Page 74 of The Wrong Side of the Law

“Huh,” she says. “I think I knew that, somehow.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Intuition? Maybe? Partly it’s this place,” she says. “You’ve been here for a few years, but it hardly feels lived in. It’s spotless.”

“Cleaning lady on Wednesdays,” I say, with a shrug that sends a fascinating wave of motion rippling through her body next to me.

“No, not that it’s clean,” Emily says, lifting herself up on one elbow and looking down at me. “No. There’s nothing here that says anything about you. It’s still a model home, except for that one spot on the couch where you sit and stare out at the ocean. You haven’t ever really moved ahead with your life. You just… you work and then you sleep.”

I’m too surprised by her insights to say much of anything in response.

Emily traces fingertips lightly over my shoulders, down my chest and stomach.

“Well, work and sleep and the gym,” she says. “You had to work hard to get abs like that. But you don’t seem to… I don’t know exactly what I’m trying to say.” She pauses, lips pursed in the deep shadows of her hair. “You put that work in for yourself, I guess. Not for anyone else.”

“You got me there,” I concede, and Emilyeeps!as I use some of that hard-earned strength to clamp her tightly against my cheat and roll onto my back.

“Hey! That’s not fair!” she squeaks. She bats at my shoulders ineffectually for a moment, but it turns quickly to a kneading motion that creeps down to my chest. “Although,” she says diffidently, “if you’d shown me this a few weeks ago, it might have saved us both a bunch of time and frustration.”

“Oh, please!” I laugh. “You’re not that shallow.”

“No, I’m not,” she says, lightly caressing my cheek with the backs of her fingers. “I’m not, and neither are you.”

Emily slides back down to lay beside me, again using my shoulder as a pillow. Her fingertips still trace slowly over my chest. It’s an easy silence, a comfortable one, but it doesn’t last for too long.

“You’re probably right, though.” I stare blankly up at the ceiling, idly twisting a lock of her hair around my finger. “I don’t think I ever really have moved on, but it’s… I don’t know that I was ever fully in the relationship in the first place. If that makes sense?”

The words just stumble out spontaneously, surprising me. I’m never this candid, this open.

“I was in love with her. I think I was, anyway. But… every single time there was a choice to be made about work or home, I picked work. I had responsibilities, duties. The things that we wanted, those could wait. Duty and responsibility came first.”

Emily’s head moves against my shoulder as she nods silently.

“I thought I was building our future,” I say, then chuckle harshly. “I guess I was, in a sense, but not the way I thought.”

“She got tired of waiting for that future,” Emily says. “She wanted to livenow, notsomeday.”

“Yeah.”

When I look back on the choices that I’ve made, I know that they weren’t always the right ones. They weren’t always the best possible decision. Yet the combined total of them, the sum of all the wrong turns, has led me to this point. I wouldn’t be laying here in the darkness with this gorgeous naked redhead if I had made all the choices that—at the time—would have been the right ones.

“Knowing what you know now, would you change something?”

“I… don’t think I would.” Somehow it feels like a weight has just lifted off my chest, to admit that. “I truly don’t think I’d change the past. And…”

“And… what?”

I hesitate before continuing. I could be sabotaging our relationship right from the start, but if there’s one thing that I’ve learned from my mistakes, it’s that I don’t want to fuck over someone that matters to me. If I’m going to let another woman into my life, I need to be sure she understands who and what I really am. But how to explain it?

“I don’t think I’d change the past,” I repeat, then take a deep breath. “And I don’t know that I’ve changed because of it. Or that Ishouldchange.”

I regret my bluntness when I feel Emily’s body stiffen against mine and slowly back away, opening up a gap between us.

“Don’t worry, boss,” she says. “I know it was just a one-time thing. We both needed to… I dunno, knock the cobwebs off. Or something.”

Her tone is light, but I wince at the edge of hurt running just below the surface. It’s an act. Emily Wilson is not impulsive enough to be a sleep-and-run sort of girl.

“Emily. Wait. I’m… hold up,” I say. “I think I’m not saying it quite- Look, do you think we both just had an urge and we acted on it? We just had to get something out of our systems? Is that all this meant to you?” I ask.

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