Chapter 5

I can’t sleep.

It’s just too much. The images burned into my mind, of the expression of abandon on Mia’s face and the guilt on Harris’s, and the way they looked to each other for support. How I figured it out, in jerky frames like a bad filmstrip: Mia’s face. Mia’s skirt. Harris. Under the skirt. His head under the skirt, with his face—cheating. My boyfriend’s cheating. On. Me. With. My. Best. Friend.

The woman formerly known as my best friend, that is.

In the dark room, in the quiet house, my thoughts are thick and heavy and my mind won’t let any of them go so I can drift off.

When I left the condo, I knew I had to get away. And I knew I needed to go somewhere—somewhere safe—but all I could think of was that Mia and Harris had taken that away from me. They’d taken home away from me. They’d taken trust away from me.

Except—Jack had done that, years before. So Mia and Harris were only reminding me that trusting someone to take care of your feelings was a really, really bad idea.

Yet, insanely, when I was sitting in my Prius, gripping the wheel like it would keep me from breaking into pieces, tears running down my face, the only place I could think to go—the only place that still felt safe—was Jack’s.

I told myself that part of it was that I wanted to be near the one guy who I knew loved me without reservation: Gabe.

I think that even in my totally wrecked state, I knew that wasn’t the whole truth.

And now I know for sure it’s not, because even as I’m lying here, my thoughts don’t stay fixed on Mia and Harris, what I saw or what I’ve lost.

They keep wandering to Jack.

It doesn’t help that I’m wearing his clothes. It doesn’t help that his clothes, and the sheets, and the whole goddamned room, smell like him. Or that my body is still quietly luxuriating in the aftermath of the really, really intense orgasm he gave me. Or that even though I know it’s the worst idea on earth, I’m contemplating whether there might be another one in my future.

I should never have agreed to stay here.

Of course, Jack’s logic all made sense. Everything he said was true and valid. And I’d already reached the conclusion that I had nowhere else to go. I reached it when I was sitting in my car, trying to figure out where to run. Besides Gabe and Mia and Harris, I had my parents, but I knew San Diego wasn’t an option with Gabe asleep at Jack’s. I had friends from work and other periods of my life, but I didn’t have the kind of relationship with any of them where I could call them late at night and ask to crash for a night—or ten—with my four-year-old son.

(I did make a mental note, sitting in the car, to cultivate more of those kinds of relationships, as a hedge against all the stupid shit than can go wrong. Never again with the one-boyfriend, one-best-friend strategy.)

And then there was Jack.

The first time the idea popped into my head, I dismissed it. I couldn’t run to Jack, for a lot of reasons. Our relationship—if you could even call it that—ended when he betrayed me. He made it abundantly clear then, as he had for years before and has for years since, that he didn’t want to be tied down or asked to give up his freedom. And I’m still angry, and hurt, by all of that.

But beneath all that—like the good bones of a classic old home that’s been through bad renovations—is a very old friendship.

This is one of my earliest memories of Jack:

I was ten. He was eleven. We were lying on the floor of his room on our stomachs, facing each other across a Stratego board. Jack was winning. Jack always won. I kept threatening not to play him anymore, telling him it wasn’t fun when he always won, but the truth was, I loved that game and I especially loved playing it with Jack. He made up stories about the pieces, as if they were real soldiers in a real war, and part of why I always lost was that I was listening so hard to his story and feeling so sympathetic for the reluctant spy who had just gotten captured and tortured that I’d forget I was supposed to strategize.

Except that day I wasn’t thinking about Jack’s story or strategy because it was thundering outside, and thunderstorms freaked me out.

I’d been scared of lightning for as long as I could remember. My parents had told me a hundred times that the house was safe during a storm, but when a crash of lightning came out of nowhere, it still startled me so bad it left my heart pounding and sent cold water through my veins. And when the lightning and the thunder were right on top of each other, it never mattered to me that I was in the house. I was sure the house was going to be struck and that all the violent bright energy would surge straight through me and burn me black and ashy.

Jack’s mom was out getting groceries. She’d just started leaving us alone when she went out. Jack’s older sister was upstairs in her room, so if there had been an emergency, she would have known what to do. I would have known what to do. I’d have called 911. Or my mom, who was just one block away—if it wasn’t a big emergency.

Is it a big emergency or a little emergency if the house gets struck by lightning?

That’s what I was thinking about when the house seemed to crack wide open, the white light and vicious sound shaking me so hard I was sure I’d been hit.

The power went out.

It wasn’t pitch dark but, oh my God, my brain felt like it had been shaken and my hands were clenched into fists and someone whimpered and it was me. And I couldn’t catch my breath. It kept getting faster and shallower and my chest kept getting tighter and tighter.

Just when I thought I was dying, I felt something. A hand around mine. A hand clutching mine tight, like a raft in the middle of an ocean of fear, and I clutched back. Jack’s hand. And I gradually became aware of the world again. Jack’s hand was bigger than my hand, which is a thing I had never noticed before. Jack’s hand was warmer than my hand. A lot warmer. And it was like comfort was streaming out of Jack’s hand and flowing into my cold-water veins and flushing the ice out and filling me up with Jack’s warmth.

“It’s okay,” he said. And he sounded so sure, I believed him. I forgot all about the thunder and lightning, which were receding now, and I forgot about the fact that the power was out and we were home alone, and I just sat there in the dark with Jack, feeling safe and happy.

So here’s the thing. Jack may not be the kind of guy who is meant to be a father or a husband. He may not be capable of monogamy or commitment. But he always was my friend.

That was the realization that brought me here tonight.

And it turns out Jack still is my friend, as evidenced by the fact that I have a warm, safe place to sleep tonight.

At the moment, he is my only real friend.

Quite possibly my last coherent thought before I finally succumb to total exhaustion is: I can’t risk damaging my friendship with Jack over sex.