Page 89 of My Favorite Bad Decision
“Okay,” I whisper. “I’ll be here.”
I hang up and turn to him. “Maren is on the elevator,” I gasp. He grabs his shirt and shoes and looks around him frantically.
“I’ll go down the stairs?” he asks.
When I nod, he presses a quick kiss to the top of my head and runs out the door with his shirt and shoes in hand while I race to my room for a robe, snatching up the boxers and socks Miller left on my floor and shoving them under the bed just as I hear Maren letting herself in.
Her eyes are swollen from crying, but she comes to a dead stop when she enters. “Is someone else here?” she asks.
“What?” I reply, my voice weak. “No. So what happened?”
“This apartmentreeksof sex,” she says, wiping her eyes. She steps forward, past the kitchen, and points at my room off to the left. “That is a sex bed, and you have sex hair.”
“I have no idea what you are referring to.”
“Was it Blake?” she asks, swallowing and forcing a smile. “He was so pissed last week. You must be incredibly good in bed if you were able to win him back that fast.”
I lead her to the couch. “It wasn’t anyone. Tell me what happened.”
Her shoulders sag. “I just…Harvey was such a dick over dinner and such a dick on the way home, and all I could think was about how nice Miller was when I dated him. I mean, I know he bickers with you, but he was never like that with me, and then he kind of put Harvey in his place with that whole thing Harvey said, about how it would be emasculating to have a wife who works, and?—”
My heart is in my throat. “That was Charlie, Mare.”
She shakes her head. “No, it was Miller. And he also said the thing about how millions of men would be happy to take me off Harvey’s hands, which I thought was?—”
“That also was Charlie.”
She shakes her head. “I don’t think so. But anyway…I finally saw Harvey through everyone else’s eyes, and I mean, yeah, I knew he was kind of a pompous dick, but I didn’t realize how bad it had gotten until tonight. It just suddenly hit me that I could be so much happier with someone else.”
And thesomeone elseshe has in mind is Miller. He represents, for her, all the things in the world that could make her happy.
“I don’t blame you, you know,” she says, “for him leaving? I mean, if we’d kept dating back then, it would have ended. We were both so young that maybe you did us a favor.”
It hits harder than it should. I suspected for a very long time that she thought I was at fault, but this confirms it. And…I no longer think I was.
Miller liked sparring with me. And in my seventeen-year-old mind, it seemed entirely possible that I’d just pushed him too far. As an adult, one who knows him fairly well, I’m certain nothing I ever said would have driven Miller off had he wanted to stay.
“Did you a favor?” I ask weakly.
“He left then, but now, you know, we’re adults. Our lives are in different places, and we’ve both grown up.”
She thinks this is their second-chance romance. This isAtonementand I’m the bratty little sister who drove them apart, all so they could find each other again. It’s incredibly far off the mark, but the wrongness of what I’ve been doing is absolutely suffocating.
If she finds out—and she will if this continues—it’s going to look as if I drove the love of her life away only so I could claim him for myself. She’s going to think I stole something from her twice, something that would have made her perfectly happy.
And I knew this. That’s why I was panicked to even let Maren know he was on my trip, why I swore him to secrecy about meaningless things. And now here I am, sleeping with him every night, sexting him at a family dinner.
I’ve been slowly boiling myself to death, falling deeper and deeper into something that I shouldn’t even have had a toe in.
And now I’ve got to force myself out.
She cries for a while about how hard it’s going to be to leave Harvey. Not because she loves him, so much, but because she wants children the way I want my next breath, and they’ve been doingin vitro, and now she’s going to have to start over.
I’mworried because Harvey is the type to take it all very, very poorly.
“Do you want to sleep here tonight?” I ask.
She smiles, wiping away her tears. “In your sex bed? No thank you. I’m gonna go to Mom’s. There’s nothing like several veiled suggestions about weight loss to cheer you up during a marital dispute, I always say.”
