Seth looked
fully alert, despite the early hour. He’d pulled on a pair of pants and the t-shirt
he’d been wearing the previous evening, and he certainly appeared more pulled
together than Erin did in her wrinkled clothes and messy hair.
He didn’t seem
tired, but he was unusually quiet this morning and a little withdrawn. Erin
wondered how much of it had to do with what had happened between them the
previous night.
“All right,” Seth
murmured, kissing Mackenzie, who now appeared to be asleep, and handing her
back to Erin. “I’ll call you later.”
Erin put Mackenzie
in the car seat and made sure the baby was securely fastened before she stood
up to face Seth again. “Okay,” she said, feeling a nervous clench as she looked
at his distant face.
She’d felt so
close to him last night, and now he seemed to be pulling away.
Not wanting
things to get weird between them again, Erin raised a hand and placed her palm
on his chest. “Seth? Are you all right?”
Seth met her
eyes and his mouth tilted up. “Should I try to count how many times you’ve
asked me that in the last twenty-four hours?”
Erin giggled,
relieved at the brief flash of ironic humor—proof that he wasn’t emotionally
closing down on her after all. Giving him a sheepish look, she slid her hand
down a little farther, until it was curved around one side of his waist. “I
guess I have been asking it a lot, but you seem kind of quiet this morning.”
“Are you
implying that I normally babble too much?” His voice was dry and even, but Erin
could tell that it was just a ruse. He was slightly tense, uncomfortable. And
his eyes seemed as guarded as they’d been during the first few months of her
pregnancy.
She gave a
faint, appreciative smile. “I believe most of the babbling falls on my
shoulders. But I’m serious. You seem... Is everything all ri—” She stopped
herself before she asked the question again, but she peered up at his face
anxiously.
Seth smiled
faintly. “Are
you
all right?”
When she saw it
was a genuine question, she answered honestly. “Of course. A little sore. But
last night was so good.”
“So it was
really what you wanted?”
She realized
what he was worried about. “Yes. I wanted it. It was what
both
of us
needed.”
They stared at
each other for a minute. Then she stood on her tiptoes and pressed a soft kiss
onto the side of his mouth. “I’d better get going. I’ll talk to you later.”
Seth nodded and
opened the car door for her. “I’ll call you this evening.”
As Erin drove
away, she could see him in her rearview mirror—standing on the side of the long
driveway, watching them drive away.
***
“So you and Seth actually...” Liz
paused abruptly, obviously rephrasing her sentence after a guilty glance over
at Mackenzie. “…did it? Again?”
Erin pressed
her lips together, her cheeks burning. She didn’t know why she’d been feeling
so embarrassed recently about her relationship with Seth. She’d never been
particularly self-conscious about men or sex before. She and Liz had shared
details about sexual encounters for years. But, for the last month or two, Erin
had felt like blushing whenever she referred to anything intimate regarding Seth.
She cleared her
throat. Pulled Mackenzie’s hand away from the fistful of her hair the baby was
pulling. “Yes. We did.”
Liz looked torn
between amusement, surprise, and delight. “Well, well, well,” she began, a
familiar taunt in her voice. “So what exactly is going on between the two of
you?”
Mackenzie babbled
happily and incoherently, and she made another grab for Erin’s hair. They were
eating an early dinner in a sandwich shop near Erin’s apartment, and it had
only been two days since the weekend with Seth.
Her daughter
had been good while Erin and Liz were eating, but then she’d started getting
fussy and restless, so Erin had moved her to her lap and was idly playing with
her while she chatted with Liz.
Trying to
distract Mackenzie with her baby spoon instead of Erin’s hair, she gave a shrug
in response to Liz’s question. “I don’t really know.”
“So are you
changing your mind about him?” Liz persisted, leaning forward.
“I don’t think
so,” Erin admitted, feeling that guilty ache in her belly at the thought. “I
don’t know. I mean, if we were in a normal relationship, then I guess I’d think
things were progressing well. But I’m just scared that whatever progress we
make still won’t take us to...where he wants us to be.”
