Page 78 of The Tryst

“I’m over it,” I say with a shrug that I hope comes off as careless.

“But it still stings?” she asks gently, seeing through my act immediately.

I don’t say anything at first. This kind of vulnerability with a woman is new to me. Hell, it’s new with friends, with family, with anyone but Finn. Vulnerability is not an emotion I like to traffic in too much.

But I invited her into this conversation. I ought to let her in all the way. “I suppose,” I mutter.

Her expression is warm as she says, “I know that was hard for you to say. But thank you. I want to knowyou,” she adds, then bobs a hopeful shoulder. “Since, maybe in Connecticut we can get to know each other.”

My heart lurches. “I want to know you too,” I say, then clasp our fingers together and return to the tale. “Anyway, my parents lived paycheck to paycheck. I had to earn my own dough and find scholarship money to go to college. I was herea lotworking. All day. I’d have swim team practice all week, meets on Saturday morning, then I worked the rest of the weekend,” I say.

She listens attentively. “That’s a lot to balance, Nick.”

“It was, but my friends and I—the waiters, the caddies, the club attendants—we had fun after work. Hung out in that spot where you took me tonight.”

“You knew that spot,” she says, a smile breaking through over this shared history.

“I did, beautiful. Bet you came here with your dad, bet he took his lovely family out to lunch, bet you and your friends sneaked off to explore the grounds,” I say.

The smile widens. “We did. But I never took a boythere.”

I return her smile, feeling a little like I have an ace up my sleeve. “And I never took a girl there,” I say, playing my card.

“Really?”

“I swear,” I say.

“So I get a first of yours?” She sounds too delighted, and I want to stay here in this happy, flirty place with her all night.

“You sure did,” I say, reaching for her hand and running my thumb along her index finger. She shivers.

But that’s my cue to stop. I can’t get caught up in her and me, in our sweet nothings. I clear my expression so I can focus on the serious story I need to tell her. “Anyway, like I was saying, I met Rose here. Waited on her family. And then later, when Rose found out she was pregnant, her parents kind of took over all my choices.” A flash of self-loathing hits me square in the chest. Those hard days return to me in sharp relief. I’d fucked up. Big time. “Which made sense. They were rich. They had means. They had nannies. I was heading to a community college, hoping to land a swimming scholarship to a state school, which I did. But Rose had already been admitted to Yale. And her parents pulled me aside after the lunch service one afternoon. I was in my waiter’s uniform, and her dad said to me in a quiet hallway behind the clubhouse,Rose is done slumming it with you. And you will not ruin our daughter’s chances at Yale.”

My face is red hot, all over again.

Layla reaches for my hand across the table. It feels good—her touch as I tell this story.

“He saidshe will finish college like all Bancrofts do.And if you want to go to school too, we will raiseherchild while she’s at Yale. He’ll have our name. He’ll be a Bancroft.”

“Oh, Nick. That’s what you meant by their rules,” she says, frowning.

“Yeah,” I say hollowly, scrubbing my free hand across my jaw, like that’ll erase the shame I felt then. But time has healed that wound, since that’s what time does. “They barely let me see my own kid when I was in college, right after he was born. I didn’t have much choice in the matter. The only way either one of us could go to school was if the Bancrofts raised David in those early years. Rose and I were lucky, I suppose, to have that option.”

“I understand what you mean,” she says.

“I wouldn’t quite call it a Faustian bargain, but I had to go along with their wishes if I was going to carve out a life someday for myself, for my son, for the mother of my child.”

“That’s hard. You made the only choice you could make,” she says.

I’m glad she sees it that way. That’s how it felt to me. I had no other options. “I just wanted to pay the bills, make my own way. Take care of my family,” I say. I don’t share this story with just anyone. Hell, I don’t think I even told Millie. But I want Layla to understand me. To know why I saidthis is wrong. “So that’s why David and I don’t have the same last name. When Rose and I graduated from college and finally got married, there was still no relenting. A name was a little thing. I didn’t push. I just said thank you, then moved into a small apartment with my wife and my kid. Until Rose and I both finally admitted we were a terrible match.”

Layla links her fingers through mine. “That’s a lot to go through,” she says.

But she’s been through a lot too. “We all have stuff to deal with. I’m just glad he’s a good kid. I’m glad I have a good relationship with him. We’re in the same city again. We work together and see each other a lot. I don’t want to mess it up, Layla,” I say, and I sound desperate.

Desperate to have it all.

But I can’t.

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