Page 58 of Indulgence
He shook his head as my frustration reached an all-time high. “What I’m saying is that I don’t think there should be any blame at all. We should be working on learning a valuable lesson and putting it in the past.” He ran his hand through his hair. “At first, I was okay accepting your anger because I felt like I’d wronged you. But did I really? I made a mistake and was dealing with one of the most potentially life-altering situations I’d ever had to deal with, and I was doing it alone. Without my wife, without my best friend, without my partner. Did you ever stop to think about whatIwas coping with this week while you holed up at Penelope’s? No, you didn’t. I needed you to stand by my side, and you didn’t. You left. Where was my understanding and support when I needed it?”
My lips parted, my mouth opened, but nothing came out.
Matteo sighed, defeat overtaking his rigidness. “You need to work toward letting me down from the cross, Nat. I’ve owned my lapse in judgment. I’ve told you how I feel. It’s your turn to acknowledge those feelings instead of dismissing or invalidating them with your own shit. I know you were scared. I know that you think that our two worlds mixed, but there were never two different worlds. It’s all one life, and when you can finally see that, maybe you’ll see the destruction happening. Don’t ruin our marriage over one mistake.”
A tear slipped down my cheek. Matt’s hand twitched as if he wanted to wipe it away, but he didn’t come any closer to me. “We’re supposed to work as a team to find a solution. Let me know when you’re ready to do that. Maybe when I get back from Florida, you’ll be ready to be the woman I love again. ”
Wait, what?“You’re going to Florida?”
“Oh, yeah, by the way, I received a promotion to senior consultant two days ago.” His jaw clenched as I tried to digest his words.Promotion. “I head out in two hours to meet with a new client. Thanks for being there to celebrate with me. I’ve only been waiting for this for years.”
He was leaving town. He finally climbed his way to the position he’d wanted for two years. “Senior consultant?” I asked as he took a few steps back toward the front door. He just nodded, his back to me as he grabbed the knob. “How long will you be gone?”
“A couple of days,” he replied as he opened the door. When he turned backed to me, his eyes seemed haunted and despondent. “I’ll give you a call when I return. Maybe then we can start to act like we’re a married couple who loves each other again.”
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Natalie
I’d been trying to makesense of the kaleidoscope of random thoughts and dichotomous emotions swirling inside me since Matteo left that morning. Everything I thought and felt kept butting together, making a bigger mess.
My mind was a muddled sea of confusion, and I had no one to help me work through it. No one could work through this jungle of a mess but me.
Stress, anxiety, fear, panic, and anger. I’d felt them all for the last week. Mostly at the same time. But they had become amplified to a whole other degree.
I’d never seen Matt the way I did earlier. He was callous and enraged. All I wanted was to be overjoyed. He had a new, well-deserved title. There was no longer a threat with Brooke.
Except, I couldn’t process his words or rejoice in the baby that is no longer a possibility. Everything swan around in my head distorted and chaotically. I needed to make it all stop before I went insane. My job was the only thing keeping me grounded lately, so I threw myself into it. Work had become my safe haven, and that was where my attention needed to be today.
I didn’t even mind when Bastien lost his mind over his brushes or his wobbly easel or his paint colors being wrong. He spent an hour ranting about orange, and I was right there next to him, hanging on his every outlandish accusation about the supplier and sympathetically nodding my agreement when he decided it must be someone breaking in and switching his paints to sabotage his work. Focusing on someone else’s issues was far easier than dealing with my own.
The paranoia was new for Bastien, but I rolled with it until Annetta stepped in and started yelling at him in French.
He stopped complaining after that.
A text came through from Penelope.
Penelope:Bateau 7:00pm. Dinner isn’t optional. Norah and I will meet you there.
I knew immediately that they were staging an intervention of some kind. No way was Pen staying quiet after hearing everything that happened with Matt this morning.
My palms were sweaty when I parked at the curb and fed the meter. The day has started to catch up with me and I was exhausted. Even my hair hurt. Between Matteo, Bastien, the screaming in French, and my own subconscious, I felt as though I’d been through war. Battle after battle. I didn’t know if I had another one in me for Pen and Norah.
Norah was waiting for me in the lobby when I arrived. She linked her arm through mine and guided me to the table. “Pen already ordered us some wine.”
“Thank god.” I breathed a sigh of small relief.
Norah looked me over with sad eyes. She was never one to hold back the truth. “You look worn thin, babe.”
“I feel thin,” I said as we joined Pen in the booth. “I feel like I am living in this . . . this . . .” I struggled for a way to put it all into words. “Cloud? Fog? As if I’m running in place and can’t move.”
As Norah and I slid into the booth, the waiter arrived with three glasses of red wine. “Can you bring over a whole bottle?” I asked, knowing we were going to need it. Or at least I was. He nodded and walked away just as I realized that I couldn’t actually drink the entire bottle because my car was here and calling my husband for a ride wasn’t an option. I couldn’t ask him to come get me or have him bring me here in the morning. God, that was so symbolic of the current state of our marriage—in two totally different places, literally and metaphorically. That thought stung deep.
Sliding the one glass I’d be allowed to have closer, I began to ramble and couldn’t stop. “It’s taking so much energy for me to try to keep my shit together. I’m mad. I’m sad. I’m hurt. I’m lonely. I miss him, but I still can’t look at him the same.”
“It’s okay to feel all those things.” Norah comments as she passes me a menu. “You are allowed to be all those things. What isn’t okay is living in them. You need to move through them.”
“After this morning,” I tell her. “I think it’s clear that I don’t know how to do that. I don’t know why his anger pisses me off and makes my guard go up. I don’t know why he can’t see how hard this is for me. That I couldn’t just hold his hand and say that everything will be okay while we wait for word on his role of baby-daddy. I couldn’t.”