Liz’s eyebrows
arched up. “And where’s that?”
As she was
squirming, Mackenzie accidentally kicked Erin in the stomach, making her grunt
softly in surprise. “Don’t be obtuse, Liz.”
They were
distracted from the conversation by a beep of Liz’s phone. She glanced at it
idly but then did a double-take at whatever she saw on the screen.
She clicked on
something, and her entire body froze.
“What is it?”
Erin asked, concerned by her sister’s reaction.
“This link was
just sent to me. It’s Mary Carlyle’s…”
She sounded so
upset as she trailed off that Erin just took the phone out of her hand.
She stared down
at the screen. There was no story this time. Just a photo and a provocative
question: “Has Seth Thomas moved on?”
The picture was
of Seth in the hallway of a fancy apartment building or hotel, and he wasn’t
alone.
He was with a
gorgeous, slender blonde—one that Erin recognized as working in the mayor’s
office.
Seth’s arm was
around the woman, and she was smiling up at him seductively, her hand
disappearing inside his suit jacket. A suit that looked very much like the one
he’d been wearing yesterday when he’d dropped by her apartment in the evening,
before he’d left for what he’d called a “dinner meeting.”
Erin blinked. Felt
her throat close up. Started to shake inwardly. Had absolutely no words.
“That bastard,”
Liz muttered, finally finding a voice.
Mackenzie must
have been able to sense Erin’s distress because the baby’s face screwed up and
she let out a few whimpers.
Then she burst
into deafening squalls.
Erin couldn’t
seem to think. Couldn’t seem to move. Couldn’t seem to breathe. She
instinctively pulled her daughter closer and jostled her a little, but she couldn’t
begin to murmur anything comforting.
Never in her
life had Erin been so utterly stunned—so utterly without words.
It wasn’t a
crisis or a real trauma. Certainly not a life-or-death situation. But it had
leveled her in a way she could never remember being leveled before.
She wanted to
laugh bitterly from the sheer, exquisite irony of it all.
Irony had
always been her oldest of friends.
For some
reason, though, Erin found herself incapable of laughing it off.
“Erin,” Liz was
saying. “Are you all right? What do you want me to do?”
She couldn’t
respond to any of those questions.
After a minute,
Mackenzie finally quieted into pitiful sniffs and whimpers. Erin rocked the
baby against her.
The more she
processed the situation, the more she was able to move past her first stunned
and agonized response.
Nothing was
ever as simple as it seemed.
And some things
weren’t what they seemed at
all
.
So Erin was
finally able to meet Liz’s eyes, in control of herself again. She actually
thought she could see something clearly for once.
“Erin,” Liz
said again, pulling her chair a little closer. “The picture...Seth. Wait until
I get my hands on that fu—freaking...butthole.”
“I think in
this case you can save your outrage. I don’t think this is what it seems.”
Liz drew her
brows together. “What do you mean? Seth and that woman. And evidently he spent
the night with her.”
Erin didn’t feel
quite as casual as she sounded, but she was starting to feel a strange kind of
confidence growing from the storm of her initial emotions. “Yeah. That’s what
the story said. But what kind of source is Mary Carlyle? I’m not going to react
until I talk to Seth about it.”
Liz was staring
at Erin like she was an alien. “Seriously? You think he’ll tell you the truth? If
he’s really been sleeping around behind your back—”
Erin shook her
head urgently. “See, that’s the thing. I don’t think he
has
been.”
“What? That
picture—”
“Was in a hallway,
not a bedroom. His arm was around her, but nothing else. They could mean
anything.” As she spoke, Erin became more and more certain that she needed to
wait before she completely freaked out. “We don’t have enough information, and
I don’t think Seth would have done this.”
Staring at her
incredulously, Liz asked, "Why not?"
Erin felt
herself blushing, behind the flush of all the other emotions. She looked down
self-consciously at the table in front of her. “He loves me.”
