Chapter 44
Asher
I’ve been on cloud nine for more than a week now. And if you tell me that sounds like a chick thing to say, I will tell you I don’t give a flying fuck. Within twenty-four hours, I went from thinking I’d lost the only thing that mattered to me to somehow, someway getting her to agree to spend the rest of her life with me. Me, the guy who has more personality flaws than I can count. I’m still in disbelief she said yes.
I am the luckiest goddamn man on the face of the planet. I will never take a day with her for granted. I feel like I’ve waited my whole lifetime for her. In many ways I have.
What Alyse has been through is unimaginable. She’s a strong, determined, loyal, and loving woman despite her rough life, but I will do everything in my power to keep her from suffering another day for as long as she lives.
And what Livia went through to save her is almost too horrific to comprehend. I owe her everything, my heartfelt apology being the first thing. She sacrificed more than one person should have to because of the love she has for her sister. I have absolutely no doubt I would not be with my soon-to-be wife had it not been for her selfless act. Alyse had just been through something so traumatic that there’s no way she would have survived the hundred kinds of hell Livia had to have endured. I’m ashamed at the horrible things I’ve thought about her all this time.
I hear the chime of my phone and grab it off my nightstand, smiling. Alyse is out with Livia, Addy, and Kamryn for a few engagement celebratory cocktails, insisted on by Addy, and I have little doubt I’ll be the recipient of a mind-melting blow job in about an hour.
Alyse and Addy have quickly become good friends. I’m glad. Alyse has so much to give and anyone who is let into her very small inner circle is precious to her. I guess I also have to accept that both Cooper and Beck are in that circle, like it or not. And for the record, I don’t fucking like it. At all. But I’m dealing, until I can figure out a way to shove them out permanently. I guess I’m not making too much progress in the jealousy category, but I am trying.
Alyse: want me to pick up that cheesecake u like on my way home
Me: ur all the sweet I need, baby. i plan on indulging later
Alyse: luv u
Me. not more than i do sweet alyse
I set my phone down, not expecting her to respond again, getting back to the task at hand. I’m going through my pile of clothes to take to the dry cleaner tomorrow, making sure all the pockets are emptied. I’ve lost all kinds of shit because I’m too lazy to clean out my suits. Wallets, money, business cards. So now I take ten minutes to scour my clothes every Sunday night.
Tonight I have a pile on the floor in my closet that includes probably five dollars’ worth of coins and nearly a hundred dollars’ worth of paper money, along with several scraps of paper.
I’m scooping the scraps up to throw them out when I notice the crumpled up one that Conn gave me several weeks ago now. The one with Natalie’s phone number on it. My mother’s words, which were meant for Alyse, but that I overheard anyway pop into my head.
“Forgiveness? That’s hard. Much harder than holding onto our hurts and wrongs. It takes courage and bravery to forgive. Oh, but Alyse…forgiveness is freeing. Healing. In both mind and spirit…”
I think about Alyse and how she’s been able to forgive the wrongs that were done to her. She’s even listening to me about possibly meeting her mother. And then I think about how I need to do the same. I need to let my bitterness with Natalie go, once and for all so I can be completely free of that dead weight.
I pick up my phone and dial.
“Hello?” her soft voice chimes through my earpiece.
“Natalie, it’s Asher.”
“Asher?” Her voice perks up, full of surprise. “Hi. I’m glad you called.”
I’m not. “What did you want, Natalie?”
“I—I wanted to see you.”
“That’s not going to happen.” I curse myself for being so short, reminding myself of my purpose. Forgiveness. Move forward without baggage. With Alyse. “But I have a few minutes now to talk.”
“Yes, okay. I’d like that. I, uh…I wanted to apologize. For everything that happened.”
“Why, Natalie? Why now?”
“Because I made mistakes and I hurt you. I was wrong and I wanted you to know that.”
“Why would you do that to me?” I need truthful answers if I have any hopes of ending this conversation with a lighter heart.
Her prolonged silence irritates me. “I was lonely, I guess. You were gone all the time and Rick was just there. And part of me…part of me wanted to get back at you.”
“Get back at me? What the hell for?”
“I know there was someone else, Asher. The last few months we were together, you’d call out a woman’s name in your sleep. You even said it a couple of times when we were having sex and you were drunk.”
I sigh heavily, not wanting to rehash the same shit more than four years later. I’m beginning to wonder if this was such a good idea after all. “Natalie, we’ve been over this before. There was no one else.”
“Then who was Alyse?”
My heart stutters, my breath momentarily stolen by her words. “What did you say?”
“Alyse? Who was Alyse?”
Even though it’s highly inappropriate, I laugh, unable to believe what I’m hearing. “Why did you never mention her name to me before now?”
“So it’s true?”
“No. It’s not true. Alyse was an old friend.” A friend I wanted to fuck, but we were never officially more than that. “I didn’t see her the whole time we were together, Natalie. I promise you.”
“But she was someone you cared about?”
