“I, um, got sidetracked,” I said, exchanging glances with Emmie. Jill caught us looking at each other and became more concerned.
“Is everything okay?” she asked, her voice rising an octave. “You’re scaring me. Is something wrong with Meg? Where’s Meg?”
Just then, as if on cue, a fresh-from-the-office Meg bustled through the door of the coffee shop, dressed in a rumpled beige corduroy skirt and a navy blouse.
“Sorry I’m late,” she mumbled, giving Jill a peck on the cheek and sliding into the chair beside her.
“We just got here,” I said softly. Jill’s eyes darted nervously among the three of us.
“What is it?” she asked. “What’s going on? Are you all okay?”
Emmie, Meg, and I exchanged looks. Emmie nodded at me to go ahead. I wasn’t sure why this was my job, but someone had to do it.
“We’re all fine, Jill,” I began. She looked relieved and nodded. I hesitated for a moment, then drew a deep breath. “Actually, this is about you.”
“Me?” She looked shocked.
“And Alec,” I added, watching her expression carefully. For a moment, her face fell, then she smiled brightly. I knew her well enough to know that the smile was forced.
“What do you mean?” she asked with levity that I knew wasn’t real. “Alec and I are fine. Things are good. Like I said, I think he’s taking me on vacation soon.”
Emmie and Meg looked at me helplessly. I forged ahead.
“He’s cheating on you, Jill,” I said gently. I reached across the table and took her hands as her mouth fell open. “It’s going to be fine. We’re all here for you.” I squeezed her hands tightly and nodded as encouragingly as I could.
Jill stared at me for a moment, then yanked her hands away. She stared first at me, then at Emmie, then at Meg, then back at me again.
“What are you talking about?” she finally demanded. “Alec isn’t cheating on me. We just got married. Things are fine.”
“Harper and I caught him in the act,” Emmie explained softly.
Jill’s eyes flashed and her nostrils flared. “Oh, so now you’re spying on him? What, you two have nothing better to do than to follow him around?”
Emmie and I exchanged glances. We had been braced for sadness, outrage, and anger at Alec. But we hadn’t expected Jill’s fury to be fully directed at us.
“Don’t be angry at them, Jill,” Meg said in that soothing voice of hers. “They knew he was cheating on you, and they wanted to be sure before they said something. To be honest, I didn’t believe them when they told me at first, either.”
“He’s
not
cheating on me,” Jill said through gritted teeth, glaring at the three of us. “Look, I know you guys aren’t
trying
to hurt me. But what is this all about? Why are you doing this? Are you mad that I’m married and you’re not?”
She looked sharply at Emmie and me, and I felt like she’d punched me in the gut.
I finally said softly, “No. Of course not, Jill. We’ve never been jealous of you. Not about that.”
“Oh c’mon,” she scoffed. I couldn’t believe she was being so mean. “No offense, but I know you two want to get married,” she continued. “It’s okay if you’re upset that I got married first. But following my husband around is no way to behave.”
“Jill, there are pictures,” Emmie said flatly. I knew she was struggling to contain her instinct to snap back. Like me, she was offended by Jill’s accusations, but she knew what was at stake here.
“What?” Jill asked softly, tears creeping into her narrowed eyes. “What pictures?”
“We took them less than an hour ago,” Emmie said slowly. She reached into her handbag, turned her camera on, pulled up the first image, and handed it to Jill. “They’re from a little Italian restaurant in the East Village.”
“Alec doesn’t go to the East Village,” Jill protested, but her voice was weaker this time, less convinced. “He hates anything below Union Square.” She looked at the camera, but she didn’t take it, didn’t look at the screen.
“It was definitely Alec,” I said, as gently as I could while keeping my voice firm. “He was in the East Village because that’s where the girl he’s seeing lives.”
Jill’s eyes welled up with tears and she looked helplessly among the three of us.
“I can’t believe you’re doing this to me,” she whispered. “He’s not cheating on me. You
know
he’s not cheating on me.”
“Look at the pictures, Jill,” Emmie said firmly, thrusting the camera at her again. Jill didn’t take it but she did look down at the screen. I watched as her eyes widened and then narrowed again.
“It’s not him,” she said simply, looking away. “You’re wrong. It’s not him.”
“There are more,” Emmie said, pushing the button on her camera to go to the next shot. “There are five. Look at them, Jill. They’re definitely him.”
Jill hesitantly took the camera from her and stared long and hard at the second picture that, like the rest, had a time and date stamp indicating it had just been taken tonight. She was silent as she skipped to the third and then the fourth. When she landed on the fifth, the flashbulb shot of Alec kissing his redhead, she gasped aloud and lifted the camera up to look closer.