Liz looked a
little uncomfortable. “I know that,” she said, her voice obviously an attempt
to be comforting and reasonable at the same time. “But sometimes a person can
love someone and still have sex with someone else. And, if we think about Seth’s
history, it doesn’t exactly lend itself to—”
“I know,” Erin
interrupted, feeling a rush of anxiety that she immediately talked herself out
of. “I’m not saying it’s out of his character completely. Who knows what anyone
would do if they’re pushed in certain ways. I’m just saying I don’t think he
did this now.”
“But you’re not
together.”
Erin wished Liz
would shut up, although she knew that her sister was just trying to prepare her
for the worst—as an act of kindness and support.
The thing was,
for once, Erin wasn’t expecting the worst and didn’t want to start expecting
it.
“You keep
telling Seth you don’t love him, so maybe he wants to try to move on.”
“It’s possible.
But I think he would have said something to me first, if he’d changed his mind
about...about me.”
Liz’s voice was
almost hushed now. “Is he normally
open
about such things?”
Seth wasn’t
open about such things. He wasn’t open about anything.
But Erin—however
unreasonably, however much her cynicism and sense might tell her that he could
have easily sought some sort of solace and power by fucking another woman—still
didn’t think that he had.
A shaky kind of
peace had settled over her. One that could be rattled at any moment and one
that left her fingers trembling as they held on to her daughter. But a peace
nonetheless.
Erin's mind and
heart and instinct had settled into a tense, waiting quiet. An eye-of-the-storm
kind of thing.
“Erin? Are you
sure you’re all right? You handling this so calmly and maturely is kind of
freaking me out. Are you about to have a breakdown or something?”
Erin huffed
with what wasn’t quite real laughter. Mackenzie was warm and substantial in her
arms, and Erin clung to her—couldn’t even imagine what it had been like to not
have her daughter to hug. “I don’t think so. It’s weird, isn’t it? But I think
I’m all right. I’m going to wait until I talk to Seth.”
“And will you
have the breakdown afterwards?”
“I hope not. Like
I said, I think the picture is misleading in some way. Mary Carlyle isn’t a
good source.”
Erin sat with
her daughter in her arms, at a corner table in the quiet sandwich shop. It felt
like her world had changed in some way during the last five minutes, although
she couldn’t exactly name what had changed.
It was bizarre,
surreal, and almost frightening, but it felt like something had shifted in her universe.
Liz was silent
for a long time, just watching Erin anxiously, uncertainly.
Until finally Liz
said, very softly, “What will you do if this
is
what it looks like?”
“I told you. I
don’t think—”
“But what if it
is?” Liz repeated, in almost a whisper.
Erin’s tenuous
calm vanished for a moment as she unwillingly acknowledged the possibility. Put
herself in the position of hearing Seth tell her that he’d actually fucked
another woman last night.
And Erin could
feel it. All of it. Knew exactly how she’d react to hearing it and was almost
overwhelmed by the pain of it.
Her face
twisted as she tried to control her rising emotions. “He has the right to do
what he wants,” she forced out, her voice thin and unnatural. “It would be fine.”
“You know, it
doesn’t look like it would be fine. It looks like it would be...devastating.”
Erin's
shoulders shook a few times, and she squeezed her eyes shut before she got
control of her emotions again—not wanting to overreact before she knew the
whole story and not wanting to upset her daughter again. Sniffing and then
opening her eyes, she managed to speak, her voice wavering but clearer than
before.
“It would be,”
she admitted. “For me. I would be really upset. But there’s nothing keeping Seth
from doing so, and what kind of heartless bi—witch would I be if I tried to
stop him from moving on? But, of course, I’d be upset. I’ve built this whole
chapter of my life with Seth in it, with him functioning in this certain role, and
without him...”
Erin was
slammed with another flood of emotion as she pictured a life without the Seth
who had somehow moved, with Mackenzie, to the center of her existence.
She had no idea
when that had happened, but couldn't deny that he was.
At the center
of her life.
“So you’ll just
be sad that things have changed? That Seth isn’t as big a part of your life as
he’d been before?”
Erin groaned. Hated
this conversation. Didn’t want to think about all of this. Wanted to go home
and have a short, private cry. Then call up Seth and figure out what had happened.