I guess Alyse was buried deeper than I ever realized. “Yes. I never realized that I’d never really gotten over her. I’m…I’m sorry, Natalie.” I almost need to say thank you. Natalie’s insecurities and inability to effectively communicate kept me from making the biggest mistake of my life, pushing me back toward the love of my life instead.
“I’m sorry, too, Asher.” Her voice cracks and I hear sniffling. Now I feel like a piece of shit.
“I guess we both made mistakes,” I tell her. I wasn’t the perfect boyfriend. Too worried about climbing the corporate ladder, I didn’t pay enough attention to Natalie or her feelings or insecurities. This is the first time I ever admitted my culpability for the demise of our relationship, and apparently it’s far overdue. I can now see I did my fair share of pushing her right into her lover’s arms, even if most of it was unconscious.
“I guess we did. I’d do it all differently if I had to do it over again.”
“I know.” I can’t say I would, because then I wouldn’t have Alyse. I’m not sure even if she confronted me about this back then that I’d have tried to pursue Alyse. I would have tried to smooth things over with Natalie. Make it work with Natalie, all the while never knowing my true destiny was waiting elsewhere for me.
I swallow hard before asking my next question, but I’m tired of wondering if everything she said was a lie. “Tell me one more thing. Was it mine?”
She’s silent for so long I don’t think she’ll answer. When she does, I’m gutted anew. “I was never unfaithful to you before that night, Asher. And I didn’t sleep with Rick until two months after we broke up. I’m…God, I’m so sorry.”
“Good-bye, Natalie,” I croak, blinking the sting from my eyes.
“Asher, wait. Are you with someone now? Happy?”
“Yes.” I don’t tell her it’s Alyse, because for some reason that doesn’t feel right, even though she deserves to have the knife twisted a bit. She’ll think I was lying to her, and it turns out the only person I was lying to all along was me.
“I’m glad.”
“Good-bye, Nat.”
“Bye, Asher.”
I hang up with mixed emotions, anger and relief fighting for dominance, but knowing forgiveness is somewhere deep within me. It will take a while for it to trump everything else, but at least I’ve taken the first step.
______________
Later that night, after one fan-fucking-tastic bj and a round of toe-curling sex against the shower tile, I lay entwined with Alyse in comfortable silence. It feels right to finally tell her about Natalie.
“I know I get irrational sometimes about other men looking at you or talking to you, Alyse, but…I can’t stand the thought of losing you to anyone else. It makes me fucking crazy. It’s not that I don’t trust you. I do. It’s my own insecurities. I’ll try to work on it.”
“Okay,” she says, lightly running her fingernails over my flank.
“You were right, you know.”
I feel her smile against my pecs. “I usually am,” she replies saucily. I grasp her side, making her giggle.
“Her name was Natalie.” Now I feel her smile fall and her hands grip me a little tighter. “I started dating her when I was twenty-three. We met at the gym when she was trying to figure out how to use some piece of equipment, I forget even what it was now. Anyway, I had just graduated with my MBA and started working at my father’s company. In the early days as VP of client management, I had to travel a lot, so I was sometimes gone all week for weeks at a time.
“Natalie was an editor at a small publishing house and she struck up a close friendship with a fellow colleague. A male colleague. I knew they spent a lot of time together when I was out of town, but she swore nothing inappropriate was going on. Only it was, and I was young and naïve and ignored all the signs. She knew how much it bothered me that she spent time with this guy, who was clearly after her, yet she did it anyway. She talked about marriage all the time, as if that would solve our relationship issues and change the scope of my job so I was home more.
“So I decided I would ask her to marry me. In retrospect, I don’t know why, because I have no doubt we’d be divorced by now. I had been out of town all week and she was expecting me on Sunday morning, but I ended my meetings early and caught a late flight home on Saturday night instead. I had the ring in my pocket. I had the words memorized that I would say when I got down on one knee. Instead, I caught them in bed together. In my house. In my bed.”
“God, Asher.”
The final piece of my confession sits like arsenic in my veins, slowly corroding me from the inside out. Saying it out loud is harder than I ever imagined.
“And the worst part of it was,” I choke on the vile words that I’ve never told anyone else before. “Two months later she sent me a text. A fucking text. Told me she was pregnant, that it was mine but she’d aborted it because she knew I would never forgive her and she couldn’t raise my baby without me. I now know just how manipulative Natalie was.”
This whole time, I wasn’t even sure if she had ever been pregnant. And if so, I had no clue if it was mine or someone else’s. To get through the wrenching pain I’d felt at the remote possibility it was true, I told myself it was a lie. But now I know she was telling the truth. She made a life-altering decision without even discussing it with me first.
“Oh, my God, Asher. That’s horrible,” she breathes, and I know she understands. While different circumstances, she’s suffered the same loss that I have. Then she rolls onto her back, encouraging us to change positions, so I am now lying on top of her.
With my head nestled on her stomach and my arms wrapped tightly around her, she strokes my hair, my back and quietly lets me cry the tears of anguish I’ve held inside for four long years.