Page 55 of The Bride
Because kissing led to sex. Because I wanted sex. Because secretly in that place I don’t like to think about too hard, I wanted sex with Jake.
There, I thought it. I don’t know how it happened. It wasn’t seeing him naked. It wasn’t any one thing. It was that day in and day out, he’d become the one person who understood me. The one person I wanted to see in the morning, the one person I wanted say goodnight to at night. When we watched TV on the couch, I wanted to cuddle. When we drove into town, I fantasized about holding hands.
When we went to Howard’s Christmas party, I’d pretended we were a real couple. Only in my head.
Because I knew he didn’t feel the same way. Worse, not only did he not feel the same way, he knew how I was feeling. So embarrassing. I guess men have a sense of things when they know a woman wants them.
He’d been walking on eggshells around me for months, while I desperately tried to tell myself I didn’t care that he didn’t want me. I didn’t care that we were going to get a divorce. I didn’t care that I was going to have to do this all by myself.
We still had no foreman, because Jake had dismissed all of the candidates as either too inexperienced (young) or too creepy (which who knew what that meant) or too set in his ways (he didn’t do things like Jake wanted him to do them).
Javier and Gomez agreed to come back in May to help me out, but they were always going to be temporary, as neither one was willing to commit to full time. Probably because full time meant legal papers neither one of them had.
So all of this had been building up and building up. Then the storm happened and Jake kissed me and now we needed to talk about it. Because it was day thirty-eight and this was more important than a lot of dead animals.
This was good. I was angry. I was pretty sure this whole conversation would be better with pissed me than pathetic me.
We were inside the back room, going through the routine of taking off our coats.
“I need a drink,” he said.
“It’s eight in the morning.”
He hit me then with his expression. “Are we going to have the conversation I think we’re going to have?”
“Yes,” I snapped, my arms crossing over my chest.
“Then I need a fucking drink.”
The only place we kept real alcohol was my father’s study. A room we never went to because I think it hurt us both too much to be in there without him. Any bookwork we did was always at the kitchen table.
Across from the living room Jake opened the door to the study and made his way toward the bar in the corner. The same one Howard had gone to the night of Dad’s funeral.
“Make mine a double.”
Jake glared at me.
“Oh you get to drink, but I don’t?”
He said nothing and poured me a splash of something brown.
He handed me the glass even as he took a healthy gulp of his own.
I smelled fire and fumes. Then I tasted fire and fumes. I coughed and set the glass aside.
“Okay, Ellie. We’re here. You want to talk, talk.”
“Don’t make this about me being dramatic about something. You kissed me, Jake. Not the other way around.”
His jaw clenched. “I was so… so fucking mad at you.”
“Then that’s it. That’s all it was. Because we’re getting divorced in thirty-eight days. Do you get that? That means you move out. Completely. You go to your ranch, I stay on mine and we see each other… whenever. Which with all the work you have and all the work I have means hardly ever. We will hardly ever see each other. Is that what you want?”
He started laughing that. A harsh and ugly sound. I never wanted to hear it again. He sat on the couch like his legs couldn’t hold him and looked up at me. “Are you that fucking naïve?”
That hurt. Like he’d slapped me.
“Not cool, Jake,” I said stiffly.
