Page 31 of Together

“Just forget I called,” I tell him and prepare to hang up.

“Wait! I’m sorry, okay? I just… I didn’t expect this call, you know? It’s a little shocking. I wasn’t… I don’t know, okay?”

“You weren’t, what?”

“I don’t know!”

“Sure you do. You just don’t want to say it out loud.”

“Maybe that’s it. But this is a surprise for sure and I don’t know how I feel about it.”

“You’re telling me,” I mutter. Standing up, I walk to the kitchen and fill up a glass with water and take a sip.

“Why’d you really call me, Ashley?”

Because I’m scared out of my mind and my first instinct was to call Nik but that made me even more scared so I made this mistake.Of course, I don’t say this out loud. I’m definitely not ready to tell Zachary anything about Nik yet.

“I don’t know,” I say, throwing his words back at him.

“Sure you do,” he says, throwing mine right back.

I roll my eyes and take another drink.

“You’re right. I do know. I’m scared, Zachary. I can’t stop my mind from wandering and I have no idea what I’m doing. I need to hear someone who knows me tell me that I’m not going to be a shitty mother. I need someone to tell me that…” I trail off, not really knowing how to finish that sentence. What do I want to hear? That I made a mistake but that the mistake doesn’t define me? It kind of does. I’m going to be a mother now because of a mistake I made.

I hear a door shut and some rustling in the background. Zachary says quietly, “Ashley. Listen to me, okay? I probably did a very crappy job of telling you this while we were together but you’re amazing. You have one of the biggest hearts of anyone I know and you’re so loving, so generous. You’re…”

“Perfect?”

He chuckles. “Damn near. Kind of made it hard for me to feel worthy of you, if I’m being honest.”

“So me being a good person made you cheat on me?” I ask, not in a snarky way, but out of genuine curiosity. Do people only cheat on the good ones and not the jerks?

“Kind of, yes.”

This right here is why I called him. Because I might dislike him for cheating on me, but if nothing else, I knew I’d get some truth out of Zachary.

“Why did you never want me to call you Zach, by the way?”

He laughs at my randomness. “My sperm donor father always called me Zach. I wasn’t going to completely change my name but I can’t stand hearing the shortened version because it reminds me of him.”

“You never told me that.”

“I never told you a lot of things,” he says, almost cryptically.

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Ashley, you’re intimidating to be around. You’re so put together.”

I can’t help it, I burst out laughing. “What the heck are you talking about? I’m so far from being put together.”

He snorts. “Right. You’re so full of shit and you know it.”

Even though he can’t see me, I wrinkle my nose. “Explain to me how I’m intimidating. That doesn’t even make sense.”

“You’re… Ashley. You budget to the penny, your taxes are done within three days of when you’ve received all the paperwork, plan every detail of your day practically down to the minute, and keep your house looking spotless.” I look around the house and wonder what in the world he’s talking about. I know I didn’t make my bed this morning, there are two loads of clothes unfolded and sitting in the laundry baskets, there’s a thin layer of dust on my TV stand, and the not-so-thin layer of dust on the ceiling fan blades. “Your fridge is more organized than a five-star chef’s.” That’s not true, either. I haven’t cleaned my fridge in a month.

“I’ve never seen a car that looks like it came out of the showroom constantly. It’s never dirty inside or out.” Also not true. I haven’t vacuumed it out in a month, either.

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