He should have known better. Did know better.
Dammit.
How could he have let that happen?
How could he stop it, without making more of a mess?
When he was with Willow it felt like a separate life, but he didn't have two lives, he only had one.
And she didn't fit into it.
But he wanted her to.
Even if he knew logically that the only sane course of action was cutting her loose, he knew right down to bottom of his soul that he would miss her.
He should have never slept with her. It was a line that he knew better than to cross, and yet, he did. Sure, Willow had wanted to, but he should have had enough sense for both of them and talked her out of it. Talked to her about the dreams, about her counseling sessions—really any other reaction that didn’t involve his penis.
Instead he fucked everything up.
He couldn’t even try going back to just being friends with her—or some twisted version of friendship, at least—because he had cheated on his damn wife with her.
If he had tried, he couldn’t have made a bigger mess of things.
Unsurprisingly, three days passed without a word from Willow. He wasn’t sure that she even wanted to hear from him after that rather abrupt ending to what was essentially the night she lost her virginity….
On day four of no contact, he went out for groceries by himself and took the opportunity to send out a text message so he had some time to wait for her response. By the time he made it to the produce section, she had responded—just “hey back” but he hadn’t expected much more than that.
“Free to talk?”
She sent back an affirmative, so he decided to go ahead and call her. Almost as soon as he pressed the last button, he realized he was still in public and close to home, so that was probably a mistake, but she answered before he could hang up.
“What are you doing?” she asked, in lieu of another greeting.
“Uh, shopping. Grocery shopping,” he replied, grimacing at yet another reminder of his normal life. “What about you?”
“Facebook stalking you—your new baby is adorable.”
An eyebrow shot up at her frank response. “I don’t have a Facebook.”
“Amanda does.”
“Right.” He couldn’t really say much about that, seeing as he stalked her on a semi-regular basis. “Well…”
“Not that the other two aren’t,” she added. “They’re all pretty adorable, but where did your daughter’s brown hair come from? You and Amanda both have super black hair.”
“This is not the conversation I expected to have,” he stated.
Willow laughed. “Well, I haven’t posted any new pictures on my profile. Wait, is it weird when I check you out, but not weird when you check me out?”
“No…it’s plenty weird when I check you out,” he replied, dryly. “You’re the weird one for not being worried about that.”
“Eh, if you wanted to murder me, you would have by now. Don’t worry, I’m not trying to go all Fatal Attraction on your little family, I was just curious.”
Since she so brashly introduced the topic, he decided to dive right in. “I’m sorry about the other night.”
“It’s fine,” she assured him. “Not like I didn’t know.”
“Yeah… but knowing is one thing…. Anyway, I wanted to apologize if that made you uncomfortable. I thought I turned my phone off.”