“No,” she said finally, but I knew she was no longer protesting against us. The pictures didn’t lie, and not even Jill could explain away their significance. She started to cry.
We sat there in silence for a full five minutes, a statue of intertwined arms, comforting a friend we loved dearly. Emmie, Meg, and I looked at one another with concern as we rubbed her back, rubbed her arms, held her hands, while she looked down at her lap and cried silent tears. None of us knew what to do. There was nothing
to
do.
“I appreciate your concern,” Jill finally said stiffly, pulling away from us and sniffing back tears. “But I’m sure there’s an explanation for this. I know he wouldn’t cheat on me.”
I gaped at her. She was still in denial, even after seeing the photos. “Jill, I—”
“I’m going home now,” she said, standing up without looking at any of us. She sniffed again. “I’m going to talk to Alec. I’m sure there’s a logical explanation.”
“Jill, you can’t—” Emmie began.
“Stop,” Jill cut in coldly. “Just stop. I think you’ve done enough for one night.”
Gathering her purse up, she sniffed again and strode purposefully toward the door. She was gone before any of us could react.
“What just happened?” Emmie asked, looking helplessly between me and Meg.
Meg shook her head. “I was afraid she’d react like this,” she said softly. “She’s going to have to deal with this in her own time, in her own way. We just have to try to be there for her as best we can.”
We all stared after her until long after she’d disappeared back into the perfect doorman entrance to her perfect apartment building, where she had been living her perfect life with her perfect husband.
I
walked home that night, after Emmie and Meg and I had parted ways. We all felt sad and helpless and unsure what to do about Jill—even Meg, who always had an answer for everything. None of us was angry at her for blaming us. That was just Jill. The four of us were like sisters, and we had been through enough ups and downs together to forgive one another when the going got rough.
We talked for a little while about sticking around to see if Jill needed us, perhaps trying to get past her doorman to join her in her apartment so that we could support her when Alec got home. In the end, we realized it was a battle she needed to fight alone. She knew we would be there the moment she called if she needed us.
In the blocks from Jill’s apartment to mine, I thought a lot about love, loss, and that which makes a relationship real. I’d spent so much time faking love and happiness in the past two weeks that I’d barely noticed my friend, who had been faking her own love and happiness, even to herself, for months. Perhaps she’d been faking that same visage of perfection for as long as we’d known her. Jill had never had a hair out of place, had never looked, seemed, acted anything less than perfect. I guess I’d always figured that, for the most part, she and her life
were
perfect. But maybe they never had been at all.
It made me think about this stupid Blonde Theory and the quest for perfection in my own life. Maybe I just wasn’t meant to have it all. Maybe I’d gotten smarts and the perfect job, and that’s all I would ever get. Maybe that would have to be enough, would have to be okay, would have to be something I conceded to in order to be happy for the rest of my life. After all, I was thirty-five. I’d never been in a relationship where the guy hadn’t eventually walked away from me. Since Peter, in fact, I hadn’t been in a relationship at all. Discovering these past two weeks that stupidity made me attractive in a way that kindness, intelligence, humility, and charm never had was sort of the final blow. Instead of making me feel better or somehow illuminating where I had gone wrong, The Blonde Theory had just left me feeling more alone than ever.
Maybe I needed to start being happy with what I had rather than wanting more than I was owed.
I was so lost in thought that I didn’t notice the tall figure in the shadows of my fifth-floor hallway until I was jiggling my keys absently in the lock on my door. I didn’t notice him until his hand was on my shoulder. I whirled around and started to scream, but he clapped a hand over my mouth.
“Harper, it’s just me,” he said, emerging from the shadows. I stared into his face for a moment, until he dropped his hand from my mouth.
“Matt?” I asked, my heart thudding, although I wasn’t sure if it was from the scare or from the fact that Matt James was standing in the hallway outside my apartment, holding a bottle of wine, looking deliciously sexy as usual in a pair of faded jeans and a black ribbed shirt. “What on earth are you doing here?”
“I just wanted to see you,” he said with a helpless shrug.
“At”—I checked my watch—“midnight?”
He shrugged again. “Well, you ran out of the restaurant after I kissed you, and I didn’t know what to think,” he explained sheepishly. “I’ve actually been waiting here for a couple of hours. I was starting to wonder if you weren’t coming home.” I didn’t know what to say to him, so I just stood there for a moment, until he asked if he could come inside.
“Uh, yeah, I guess,” I agreed, still a bit bewildered.
“Thanks,” he said, his voice husky.
