Page 141 of The Rebound
“What does that matter? You didn’t answer my messages.”
“Because I didn’t want your pity.”
“It wasn’t my pity. It was myhelp.” He rises, slipping the box back into his pocket. “Help because I still cared about you. Can’t you see that? I shouldn’t have cared so much for someone I chose to cut from my life but I did. That’s when I knew how much I loved you.”
“So because you pitied me you realized you loved me.”
“You’re twisting my words,” he says calmly. And I am. I know I am. I want to make him the bad guy.
It would be so much simpler if he were the bad guy.
“You don’t want to marry me,” I say, feeling tired. “You think you do but you don’t.”
He smiles slightly. “You might have to explain that one to me.”
“Number one, how about the fact you were barely around the last year we were together.”
Tyler takes a seat in one of the low, beige armchairs, folding his tall form gracefully into it. “I was traveling for work.”
“And has that work just magically disappeared?”
“No.”
“No,” I echo. “So how would you balance that with our relationship?”
“My workload has never been an issue before.”
“Well, it is now. What we had before didn’t work, so we’d need something different.”
“Okay,” he says. “We can talk about that.”
Talk. Always talk. Talking without saying anything. “Number two, your mother doesn’t like me.”
“Of course she likes you.”
“She doesn’t. She doesn’t think I’m good enough for you. She always had some comment about my clothes or my hair or my accent. And you never defended me in front of her. Not once. I just had to stand there and smile, which, thankfully, wasn’t that often because you never brought me to anything with your family.”
“You never brought me to yours.”
“Because mine were an ocean away and I didn’t see them either! Sometimes I didn’t even know you were with yours until you told me afterward how bad a time you had.”
“I did have a bad time.”
“So don’t go!” I exclaim. “Or bring me with you so it can be fun. You say I’m your partner but you never let me into your world, into the family I was supposed to marry into.”
“I didn’t know you wanted to go,” he says, his hands upturned as though to show how open he’s being. “You always said it wasn’t your scene.”
“But it was yours. It was yours and you shut me out of it.” I perch on the edge of the bed. “I’m not trying to blame you,” I say. “I’m not saying it was a one-sided thing but you need to see that maybe what we thought we had wasn’t actually what we had. Maybe we were together because it was the easiest thing to do, because neither of us thought we had to pay attention to the other and maybe… maybe that used to work for me before but not now.”
“That’s a lot of maybes,” he says quietly. “Maybe you’re not sure what you want.”
“Are you trying to be funny?”
“No, Abby. I’m trying to understand you. Something I don’t think I ever had a problem with before.” He leans forward, capturing my gaze. “It’s not that my mother doesn’t like you, Abby, it’s that my mother is mean. She’s mean to everyone. I know that. I’m used to it too and that’s why I never said anything when she picked on you. I also said nothing because I know you can handle yourself and that it takes more than a few snide comments to bring you down. I didn’t bring you to see my family because I thought you wouldn’t enjoy it. I was trying to save you from wasting your few hours of spare time with a bunch of people you don’t like, not because I was shutting you out. I don’t know what I was thinking when I broke up with you. All I know is I was stressed with work and we’d been seeing so little of each other and one day your name flashed up on my phone and I didn’t want to answer it.” Tyler sits back, softening as I stare at him. “I thought that meant something,” he says. “But I was wrong. I was so wrong, Abby. You have to believe me.”
I don’t answer. A room service cart rolls heavily along the hallway outside and I picture Louise waiting in the lobby, wondering what’s happening.
“I think I want to have children.”
