Stitches

I shoot him a mild look of annoyance. “I’m not trying to leap ahead; I’m just trying to figure out how this works in the big picture.”

“It works the way we need it to,” he states. “I’m always looking at the big picture, but this stuff will come up when it comes up. It’s too soon to worry about it now.”

Bringing up babies at breakfast, it turns out, is a good way to get rid of Seb. He finishes his breakfast in record time, kisses Moira, and leaves for work.

It’s weird as hell staying here with Moira after he leaves. I don’t take a lot of time off in general—one day a week is good enough for me—and since things have been going so shitty with Ashley, even that has been too much. A day off just means time to think, time to stew, time I’m not busy and I can get lost down a rabbit hole of stress and aggravation.

Now days off are going to mean something different. It’s foreign but peaceful the way Moira goes about her routine. I stay in the kitchen and talk to her while she cleans up after breakfast. When she’s done with that, she gets out her sketchpad and oil pencils and draws for a little bit.

I relax on the couch and catch up on a few emails while she works.

It’s calm and uneventful and I can’t wait for a hundred more days like this one.

Once she has drawn until she feels her food has digested, apparently, she gathers up her supplies and tells me, “I’m going to change into my workout clothes.”

“You want company?” I ask her.

Flashing me a smile, she says, “You just want to get laid, don’t you? Come on up, I’ll go a round before my run. Just don’t wear me out so much that I can’t finish. I’ve gotta get in two miles.”

A burst of surprised laughter shoots out of me. “I meant did you want me to go running with you?”

“Oh!” Chuckling lightly, she says, “Sorry, I’m in Sebastian mode. Sure, that would be great. He never runs with me. I asked him to once when we first started dating—I figured he clearly works out, right? Or he’s just blessed with incredible genes. But he won’t run.”

I shake my head. “Nope. I will, though. Let me finish answering this question real fast and I’ll be right up. I’m not saying no to the sex, if you’re still offering,” I call after her, as she heads for the stairs.

“Wait until we get back and we can have shower sex,” she calls back, her voice muffled as she heads for her bedroom.

It’s a damn good day off.

25

Sebastian

When Moira and I first started dating years ago, she surmised a certain truth about me early on.

“You’re a man who does what needs doing, aren’t you?” she asked one night, a look in her eyes like it impressed the hell out of her.

I’ll be honest, I like impressing the hell out of Moira, but whether she liked it or she didn’t, that answer would have been the same.

Yes.

I am a man who does what needs doing.

Doesn’t matter if it’s pretty or nice or fair. Doesn’t even matter if it’s what I want to do, in a lot of cases. I’m a realistic man. I know when to push my own agenda, and when to accept I can’t change a thing doing it my way. I know that in order to survive, in order to rise, in order to thrive, sometimes you have to make certain adjustments. Sometimes you have to do things you don’t want to do, learn to accept things that don’t seem right, make compromises more naïve versions of you never thought you’d make.

In life, you will always end up surprising yourself—it’s your call whether it’s because you get further than you thought you would, or you end up a disappointment even to your own damn self.

Me, I’ve only ever entertained one option.

Whatever I had to do, whichever lines I had to smudge, I would never become that disappointment.

In the interest of success over ego, adapting to change over clinging stubbornly to what doesn’t work, I have become a man who does what needs doing.

Every compromise comes at a cost, but so does being a pussy whose life falls apart because he’s too caught up on his own fucking principles.

That’s what I tell myself, sitting at this bar, sipping on this drink, waiting for Donovan to free up so he can give me a few minutes of his very expensive time.

A young woman in a tight red dress sidles up next to me, stealing not-so-subtle glances at me from time to time while I drink. She’s on my left side and I know she checked my finger for a ring—clearly visible on the bar top here—but after a few minutes she still says, “Hey.”