“Come in,” I said softly. I was exhausted, both physically and emotionally. My feelings had been stripped raw by the events of the evening. Jill was still weighing heavily on my mind. And now here was this man in my hallway—the man Emmie had, just hours before, described as a “player”—and I was too tired to pretend to myself that I wasn’t attracted to him. I just couldn’t figure out why the feeling appeared to be mutual. The fact of the matter was, hot, sexy, successful, gorgeous (did I mention sexy?) men weren’t attracted to me. Ever.
Once we had stepped into the front hallway and I had closed the door behind us, Matt held up the bottle of wine tentatively.
“I realize it’s kind of lame,” he said, smiling at me helplessly. “But I was hoping you might join me in a bottle of merlot.”
I looked from Matt to the bottle then back at him again. I don’t know whether it was the long day I’d had, my heartache over Jill, my frustration with dating in general, or the simple realization that things were never as good as they appeared and I therefore needed to stop counting on them, but I started feeling very cranky.
“Exactly what are you trying to pull here?” I asked wearily. I knew my wariness was entirely appropriate, no matter how innocently he was staring at me with those wide green eyes.
“What do you mean?” Matt asked, looking bewildered. “I’m not trying to pull anything. I’m just trying to say that I like you, Harper. I like you a lot.”
“Oh, give me a break,” I said, hating the way that my heart had jumped into my throat when he said that. After all, I knew he didn’t mean it. I wasn’t one of his soap-opera fans who believed the fictitious lines his character delivered to swooning leading ladies. “Seriously, what is this? Some kind of little joke? Ha ha, you’ve hit on the uptight lawyer lady, now you can get back to your real life and all your little model girlfriends?”
Matt looked at me blankly.
“This isn’t a joke,” he said. Was it my imagination, or did he look genuinely wounded? “Harper, I don’t date models. I don’t like models. Stupidity doesn’t turn me on. Intelligence does.”
“Oh yeah, brains are a
real
turn-on,” I scoffed, rolling my eyes at him. “
All
the guys just
love
the smart girls. C’mon. Give me a break, Matt.”
I sauntered into my living room, my back to Matt, doing my best to pretend I didn’t care that he was here. What was he
doing
here? There had to be some sort of ulterior motive. But I was at a loss when it came to figuring out exactly what it was. And I
hated
being at a loss.
“Do you have a corkscrew, Harper?” Matt asked, ignoring my sarcasm as he followed me into the living room. “And maybe two wineglasses?”
My back still to him, I walked into the kitchen, removed a corkscrew from the drawer, and took two wineglasses from my glass-front cabinet. I walked back into the living room where Matt stood, holding the wine bottle and looking at me quizzically.
“Here,” I said, thrusting the corkscrew and glasses at him. “Have a seat,” I mumbled as an afterthought. “I need to use the bathroom.”
When I returned a few minutes later, after trying to get ahold of myself while staring at my dark circles and growing crow’s-feet in the bathroom mirror and marveling at the new pimple that had materialized on my forehead at some point during the day, Matt was holding two wineglasses filled with merlot.
As I approached the sofa, he stood and held out one of the glasses in my direction. “At least have a drink with me and hear me out.”
Something in me snapped just then.
“Honestly, what the hell are you doing here, Matt?” I demanded, waving away his offer of wine. He slowly set the glasses slowly down on my coffee table and stared at me. “I mean, I’ve had enough for one night, you know? I just had to tell one of my best friends that her husband has been cheating on her. And that’s after you appeared at Bistro Forty-nine with the sole purpose, apparently, of ruining what could have been a good date. So whatever your reason for being here, let’s just get it out in the open. Okay?”
Matt regarded me carefully and seemed to take a moment to collect his thoughts before speaking.
“I’m sorry to hear about your friend,” he said slowly. “And I know you don’t believe me, but I didn’t show up at Bistro Forty-nine trying to ruin your date. I just wanted to see you.”
“Whatever,” I sniffed. “Seriously, Matt, don’t patronize me. I’m not stupid.”
“No, you’re not,” Matt agreed. “But you’re also not acting very smart right now.”
I bristled. “And what exactly is
that
supposed to mean?”
“It’s supposed to mean that I’m telling you something that should be relatively easy to understand, and you won’t be quiet long enough to listen to me,” he said, his brow furrowing into waves of frustration in a way that, I had to admit, was somewhat endearing. At least I was starting to get under his skin, too.
“And what exactly is that?” I asked, trying to sound obstinate.
“Harper,” Matt said, taking a few steps forward until we were face-to-face, our noses barely six inches apart. He looked so deeply into my eyes that I started to squirm, mostly out of a desire to restart my heart, which I swear had stopped for a moment. “I like you,” he said softly. “I don’t know how many ways you want me to say it. I like you. I like you a lot.”
