Page 74 of Canadian Boyfriend

I shook my head. “No. You couldn’t have known. And it helped. You didn’t foist anything on me—you weren’t even here. It was… a safe way to experiment.” I made a face. “Listen to me. I sound like I’m talking about drugs. Anyway, I’m making a lot of progress with the therapist.” I was finally starting tobelieveher about food being morally neutral. It was making it so I could choose to eat or not to eat something without it feeling like such a big deal.

He smiled at me with what looked an awful lot like tenderness, but then he grabbed my boob and said, “Hat trick?”

“What trick?”

He chuckled. “It’s when a player scores three times in a game.”

OK, this was it. The hard part. “I can’t. I’m going out with Gretchen.”

He lay back in the bed and clutched his chest like he’d been slain.

Yeah, same. But I’d made the plans specifically to avoid awkwardness at the end of our week. I knew he was going to call a halt to things again, like he had with the kissing over Christmas. Somehow, it felt easier to be the one who initiated the disentanglement.

“You going to be out late?” he asked, though we both knew what he was really asking.

“Yeah, probably,” and we both knew what I was really saying.

“Right.” He sat up, all traces of humor gone from his demeanor. “Should we talk about this?”

“I’m not sure what there is to say. You can’t be having a fling with the nanny once the kid is home.” I understood that, though it didn’t mean it was going to be easy to go cold turkey after such a spectacular week.

“You’re not the nanny.”

Right. The longstanding joke about what we were to each other. It was starting to feel less funny. “But this is a fling, right?Wasa fling,” I added, emphasizing the past tense to telegraph that I understood. That I was not the kind of girl who was going to press him for more than he could reasonably give.

He looked at me for a long time. “It can’t be anything else.”

My first instinct was to ask why, but I knew why. His fear of “leaks.” Even if I still didn’t know exactly what that meant, I understood that it was shorthand for a lot of bigger stuff. Not being ready for anything serious, maybe. Or not wanting to upset his hard-won balance with Olivia.

“Of course. It was…” I cleared my throat. “Fun while it lasted.” That was true, so I wasn’t sure why the words felt so clunky in my mouth. I got out of bed. “I’ll see you tomorrow. Say hi to Olivia for me.”

Getting ready to meet Gretchen, I thought again about her theory that the best sex happened when you and your partner were in sync with the sex stuffandwith the emotional context surrounding the sex. Mike Martin and I had been in sync all week. So what was my problem now? I had to get myself back in sync, or someone was going to get hurt, and I very much feared that someone was going to be me.

16—TRICK QUESTIONS

MIKE

“Lauren and Ivan had their baby,” I said to Dr. Mursal the moment I sat down the third week in May.

“And?”

“Her name is Annika and she’s tiny and perfect.” She looked exactly like Ivan, and even though his features should have looked weird on a baby, the big dark eyes and wide mouth just kind of worked.

“And?”

“They invited us over a few days after they got home from the hospital. It sounds like it was a long delivery, and she’s colicky, but she calms right down when Ivan sticks his tongue out at her and makes this stupid squeaking noise. They let Olivia hold her with a pillow in her lap, and she was beside herself with excitement. She kept talking about how old she would be when Annika hit certain ages, and how she was going to babysit.”

“And?”

I rolled my eyes. Dr. Mursal did this sometimes, kept pressing me to answer her questions in a different way. “I’m athirty-five-year-old man with baby fever and a dead wife, and I’m consumed with jealousy.”

Dr. Mursal sat back and stopped with the “And?”s. I guess I’d finally hit on the correct answer.

“You’re sleeping with Aurora,” she said after a few beats of silence.

“Not anymore. That was only while Olivia was out of town in April.” And I’d thought of it every day since. “Anyway, what are you saying?” I wasn’t sure how we’d gone from my being jealous of Ivan’s baby to my having slept with Aurora. “You want me to knock up the nanny?”

“That is not what I’m saying. As an aside, I would like to point out that Aurora is the nanny when it’s convenient and not the nanny when it’s not.”

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