Page 12 of Stay Away from Him

Maybe, Melissa reflected, it washerselfshe was afraid of. Afraid she couldn’t trust herself in a new relationship so soon after her marriage had fallen apart.

But then she pushed down further, beneath the fear, and found something else alongside it. Tangled up with it.

Excitement.

Melissa opened her eyes and responded.

Soon.

Soon?Thomas replied.

Yes,she texted back,soon. I just need more time.

It took a few seconds for his final message to come through. When it did, the back of her neck tingled.

I’ll be waiting.

Chapter 4

Melissa might have left things like that with Thomas forever—might have left himwaiting—had not the very next day, a Monday, been so absolutely terrible, making the prior evening’s flirtations take on an idealized glow, seeming a fairy tale in retrospect. A storybook place Melissa felt desperate to get back to.

There was, to begin with, Bradley’s first day at a summer daycare whose tuition Melissa couldn’t afford—except you had to spend money to make money, and if Melissa was going to find a job and start paying down all her legal debt from the divorce, she needed to get her son in some childcare first, bridging the gap to kindergarten in the fall. Bradley was an anxious kid, didn’t like new situations, and as Melissa had feared, he cried and clung to her legs at drop-off. The staff had to pull him away from her, and then he screamed as she walked away, practically crying herself.

After that, she botched a job interview that Lawrence had helped her set up, a bookkeeping job at a carpeting installation company. The owner interviewed her, fat and imperious behind his desk in a shabby, cluttered office, and when he demanded to know why she hadn’t had a job in a while, she somehow ended up telling him the whole sordid story: bad marriage, motherhood,expensive divorce. At the end of it, the man smirked, sat back, and asked her why she wanted this job. Melissa hated him, knew that he was the kind of boss who belittled his employees, that if she ended up sitting with him in this cramped office, he’d spend the days sniffing around her, finding excuses to put his sweaty hands on her shoulders, her neck, the small of her back. Before she could stop herself, she blurted out the truth.

“I don’twantit. Ineedit.”

***

And so, when Melissa unexpectedly ran into Thomas, she experienced the sight of his face as a welcome relief. She’d come into a coffee shop and ordered the sweetest thing on the menu, an absurd concoction of coffee and milk and caramel, whipped cream and sprinkles, hoping the bomb of sugar on her tongue would somehow erase the events of the morning. The barista shouted her name when she slid the drink across the counter, and it was as Melissa grabbed it that Thomas came up behind her.

“Melissa?”

She turned, and there he was.

“I thought that was you!” he said, gripping her by both elbows in a sort of half-hug. His blue eyes sparkled, an ice-white smile breaking across his face and dimpling his lightly tanned cheeks.

Melissa was so happy to see Thomas that she found herself wanting to fall against his chest, to close the small remaining space between them and let herself be enveloped by his sinewy arms. All that held her back was the hot cup in her hands, the fear of spilling it. But not any fear ofThomas, she was surprised to realize—no fear of the things she now knew about him, the things he’d been accused of having done. The events of the morning had brought her face-to-face with the realities of being divorced, of being single,of being alone: the thousand small humiliations and indignities of protecting and providing for her son without anyone to help her. No one strong and soft and kind to stand beside her through it, to comfort her in the face of it. That was precisely what Thomas seemed to be, just then, and in that moment she forgot every reason she had not to want him.

“I can’t believe you’re here,” she blurted, which seemed, as she said it, a colossally dumb thing to say in a way she couldn’t quite pinpoint. “I’m a mess.”

Thomas squinted at her, cocking his head in what looked like genuine confusion. “What are you talking about? You look lovely. Why so dressed up?”

“Oh,” she said, looking down at her interview outfit, a tight black pencil skirt and high heels. “I had a job interview.”

“How did it go?”

“Pretty terrible,” she admitted.

“Oh, no. I’m sorry to hear that. I’m sure it went better than you think.”

“I doubt it,” Melissa said.

At her back, the barista shouted out another name, and an annoyed-looking guy in a baseball cap squeezed by Thomas and Melissa to get his drink.

“Hey, would you like to sit with us?” Thomas asked.

“Us?”

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