“No you don’t,” I said stubbornly, not sure why I was protesting so much. But this was impossible. Guys like him didn’t go for girls like me. Not when they knew the
real
me. Which Matt did.
“Harper, listen to me,” he said, cupping my chin in his hands. My instincts told me to pull away, but I didn’t. Because despite myself, his warm, slightly callused hand felt good there. “Harper, I like you for who you are. You’re an incredible, intelligent, attractive woman whom I respect and admire. I know you’re used to guys being intimidated by your job or your success. But Harper, I want you to listen to me: I like you
because
of your intelligence and your intellect and everything you are. Not despite those things, Harper,
because
of them. Are you listening to me?”
I finally heard him. I mean, I really, really heard him. And in that instant, it was as if all my other senses had kicked in, too. I saw his green eyes as if for the first time, noticing the little silver flecks in them that seemed to make them sparkle. I noticed his musky, manly scent, a mix between cologne and something else that was nearly irresistible. I felt his presence, just inches away from me, in a way I never had before. I felt my entire body suddenly flood with unfamiliar warmth, and I knew I was blushing from head to toe.
“Oh,” I said finally because there was nothing else sarcastic or angry or unkind left to say.
Then he kissed me, and it was even better than it had been in the restaurant. It was long and slow and deep and deliberate, and I was no longer trying to resist. Instead, I kissed back, letting his tongue search my mouth, tentatively probing his in return. I pressed myself into him with desperation and longing I hadn’t let myself feel in three years, my heart filling with something unfamiliar as he pressed into me.
Then, before I could stop myself, I started to cry.
“What is it?” Matt asked, pulling back a bit but still holding on to me tenderly, which just made me cry harder. “Did I do something wrong? Are you okay?”
I shook my head, mortified, wishing that I could stop the tears, but they seemed to be gushing out with a life of their own as if from a broken faucet I couldn’t turn off.
“No, you didn’t do anything wrong,” I said between sobs. Could I possibly embarrass myself more in front of this guy? “It’s just that...It’s just that...” I paused and struggled for the next words, because they were hard for me to say. “It’s just that that’s the first time anyone has ever said anything like that to me.”
Matt nodded, and I knew he understood. He pulled me close and held me as the tears poured out of their own accord. And slowly, as I sobbed into his shoulder, my feelings of inadequacy started to fade, leaving me only with an entirely alien feeling of belonging.
“Stupid Blonde Theory,” I mumbled as my tears finally dried. Matt smiled and leaned down to kiss me again.
That night, Matt stayed over, and we had absolutely perfect sex. Three times. Slow, passionate, gentle, perfect sex with Matt gazing into my eyes, sometimes holding my hand, sometimes stroking my face, sometimes running his big hands tenderly through my hair or over the curves of my body. I had never known that sex could feel that way. I was in such a daze by the time we finally stopped that I completely forgot to set my alarm clock. And you know what? For the first time in my life, it didn’t even matter that I was being irresponsible. I didn’t even care.
Maybe there
was
such a thing as perfection.
W
HEN I WOKE
up in the morning, an hour later than I should have but after only a few hours of sleep thanks to our love-making marathon the night before, I felt strangely calm and at peace. I looked to my left and felt a sense of comfort at seeing Matt there, sleeping peacefully, his back to me, his rib cage rising and falling with the deep breaths of slumber. He was still there. He hadn’t been a dream. The previous night hadn’t been a dream. We had fallen asleep with him spooning me, and I’d never felt so safe in all my life. Not even with Peter.
Wanting to be close to him, I rolled to my left and wrapped my body around Matt’s contours. He stirred, sighed, and settled into the curve of my body. I pressed into him, loving the feel of him against me, loving the scent of him, loving the fact that we had stripped down all the reasons why we shouldn’t be together, leaving only us, the real me and the real him. And it was all going to be fine.
Oddly, I wasn’t even worrying about the fact that I was tremendously late to work. I didn’t have any meetings until the early afternoon, and I doubted the other partners would even notice my absence. I supposed I should call Molly, who was probably worrying about me, but I didn’t want to move, didn’t want to break the spell of perfection that had settled over my bed. If I could have, I would have stayed there forever.
It was another half an hour before Matt woke up. He came to slowly, stirring a bit first, then rolling over to face me.
“Well hello, you,” he said with a lazy smile, blinking into the sunshine that had started to pour through the bedroom drapes.
“Hello,” I said, smiling back shyly.
“Did you sleep well?” he asked. I nodded, and he smiled. He reached for me, wrapping his arms around me and pulling me into his chest. I snuggled against him, loving the feeling of being held so tightly by someone who really, truly knew me.