Page 84 of Sleepover

Chapter 41

Elle

He rolls away from me, taking the condom with him, and goes to discard it in the bathroom. For a moment I just luxuriate, stretching out in the warm sheets, feeling the reverberations in my body of our intimate connection, the bonelessness, the full, sated sensation.

Sex with Sawyer is amazing.

Everything with Sawyer is amazing.

Starting slowly, quietly, that little bubble of giddiness rises up in me. The one that, if I don’t try to push it down and squash it, might, just might, tell me that I’m falling in love.

And I don’t squash it.

I let myself trust it, and it fills up my whole chest and does a little ecstatic dance in my bones.

Maybe, maybe, I could let myself do this.

I make up my mind to tell Sawyer how I feel. To ask him how he feels, if there’s room in his heart for something new. Something lasting.

Meanwhile, I start, slowly, to pull myself together—I’m going to need to go home; I can’t be here in the morning when the boys wake up—and once I’ve found all my clothes, I begin picking up the books I knocked off Sawyer’s nightstand. Most of them are just paperback novels, but there’s one lying open on the ground, a spiral notebook full of handwriting, and I Swear. To. God. I. Don’t. Mean. To. But I can’t help seeing the first line of the entry spread out on the page in front of me.

Dear Lucy, I love you. I will probably always love you.

My stomach lurches.

I know I shouldn’t, but I start reading.

It’s dated six months ago. Before I met him. So that’s okay.

Except my racing pulse and the sick feeling in my gut tell me that it’s not.

Because I know, now: I am in love with Sawyer. And I want him to be in love with me.

The journal is a letter to her, his dead wife. He tells her everything that happened that day. What he had for breakfast, funny things Jonah said, even a question Jonah asked him. He asks her to help him figure out how to answer. He asks her to help him figure out what to do about moving out of the house they shared. He tells her what makes him happy, what hurts him, how much he misses her.

I can’t bear to lose any more pieces of the life we had together.I am going to be one of those men who never gets over his dead wife.

My heart is pounding, and I feel sick. And I know I shouldn’t, but I can’t help it: I start paging forward, slowly at first, then quicker and quicker until I reach the last entry, which, like every other one, begins:

Dear Lucy, I love you. I will probably always love you.

It’s dated three days ago. Friday. The night before we went to the wedding.

He still loves her. He will probably always love her.

I hear the toilet flush, water run, and I immediately drop the journal back on the floor with the other books and go to the mirror over the dresser to begin straightening my hair. I am shaking all over. I can’t stop.

“You’re going to blow my mind every time, aren’t you?” he asks, coming out of the bathroom, grinning at me.

And then, pausing, stopping: “What? Elle, what? What’s wrong?”

I should have known I wasn’t going to be able to pretend that nothing had happened. He follows my gaze to the journal on the floor. Picks it up. Clutches it to his chest.

If there had been any doubt in my mind about the meaning of the journal, seeing that possessive gesture erases it.

I turn away.

“Elle.”

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