Page 85 of The True Love Experiment

“Yes?” I say, grinning. “Unless there’s another wife somewhere in an attic.”

He laughs. “It was at the courthouse. It was very simple.”

“How old were you?”

“When we got married? Twenty-two.”

“Oh. Babies.”

“Yeah. And baby.” He smiles at me. “She was pregnant.”

“Oh.”

Connor nods, rolling to his back and tucking one arm beneath his head. A bicep pops and I pretend that I’m not dying to touch it, because we’re having a serious conversation. “We’d been really good friends for a couple years, but only been lovers for about six months by then. I think I already knew we weren’t a great fit romantically, but it was a fun and easy hookup. I knew she’d had a thing for me almost since we first met. I mean, looking back I think I worried that I’d fuck up our group dynamic if I ended things.”

“That’s rough.”

“So then she finds out she’s pregnant, and she wants to keep the baby—which, totally her call, I never had any issue with her making whatever choice worked for her. But since my own father was absent and”—he sighs—“such a dick, really, I wanted to do the right thing, and immediately proposed.”

“Ah,” I say.

He shifts to his side, toying with a strand of my hair again. “Yeah.” I sense this isn’t a story he tells very often because he’s taking longer than he normally would to put the words together. “It was nice at first. Stevie was a really easy baby. I loved the family Nat and I had made. I knew we would be good parents.”

I make a sound of understanding.

“But I wasn’t ever in love with her, and it got harder to pretend. I was sick with the decision about whether it was worse to stay, or leave and potentially make all the same mistakes my dad made. I never wanted Stevie to feel the way I did.”

“Right.”

“I’d love to say I talked about this with her,” he says, “but I didn’t.I loved her, but I wasn’t in love with her, and in hindsight I was just looking for a way to make her stop loving me. I was immature and not very evolved.”

When he says this, I think I know. But the heat of his body and the sweetness of his fingers drawing delicate vines across my collarbones makes it feel like his next words are spoken with invisible ink.

“I cheated on her.”

He lets the sentence sit and it penetrates me like poison, first with a sting at the surface and then with a flashing burn as it takes root inside, ulcerating.

“I have no defense.” I feel him looking at my face, but I can only fix my gaze on a tiny scar on his shoulder. My heart is squeezing so tight I can barely swallow. I am all locked up inside. “We got in a fight while I was at work and I just… didn’t go home. I went out, met a woman at a bar—whatever, it’s such a boring story. I knew if I stayed out all night I couldn’t lie about it the next morning. I sat in my car until the sun came up. Nat knew as soon as she saw me. And yeah,” he says quietly, “that definitely ended things.”

I’m still unable to figure out how to make sound. I nod numbly.

“Maybe it would have happened eventually. We’ll never know. It was the worst thing I’ve ever done,” he says. “I’ve done a lot of work on myself. A lot of therapy. Nat has forgiven me, but it took a long time.” The shoulder I’m staring at lifts in a shrug. “It’s why I don’t think I can stomach casual relationships anymore. Like, I don’t even remember the woman’s name or her face. What a vile thing to do.” He exhales slowly. “That feeling has never really left me.”

I hear what he’s saying; I even hear the emotional weight of hiswords, the regret and the self-flagellation and the sincerity. But the contradiction of him marrying Nat to do the right thing and ending it in the cruelest possible way feels like a hot and cold wire, twisted around my windpipe.

Suddenly I’m up,

I’m standing,

I’m searching through my open bag for my clothes.

Underwear, joggers, T-shirt. My joints move like they’re programmed, muscle memory, locating everything and panic-dressing myself in the dark.

Connor pushes up. “Fizzy.”

“I’m just realizing people are probably still down at the bar.” I laugh like,Duh me!

His pause feels as deep as a canyon. “It’s three o’clock in the morning.”

---