Page 62 of Devil in Disguise
“No. Not nothing. Why? Oh, wait. Is this about, uh, what’s her name?”
He had to laugh. “Nobody but you wouldn’t know her name. Seriously?”
“Why should I? OK, I looked her up online back when Ididremember her name, which is Ashley something, but since she’s as tall as a giraffe andhas long, lustrous, wavy auburn hairandalluringly large yet perky boobs that unfortunately look natural despite her teensy-weensy frame, being insecure would be pretty pointless. If that’s what you want, I’m doomed anyway. But did she do that?”
“Well … I guess. This isn’t really a good topic, the ex-wife. First rule of being divorced: don’t talk about the ex. It’s never a good look.”
“Why not? Because I won’t like you? Owen. Comeon.How are we supposed to pursue intimacy while physically distanced if we don’t share? I told you about my C-minus!”
“See, it’s notexactlythe same thing,” he said, but he had to smile. “Also, I can think of some ways we could share.”
“Wrong.” She held up the back of her hand to the camera. It was the one wearing the ring he’d given her, which looked exactly as good there as he remembered. Nice and big and obvious. “If I’m wearing this thing every day, you need to tell me about the last person who wore a ring you gave her. I realize,” she had to add, “that it’s not like we’re getting married, or engaged, either, but I still want to know. What if I do the same things she did, because I don’t know what buttons I’m pushing?”
“Yeah,” he said, “that’s not happening.”
“Owen.”She looked at him sternly, something that didn’t work quite as well as it should have, given that her face was the cutest thing he’d ever seen. Cuter than a kitten. Cuter than apuppy.Her pointed chin, her sassy smile, her dimples, and those wide-open, innocent blue eyes with that brain working furiously behind them—yeah, she drove him crazy.
“OK,” he said. “She was a model. She worried a lot about me getting cut from the team, maybe because she wouldn’t be as visible, but because of money, too. She’d always ask me what the coach said, what I thought my chances were of getting cut, or later, whether I thought I’d be going to the Pro Bowl or getting an award, all that. It was like she was terrified all the time of football ending. Way more than me, because I know it’ll end sometime. There’s no way to play professional ball unless you do the Tao deal. Work as hard as you can in the moment, let the future unfold, and have a Plan B.”
“Did she have anxiety or something?” Dyma asked, which was another reason he loved her. She was feisty as hell, but she still had her mom in her. What other woman would have asked that?
“Yeah,” he said. “I think so. She grew up without a lot of money, which is like you, but she was pretty wounded by her life, which meant she spent a lot of time worrying about losing things instead of thinking about how good it was right now. I got it. I did. I felt for her. She was a little fragile, and I probably liked that. Be careful what you wish for, I guess. You can’t save people, even when you love them.”
“Mm.” Dyma had her head on her knees now. “Is that why you started studying the Tao? Because it’s all about focusing on the moment? In football, and in your marriage?”
“Probably.”
“But you didn’t only have football. You had the ranch, too.”
“Well, that was the other thing. It turned out, when she tried living there for real, that she hated the ranch. I get it—it’s an hour to Cheyenne, and once you get there, it’s Cheyenne. Population sixty thousand. She couldn’t really get into a town where the biggest cultural attraction is the rodeo, and anyway, she didn’t grow up that way. You have to like hanging out with the people around you when you live on a ranch, because you’re sure not hanging out with anybody else.”
Why was he telling her all this? Probably because, no matter how much he told himself the “live in the moment” thing, there it was. The ranch. His life. And then he threw all caution to the winds and said the rest of it. “Also, she decided she didn’t want kids after all, because then she’d be even more trapped, and also because the women in her family all gained a lot of weight when they were pregnant and got terrible stretch marks. She said she could get a breast lift, but she couldn’t erase stretch marks or get her life back. There you go. Incompatibility, that’s all.”
“You mean you loved her more than she loved you,” Dyma said. “Because you never even thought about how she’d makeyoumore famous, I bet, or whether you’d still love her if she got stretch marks or gained weight. That’s not the way you love people.”
“Ouch.”
“I’m right, though. How long were you married?” She pulled his T-shirt over her knees and got herself more comfortable against the wall.
“A year and a half before she left. Barely dated a year before we got married, though. The whole thing was pretty rushed.” He didn’t want to talk about this. If he were there, he’d be distracting her from this topic. He knew exactly how to do it, too.
He did his best. He told her, “Speaking of marks, you’ve still got that bruise on your neck showing a little bit, I see. You covering that up with makeup, or you letting people see?”
“Are you kidding?” she said. “That’s my ‘Owen Johnson was here’ reminder. I told you, I’m owning my regression.”
He’d much rather talk about that. He was ready, in fact, to see if they could do phone sex in a stairwell. If he’d ever thought that he could get her out of his system, he knew better now. She was sitting in her usual spot, on the landing just below the top floor, “because hardly anybody walks up this far.” Worked for him.
“Nice try distracting me,” she said, “but seriously, I’m not really too different from her in some ways, except that I’m crazy about you. Oh, and not anxious or whatever. Well,nowI am a little, but not normally. I’ve got probably two years more of undergrad after this year, though, and then two years for my master’s. Which I can’t do on a ranch. I won’t go into the whole ‘kids’ deal, because, hello? I’m nineteen. I’m not even thinking about that. Good thing we both follow the Tao, huh? ‘If you try to change it, you will ruin it. Try to hold it, and you will lose it.’”
“Yeah,” he said. “Not feeling that so much. Are youtryingto fight with me?”
She tucked her chin down a little more into the top of his T-shirt. “No. Well, maybe yes. I like it when you get all determined to show me I’m wrong.”
“Uh-huh.” He should pursue the issue, maybe. Unfortunately, right now he seemed to be saying, “You can call it determined. Or you can call it forceful.”
“Authoritative, even,” she said, and there was that dreamy little smile.
“Want to hear some more about that?” he asked. She didn’t answer, so he said, “What are you wearing under that T-shirt?”
