Chapter 3

Blame sexual drought.

Blame crushed ego and stupid pride.

Blame Jack, for being hot. For answering the door in worn jeans that ride low on his hips and a T-shirt that strains around his biceps and across his shoulders and chest.

Blame Jack for smelling good. Laundry soap and spicy deodorant and heavy cotton and fresh wood shavings and sun-kissed skin.

Blame Jack’s erection, which I can feel against my hip and belly as soon as I step close to him. Which returns us, once again, to crushed ego and stupid pride. Jack wants me, even if Harris doesn’t.

But overall, I think most of the blame lies with the way Jack has always made me feel, as if he’s the living embodiment of It’s okay. No matter how much hurt and heartbreak he’s caused me, the connection between us, the sense that with a touch or a few words he can smooth away anything awful in the world, has never gone away. That’s part of what makes it so hard to know that Jack will never be my island of safety in the world—that he’s never wanted to be—because he’s the only man who’s ever made me feel like this.

Fifteen minutes ago, I thought I was going to choke on the heartbreak and anger and loneliness I was feeling. I thought it wasn’t possible to feel any worse than I felt. I was thinking, Life changes so fast. It goes to shit in seconds flat.

I’d left the retirement party two hours earlier than I’d planned, thinking Harris would be home and he and I could kick back on the couch with glasses of wine and reconnect, catch up on what was going on in each other’s lives. And yeah, if that led to sex, I wouldn’t turn it down. It had been way too long. We’d both been working too hard. When I wasn’t working, Gabe was almost always around.

Or that’s what I’d told myself was the reason for the sexual drought. Don’t parents always have trouble finding time for sex? That’s a thing, right?

I drove home from the party, took the elevator to our floor, and unlocked the door of the condo we shared, which somehow I still thought of as “Harris’s condo.” I was figuring Harris would be sitting on the couch, reading or watching TV, but when I took a few steps forward to where the foyer opened out into the main area, the first thing I saw was my best friend, Mia, in the kitchen. I was thrilled to see her, because she’d been working just as much as Harris, so I didn’t think to question why she was in my kitchen. She’d been busy, busy, busy for weeks, and I’d missed her.

Mia and Harris both work at a biotech company, BioMere, which is how I met Harris in the first place—he’s Mia’s boss. The drug they’re marketing is about to launch, so it’s been all hands on deck all the time. It’s supposed to get better in a few months, but in the meantime, lately, I’ve been minus a boyfriend and minus a best friend. Because work.

Or that’s what I told myself.

Mia was slumped over my kitchen counter with a look on her face that I immediately interpreted as the agony of despair. I called out, “Mia, hon’, are you okay?” I thought maybe something had gone horribly wrong with work, and I took off jogging toward her.

As I came around into the kitchen, several things happened at once. Mia straightened and the expression on her face turned to genuine horror, and my field of vision got confused for a moment because it looked like there was something moving under her flowing black skirt, and I was working really hard to make sense out of all these questions that my brain was firing at me:

What is wrong with Mia?

Why is she in my apartment when I am not (a question that has suddenly jumped to the forefront of my brain)?

What is happening under Mia’s skirt?

Where is Harris?

And then suddenly my confusing visual experience began to sort itself out as the chaos under Mia’s skirt emerged and resolved itself into Harris.

Holy shit.

That wasn’t the agony of despair on Mia’s face. That was an O face caused by my boyfriend giving her head under her skirt in my kitchen while I was out at my boss’s retirement party.

Harris and I had been together eighteen months, almost half of Gabe’s life, living together for the last six months. And if you’d asked me yesterday, I would have told you that Harris and I were one good, long conversation away from engagement and marriage and him becoming Gabe’s stepdad.

Apparently I was missing some key details. And my heart just—flew apart. The first thing I thought was, Oh, my God, I have to tell—

Mia.

Like a one-two punch.

The two of them closed in on me, surrounding me, talking, both at the same time, making these pointless, meaningless apologies, and the worst part was the way they kept meeting each other’s eyes, looking for comfort and confirmation.

Comfort and confirmation that used to be mine.

That’s how your life goes to shit in a minute.

But the thing is, it works the other way, too. A minute ago, everything was shit. But now I’m in Jack’s arms, and I’m aware of the fact that his body approves heartily of mine. And I’m feeling that—despite everything cataclysmic that’s just happened—it’s okay. Because that’s how Jack makes me feel. That’s how Jack has always made me feel.

All I want is more of him. Because Jack also makes me greedy. I want his mouth on mine and that excellent, admirable erection inside me (where I know from personal experience that it will rock my world), and despite our track record and the fact that having Jack makes me crave more Jack and that Jack is not remotely, even slightly, available for the having, I can’t resist the craving.

There’s some part of my brain shouting desperately out of the snake pit, Don’t do it! You’re on the rebound!

But that sane voice gets drowned out. Somehow, my hand is on the back of his head, in his hair (soft, wavy), and I’m pulling him down to me.

