Page 75 of Anywhere with You
“I can’t. I have no patience when it comes to you,” Cara said. She pushed me onto the lip of the pool, shoving aside clothes and licking my breasts, my nipples, and when she lowered her head between my legs, I was gone in an instant, not holding back the near scream that emerged as my body shook under the hot desert sun.
Chapter Twenty-nine
It was probably a bad choice, a movie about a breakup, even a funny one. Cara and I laughed, sometimes at the wrong parts, but at least we laughed.
I kissed her throughout one sexy scene, the actors’ moans merging with ours.
By the midpoint, it was clear that the characters’ relationship was heading for disaster. I made some popcorn, and Cara curled against me when I returned to the couch.
A familiar actor played the psychologist, and Cara and I tried to place her, eventually giving up on our guesses and searching our phones for the answer. We were wrong on every guess.
“Bridget and I never tried that,” I said at one point, gesturing to the screen with a handful of popcorn. “It was too fast, I guess. I only knew there was a problem when she left.”
Cara was quiet for a minute, then said, softly, “We tried it. Marriage counseling.”
I glanced at her out of the corner of my eye, my attention still mostly on the movie. “I didn’t know that.”
Cara gave a little shrug, a little head shake. “It didn’t do us much good. Our last was right around Valentine’s Day. We were in a session when Lorenzo told me that he was filing for a divorce.”
I nodded. We’d talked about this. Bridget had let me know around the same time. We hadn’t been in counseling. She’d just told me on the way out the door one Sunday morning. By the way, I’m leaving you. By the way, I don’t love you anymore. By the way, I’ve been sleeping with someone else because I’m a lying, cheating slime of a human being who has been lusting after my best friend for years.
Maybe if I’d known, if we’d tried counseling, too. Maybe if we’d tried it long ago, before Bridget had one foot out the door. Maybe it would’ve mattered.
“How long had you been in counseling?” I asked.
“Since…a few months.” She glanced at me, then away.
There was something about it, about the timing, about her expression, about the hesitation in her answer that itched at my thoughts.
I shook my head and tried to pay attention to the movie, but the itch remained.
Couples went to counseling for lots of reasons. Obviously, there were problems in their marriage. Every marriage has problems.
But…
I almost didn’t ask. I almost decided that I was being paranoid, that I was letting the hurt and the anger make me suspicious even when there was no reason.
But Cara still wasn’t looking at me, and she wasn’t watching the movie, either. She was staring at her clenched hands.
“Did you start counseling,” I asked slowly, “before or after he and Bridget got together?”
Cara’s sunburned face lost some of its color.
It was something I’d wondered about, in the back of my mind. I knew that I worked late in the music store, and Bridget and I had frequent rocky spells. This one had been particularly long. But she was always there when I got home. It hadn’t occurred to me that she would cheat. I had been caught unawares, unpleasantly surprised.
But Cara hadn’t been. Cara left school after teaching all day and went home and her husband wasn’t there, day after day.
She ate dinner alone. She’d said that she rarely saw him at all. Surely, he’d given her some believable excuse. He was working. He was hanging out with friends.
I watched her mouth, her eyes, her hands curled into fists.
She was alone, she’d said. Day after day.
“After,” she admitted, meeting my eyes. The word gutted me.
“You knew,” I said, trying to force the words out, but suddenly, I had no air. “You knew they were together.”
Cara’s head shook slightly, but it wasn’t a denial. She had tears in her eyes, and her voice trembled. “The counseling was helping.We were having conversations that we’d been putting off for ages. I thought…I thought maybe…”
