out and brushed his thumb across my lower lip.

That man has the off switch for my common sense. If he actually had touched me the other day after our meeting in Mr. McKibben’s office, I probably would have ended up making out with him in a deserted elementary school classroom. Good thing he didn’t.

I write a few more lines, then sit back and admire my handiwork.

Hattie thinks I should try to get it published. She’s read some bits and she says it’s really touching and sometimes downright hilarious. But I told her that no one wants to read a book about a suburban divorced thirty-something. Anyway, remember Eat Pray Love? There are a million memoir-meets-self-help books about stuff, including divorce. So I just keep adding bits, mostly for my own enjoyment.

I get up and step over to the window, ostensibly just to stretch and take a break, but actually because I need to enjoy the view. This ritual has become part of my writing routine.

Sawyer, cordless power tool in one hand, is standing on a ladder on his side of the fence, attaching lattice panels to the top of our side of the fence.

The fence is a gorgeous piece of work.

So is he.

The sun is touching his dark hair, which gleams. The fierce look of concentration on his face sends a pleasant shiver up my spine. His T-shirt stretches taut across his pecs and biceps as he moves and shifts, and his forearms are bare—well muscled, dusted with dark hair, beautiful to watch in action.

I should stop acting like a stalker and go have a conversation with him. I force myself to move away from behind the dining room curtain and head out into the yard. As I emerge from the house, he shuts off the electric screwdriver and raises his head, nodding in greeting.

“Hey,” I call.

“Hey.”

It’s funny how I’ve stopped hearing his curtness as rudeness or lack of interest. The more I get to know him, the more I understand that he’s just like that. Not a lot of words. But he’s a good listener, and he cares about other people.

I approach the fence and touch the lattice panel next to where he’s working. The boards of the main fence, beautiful but rugged in much the same way as Sawyer himself, run horizontal. “This is a sweet fence. But I thought you said it was going to be plain old pickets, like the old one?”

He frowns. “If I built a picket fence, there’d be a front and a back side, and one of us would have to look at the back.”

“Why didn’t you just face the back toward me?”

He shrugs. “Didn’t want to. After I didn’t ask your permission to tear the fence down, didn’t seem right.”

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