Earbuds block me from hearing all the painful details of Cara’s date with Joel that next day. Instead, I try to decide if I’m happy or disappointed I didn’t run into Joel at the gym this morning.

It’s my lunchtime visitor who throws me for a loop.

“Corey, what are you doing here?”

Cara and Janet watch. I’m sure they were about to dish about Cara’s night until my boyishly sexy ex shows up.

“Can I take you to lunch?”

There are so many questions I want to toss to the man, like how he found out where I worked. Then again, he’d been at Amelia’s over the weekend. I’m so going to kill my sister.

“Sure.” I don’t want to air our dirty laundry to the peanut gallery.

Once Corey’s hand lands on the small of my back, I hear snickering behind me. I roll my eyes, wishing I worked at a big corporation lost in a sea of cubicles and anonymity.

Outside on the sidewalk, crushed by the foot traffic of other lunch-goers, I grit out, “How did you find out where I work? And why aren’t you in Philadelphia at your own job?”

He doesn’t answer, only points at a café a few doors down. I nod and bide my time. Once we are seated in a corner near the front picture window, I ask him to explain himself again.

“Should I order your usual?”

Not that we’d frequent this café, but he reminds me that he’s known me long enough to order on my behalf.

Feeling little more than a bobblehead, I nod again. He walks toward the counter, and heads turn to take notice of him. He’s that good looking, but the jealousy I used to feel doesn’t manifest. It’s like going to Belgium and eating chocolate and coming back to the States and having some here. It’s good, but it’s not the same.

If nothing else, my drunken, shameful night with Joel opened my eyes to something new and quite possibly better. Even though I can’t be with him, he’s inadvertently shown me what I’ve been missing out on.

Corey comes back to the table with a turkey and bacon sandwich on a succulent looking croissant. It is what I would have ordered before I moved to D.C. and decided to work on my weight. I say nothing, though. I’ll probably need the calories to make it through the upcoming conversation.

“Are you going to answer me?” I ask in a harsh whisper with my sandwich halfway to my mouth.

His heavy sigh and crow’s feet at the corner of his eyes spark worry in me. Has he been sleeping? Why do I care? I chide myself. He’s probably sleeping with someone else in our bed. That’s why he looks so damn tired.

“I miss you,” he declares.

I try not to choke as I laugh. “Really. Did your girlfriend leave you? She probably doesn’t want to wash your tighty-whities.”

He doesn’t wear them, but the words slip out of my mouth with a verbal slap.

His glare burns out as quickly as it fired up. “You’re wrong. She can’t wait for our divorce to be final so I can marry her and make babies.”

Disgust covers his handsome features as my bite of sandwich curdles in my stomach.

“You should.” I’m proud of myself for eking out my agreement.

“What?”

I swallow, holding back tears. “You should be with her. She can give you what I can’t.”

His hand covers mine. “Don’t you get it? I don’t want those things if I can’t have them with you.”

Slowly, I draw my hand back, to his dismay. Shortly after I left him, there were days when I’d wanted to hear those words and go back to the man I thought I would grow old with.

“We can’t.” Then realize my mistake. “I can’t.”

His brow creases and he looks like a defeated man. “Livvy, please.”

I shake my head. “Don’t you see? You broke us. If I went back to you now, which I’m not, I would resent you. I would always think about how you chose to experiment with others before making a decision about who you wanted to be with.”

“What are you saying?”

Our food, which looked so appetizing before, suddenly makes my stomach turn.

“I’m saying I want that opportunity too. I want to date other people and see what it’s like.”

His eyes darken, and I consider calling the fire department for the proverbial smoke curling out his ears. “You want to sleep with other guys?”

“Maybe. I don’t know. But I want the chance to make that decision for myself.”

“You’re saying you didn’t sleep with that Joel guy?”

I hold his gaze and feel really tired. Maybe months ago I would have thrown it in his face that I’d had the best sex of my life with a really great guy, but now I don’t. I know this man, and I love him still. So there’s no malice when I gently say, “That’s really none of your business.”

“Jesus, Olivia, what’s happened to us?”

I could so easily point the finger at him, but I prove how mature I’ve become. “We’ve grown up. Maybe our parents were right and we shouldn’t have gotten married so young.”

“Are you saying that people who dated in high school shouldn’t marry?”

Patience, I tell myself.

“Of course not. I’m talking about us, not the rest of the population. It didn’t work for us, otherwise you wouldn’t have found it necessary to sleep with other people.”

He doesn’t correct my use of the plural. I wait for the hurt to come.

“I’m sorry, Olivia, I made a mistake.”

“I’m sorry too.”

“So let’s try.”

I let the pause grow into silence before I answer him again.

“We should try, but not together. We should date other people, move on. If it’s meant to be, will find each other again.”

In no way am I trying to sound poetic. But there it is.

“How long?”

There’s something desperate in his question, and a crack begins to form in my heart. I answer before I lose my nerve.

“I don’t know. A year or so…”

“So in a year, you’ll come back to me?”

His voice comes out rough and broken, sounding more lost than I’ve ever heard him.

“I’m not saying that. In a year, you could have moved on, or maybe I have. But I need this time to figure out what I want, who I am without you.”

“I fucked up, didn’t I, Livvy?” I don’t answer. “Can you at least let me try to win you back? Take you out on a date or something?”

“I don’t know. Certainly not any time soon.”

“But maybe?”

There is so much hope there, I nod in agreement. “Just not in the next several months, please.”

The lunch with Corey leaves me in such a fog, I don’t hear anything Cara and Janet say as they hover around my desk animatedly talking. In fact, the next few days until my date with Paul go by without notice except for one thing. I haven’t seen or heard a peep from Joel since the day of his date with Cara, and I have to guess he’s avoiding me.