Page 12 of Nailed (Dad Bod Contracting 3)
I shake my head, struggling for words. “Wow. I mean just…wow. Was it real?”
He nods. “I called her. She told me it was the only way she’d survive, that she had to face her demons on her own, and she had to know she didn’t have me to keep fixing things for her.” He rubs his face. “And I realized she was right. I’d gone bankrupt—or all but—trying to save her. So…I signed the papers. The day the divorce was final, I got a call from Jesse saying that James’s wife had died, and that he needed us. Well, considering I was basically at a dead-end anyway, I packed my shit, put my furniture in storage, and moved in with James, Jesse, and Franco. I went to work for James and, eventually, put my life back together again.”
He tosses back his beer, and then glances at me.
“So,” he says. “Your turn.”
Chapter 3
I stir my drink with the little black straw—I’d been so wrapped up in Ryder’s story that I’d forgotten to drink it, and now the ice is melted and the lime is floating soggily on the surface.
“My story is sort of similar,” I say. “Just less…”
“Batshit crazy?” Ryder suggests.
I nod. “Yeah, pretty much. I dated some disasters in high school and college—mistakes and assholes, bad boys and bastards. Think of the girl who seems to have a nose for the worst possible guy she could pick…that was me. So then I met Paul. He was nice. Not a bad boy, not an asshole, not a drunk or a drug addict.”
“Sounds great on paper,” Ryder says with a grin. “What was wrong with him?”
I poke at the lime in my drink. “It kind of sounds lame, now that I’ve heard your story.” I laugh. “I should’ve gone first.”
Ryder chuckles. “Let me guess: mood swings?”
I nod. “Yep. The official diagnosis, obtained during our belated and ill-fated attempt at marriage therapy, was bipolar disorder with narcissistic tendencies.”
Ryder winces. “Ouch.”
“Yeah. So basically, everything was about him. When he was depressed, it was my fault and my responsibility to make him feel better, and when he was feeling good, he was invincible and perfect and expected me to go along with all his crazy ideas or I was a bad wife.”
“What was his brand of crazy?” Ryder asks.
I laugh—bitterly, yes, but with amusement gleaned from hindsight. “Oh man, you name it. He woke up in the middle of the night about six months after we got married and decided he needed a tattoo, so we drove through the night into Chicago and got matching tattoos.”
He looks me over. “So where’s yours?”
I snicker. “I managed to talk him into letting me get a tiny little infinity symbol on my left hipbone. By tiny, I mean it could’ve fit on my index finger.”
“Can I see it?” Ryder asks with a smirk.
“No, because I got it removed the day the divorce was finalized.” I angle my left hip upward, shove down the waistband of my skirt and point at the faint outline where it had been. “That’s all that’s left.”
“That’s not all that crazy,” Ryder says. “So far, I win.”
I cackle. “Oh, you’re gonna win, no question about that.” I wave a hand. “He bought a motorcycle, once. We were all but broke, because he was between jobs and I was working three jobs to make ends meet. He was on one of what I called his wild hair swings, where he would get a wild hair up his ass about something. That time it was thinking he’d…I don’t know, become a motorcycle racer or something. So he takes the money we’d saved—I’d saved—so we could afford a down payment on a modest house that didn’t have a leaky roof and wasn’t surrounded by crack dens, and bought a crotch rocket.”
Ryder tries unsuccessfully to suppress a laugh. “Wow. What a dick.”
“Yeah, and he’d bought it used from some guy he’d met at a bar, so there was no returning it.” I sigh. “He crashed it two weeks later and broke his leg.”
“That sucks.”
“Yeah, and he totaled the bike, and we didn’t have insurance, so we were out the money I’d saved, the motorcycle was trashed, and we owed a bunch of money for his hospital bill.” I shake my head. “That’s about average for Paul on his wild hair part of the cycle. He’d get a crazy idea and spend money we didn’t have on something we didn’t need. He’d drag me out of bed in the middle night, get himself hurt, and put us more into debt.”
“And his downswing?”
I take a long sip of my watery drink. “Basically he became the most morose, depressed, verbally and emotionally abusive asshole to ever walk the earth.” I pause. “And, if we’re telling the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth…he was also insanely sexually demanding during his downswing. When he was manic, he rarely even thought about me or sex—he was too excited about whatever his latest cockamamy idea was. But when he was depressed, he became convinced the only thing that could make him happy again was me…only, it never worked. It just made him more depressed and angry—usually because I’d done something wrong. I came too soon, or too late, or I failed to read his mind about what position he wanted…” I blush, trailing off. “I shouldn’t be telling you this.”