His lips barely touch mine at first, and I can feel him tug back, resisting, and for a second I think he’s going to reject me. And I know this is stupid and immature, but I can’t take it right now. I selfishly need him to cancel out the awful feeling of having the two people who are supposed to love you most in the world betray you and make you feel like you don’t matter at all. Right now, I’m not thinking about any of the reasons this is a bad idea. I’m just thinking about how his body is telling me I’m okay—I’m safe. I’m sexy. I matter, in some way, even if it’s a shallow way.

So I beg. “Please, Jack.”

It’s like all his resistance just collapses. His mouth settles onto mine and his arms come tighter around me, and we’re kissing.

His lips are so knowing. And he takes control, right away, setting the pace—slow, with a sweet edge of desperation. His tongue inquires at the seam of my lips and I open to him because there’s really no question. I’m open to him and I always have been. I can’t close him off, not completely—not the way I’ve wished so many times I could.

I go from wanting to be wanted to just pure want, and he’s the same. We’re all over each other. I weave my fingers in his hair and he tugs a handful of mine. I grab his butt to pull him tighter against me and he picks me up so I can wrap my legs around his waist, and then he’s carrying me over to the couch and setting me down, laying me down, covering me, still kissing me, kissing my face, my neck, the vee of my shirt, the tops of my breasts. He tugs at my shirt and I pull it up over my head and he groans.

“Oh, my God, Maddie.”

You see? a different voice in my head says. He thinks you’re beautiful.

He goes after me with hands and mouth, tugging down the lace of my bra, dipping his head to nip and flick my nipples, telling me I have the most perfect breasts ever (which cannot be true; I have nursed a baby, but whatever). Lower down, his body is moving very slowly and gently and deliberately against mine, not just rock and thrust, which would be bad enough, but with this sweet crazy friction across the seam of my jeans that will, if he keeps it up, make me come screaming his name.

“Jack,” I whimper.

“Mmm?”

“Don’t stop.”

“Not a chance.”

He’s not kidding, either. He keeps it up, just like that, that perfect rhythm, that perfect friction, until I bow my whole body from the intensity of it and bite—hard—into his shoulder. And even then, he doesn’t flinch away, doesn’t stop, just says, “Yeah, that’s it, that’s right, baby, you come for me.”

Then I can do nothing but lie like a limp rag on his couch and watch as he strips his T-shirt off and begins to unbutton and unzip his jeans. I know that underneath those jeans is Just Jack, although there is nothing Just about Jack at all. I’d blocked that bit, maybe out of self-preservation, because when you’re sleeping with someone who’s giving you 75 percent of the max you’ve had, it doesn’t pay to dwell on what you’re missing.

But now my full attention is on the lovely, lovely surplus that is about to be unveiled for me. Memory has flooded back: behind that fly, he’s long and straight and thick and—

Then he freezes, and something goes cold in my chest.

He stays like that for a moment, still as a statue. And then he shakes his head.

“Jack,” I beg.

His hand goes to his fly again, but I can tell something’s changed.

“I was going to do it again,” he says. “I was going to fuck you without a condom, again.”

He shakes his head like he’s disgusted with himself. And then he turns the look of disgust on me. “You don’t want this,” he says.

“I—”

But I’m not sure exactly what I am going to say. Am I going to tell him that what just happened felt more right than being with Harris ever felt?

Or that Jack, after all these years, can still make everything okay, just by being Jack?

Or am I about to tell him he’s right, that I kissed him, made him kiss me, because I was on the rebound and needed someone to make me feel like I mattered?

Which is also, clearly, true.

Down the hall, there’s a small cry, barely more than a whimper.

Jesus. Gabe!

In a flash, Jack’s got his jeans zipped and buttoned and is heading down the hall.

I feel a hot burst of shame and remorse for having let this happen. With Gabe asleep down the hall, no less. It doesn’t matter that Gabe cries out like that all the time and almost never actually wakes up. I didn’t even check in on him to make sure he was sleeping. That’s how in my own head—or maybe it’s more accurate to say, how possessed by my own body—I was.

I pull myself to sitting, and everything feels wrong and sordid. My rumpled clothes, my boots still on, my hair tangled and sweaty, the damp crotch of my panties and jeans, the slight sensation of burn from the friction of his rubbing.

I was going to do it again, he’d said.

I was going to fuck you without a condom again.

It’s that little word, again, that really makes me come to my senses. Because it brings it all home. The fact that we’ve been here once before, and we both know, all too well, that it doesn’t get us anywhere. Jack is Jack, as he so abundantly proved to me five years ago. He is a sucker for tears, a comforter par excellence, a lover of whatever woman is naked and vulnerable in his den, but he is not husband material.

He doesn’t have to be, a wicked little voice whispers. You could just let him make you feel good.

The real problem, however, is that there is no “just” with Jack. That’s the real lesson I learned the last time I tried this. That when I have some Jack, I want all the Jack. I want him to touch me, yes, I want him to make me come like he just did—harder than anyone ever has, without even half-trying. But even more than that, I want him to be part of my life. I want him to be part of our lives.

But that is not a thing that exists.

At least, not for me and Gabe.