The flight home was like déjà vu from five years ago, when I was in college. Except this time, we’d consummated things. Yet boarding the plane and heading back to the cold winter of Chicago after a little over a week with Chandler had felt oddly anticlimactic.

I was happy to be back with Andrea and running our small business, but something kept gnawing at me, and I couldn’t quite verbalize what it was.

Andrea and I stood close together in our new office as we stared at the whiteboard. With a little seed money from Mr. Yerac, we’d put a down payment on the first month’s rent for our boutique storefront so that we wouldn’t look like serial killers by inviting clients back to our homes. Not that we invited a ton of people back to our office, but we needed it just in case. “And I think if you can handle the back-end of the business, I can take the in-person meetings for now,” she said, tapping the marker on the ‘Andrea’ column of things.

I blankly nodded my head. “Yes, back-end. I can take the back-end.”

She capped the marker and set it down on the whiteboard. “Amy, what the H-E double hockey sticks is with you lately?”

I couldn’t help but chuckle. “Seriously? You can’t say the word?”

“Oh, whoops. Force of habit. I’ve gotten used to saying that around Tate. But seriously, what’s up with you? Is it him?”

Reluctantly, I nodded. “It’s…him, yes. Since I’ve been back we’ve been Skyping. But I just haven’t felt the same. I’m having flashbacks to my old, shitty, long distance relationships. I know it’s only two weeks, but we can’t do this forever, you know? But I’m trying to be patient. I’ve been thinking about going back on my meds.” I sighed. “I thought I could win the battle with anxiety. But I guess it’s just time to throw in the towel.”

I plopped on our couch, the one decent furniture item we had splurged on for the office.

“So you’ve Skyped every night for the past two weeks. What are you worried about, exactly?”

“Sure, we Skype, but where is this going? Are we going to Skype for another four years, and then I’ll find out he was cheating on me like David?”

“Oh God, please. Don’t let one bad apple spoil the whole bunch for you.”

Except, they’ve all been bad apples—except for Chandler. “I can’t help it,” I said instead. “He’s great, yeah, and our connection was true. But he’s a lady killer at heart. You should see him in a room with women. They give him the ‘I want your babies’ look like it’s a reflex. He says I have nothing to worry about. But I always worry. Plus, we want different things in life and he won’t budge. I’m not going to spend my entire life trying to change him when it won’t happen.”

Andrea sat down on the couch next to me. “Do you trust him?”

I bit my lip. “I think I do. That’s the crazy thing. I do trust him but part of me thinks I shouldn’t. He hasn’t even asked to make our relationship Facebook official.”

“Really?” she said, dryly. “Facebook official? That’s what you’re worried about?”

“Well, he doesn’t have a Facebook, but still.”

She shook her head. “You are a little off-kilter right now. I have never, ever seen you this worked up about a boy—not even David and you were really into him. Are you going to make it?”

“I don’t know.” I smiled and hung my head in an exaggerated fashion, drawing out the syllables. “I just want him to live here, or me to live in Barcelona and we can be happy and I can have lots of Chandler babies.”

Andrea’s eyes grew wide. “Holy shit. I thought you told me that you weren’t sure if he wanted babies.”

I leaned my head back. “That might still be true but we never went into that since a lot of other stuff came up first. In any case, I do want babies, and lots of them. Specifically ones that look a lot like him, and me a little. And I feel like I’m taking crazy pills, because all this happened after just one week!”

“You know, it is a little crazy.”

“So you think I should break up with him?” I was suddenly on edge.

“No. Actually, I was going to say to trust your instincts.”

I looked over at her. “I can do that.”

“So do it,” she ordered. “And stop moping like you don’t have choices.”

I smiled, sitting up in my seat and feeling better. “Thanks, Andrea. I needed that.”

“Happy to help.” She grinned, standing up and holding out her hand to help me up. “Now let’s get the heck to happy hour so I can have a virgin daiquiri or two,” she said, hand on her baby bump.

**

Every time I fired up my computer to talk to Chandler, a surge of dopamine went through me and I suddenly felt a sense of calm wash over my body. He was still my go-to drug. My nicotine patch. And a very sexy one at that.

A nagging feeling of dread seemed to always permeate through me in spite of this new found happiness. For me, it was greater than anything I’d ever experienced. However, there were days and nights—mostly when I let my thoughts wander too far off shore—where I felt lonely, and wanted to desperately text him in the middle of the night just to have him text back ‘yes, I’m thinking about you.’    

We tried our best to make plans in the immediate future but not address the far future. I worried what would happen if one of us asked the other to come live with them, and it turned out that the other didn’t want to come? Our connection would be severed forever.

As it was, the Skype sex was hot. Chandler had the uncanny ability to make me wet with just a few words. It was truly an incredible feat. My body was addicted to him. My heart loved him.

My mind however—oh, how my mind loved to play tricks on me.

One night I was at the office. Andrea had just left, and I was wrapping up some paperwork that was tedious but instrumental in clearing the red tape out of the way for our PR company to do business. It had been a ridiculously busy day where I’d gotten lost in my work and forgotten to go to lunch.

A Skype Mobile call showed up on my phone from Chandler, which perplexed me a little, because we had decided we wouldn’t be Skyping tonight. Either way, I picked it up and answered.

“Hola, Señor sexy,” I spoke in a low, sultry voice.

There was no immediate answer and there was no picture. Instead, I heard riotous laughter. Some of it was Chandler’s and some of it was a woman’s.

My heart sunk through my stomach and all the way down to my feet.

“Chandler? Chandler!” I yelled, this time as loud as I possibly could. No answer.

As a butt dial, I had two choices, hang up right now, or listen intently to the dialogue and try to piece together what the hell was going on.

No way in hell was I ending this call. I turned the volume up on my receiver and put the phone to my ear as best I could.

“Muy, muy lindo,” I heard Chandler say. Very very pretty? What the fuck?

The female voice spoke. “Sí, lindo como tú. Siempre sabia que pasarará.” My damn Spanish was still a little rusty, so I had to look up the last part of the phrase on my desktop computer. Phone pressed to my shoulder, I quickly Google translated the part I didn’t understand. Yes, pretty like you. I always knew this would happen.

My blood ran cold, and then even colder when I heard glasses clink and a salud get said. There was silence, and a low rumbling of voices in the background. Were they at…a restaurant? A bar? Who the hell was this girl?

Suddenly, I heard a baby crying in the background, and then Chandler’s unmistakeable voice. “Ohhh mi hijo!” The baby’s cries stopped as someone—Chandler?—picked it up and patted it on the back.

“No pensé que era posible para mi tener un bebé. Es todo gracias a ti, Chandler. Todo por ti.”

I translated as fast as I could, writing down anything I couldn’t understand immediately so I wouldn’t forget.

I didn’t think it was possible for me to have a baby. It’s all thanks to you, Chandler. Everything because of you.

My pulse sped up to ramming speed and my heart tried to break out of my chest. I could not believe my ears. It was like a movie or something. My worst nightmare: Chandler, cheating on me and all the while playing me. I was such a fool, a damn hopeless fool.

Chandler chuckled. “Gracias,” came his reply.

I felt faint. Ill. My heart beating so fast in my chest that it made breathing normally difficult. I was past angry or heartbroken. I was just numb from shock, and I felt my knees give out. My eyelids fluttered, and then everything went black.