I grab my phone and pull up my texts with Wren.
Me: You were right and now Olivia knows. I fucked everything up.
Wren: Where are you guys?
Me: Home. She’s pissed.
Wren: You need a place to crash?
Me: God, I hope not. I need to talk to her. I can’t lose her again, Wren. I won’t survive it next time.
Wren: Tell her that. Make her listen. Grovel.
I’m putting my phone on the nightstand when Olivia comes back into the room. Her face is free from makeup and her hair is piled into a bun on the top of her head. She blinks her eyes several times and shakes her head. “You’ve lost your mind if you think you’re sleeping in here.” I had hoped that seeing me shirtless might tip the scale in my favor but she practically looks through me as she makes her way to her side of the bed. “Get out.”
“Olivia.”
“OUT!” she screams as she points at the door. She climbs into bed and turns the light off on the nightstand before lying down with her back to me. “Go. I mean it.”
My shoulders sag and my head lowers in defeat. “I love you,” I murmur as I back out of the door slowly. “I’ve never stopped loving you.”
“Why the fuck did you let it come to that?” Wren barks into the phone. It’s rounding two-thirty, and I’m not all that surprised he’s still awake. He’s always a night owl, and I’m sure he fucked Alyssa to sleep and is now sitting up watching Sports Center while eating cold pizza. I’m pacing the length of the living room, too keyed up to sleep and worried about what the morning will bring.
“I needed Amanda to just…go. And I wanted Olivia to be a witness to it.”
“And that’s all well and good, but you should have told Olivia the truth FIRST. You ratted yourself out!”
“In hindsight, it wasn’t my best move, but I was drunk and having to deal with my ex-mistress while my drunk and horny wife who I’d just fingered on the dance floor was standing next to me, excuse me for not thinking clearly.”
“Jesus, B, keeping my wife from killing you is becoming a full time job. Can you imagine what’s going to happen when Olivia gets her on the phone?”
“That is the fucking least of my worries.”
“Well, it’s the top of mine. You make it really hard to stay your goddamn friend sometimes.”
Fury spikes in my veins. I’m not prepared to lose my wife and my best friend in the same night. I don’t want to lose either, but both may actually kill me. “Fuck you, Wren, I don’t need this shit from you.”
“And Ol
ivia doesn’t need this shit from you. You destroyed that girl. She was already struggling with trusting you and you think this makes it easier? You know Olivia loves you. Nothing will change that. But if she can’t trust you…” He trails off. “She’s not going to be with a man she can’t trust, you should know her better than that.”
“She can! I just…I needed more time.”
“With her pussy? Because that’s what it seems like you’ve been doing the last week.”
“No! With her. With Olivia…I just missed her.”
“And you think she hasn’t missed you? But you weren’t being fair to her. You got to see her but she couldn’t see you.”
I’m silent as his words sink in. I drop to the couch. “She thinks I made the whole thing up to get her back. Well, maybe she doesn’t anymore, but she thought I did.”
“You don’t exactly have a track record of transparency,” he says. “Of course she thinks this was all a ruse.”
“It wasn’t man, I swear.”
“I believe that. But I believe I also told you, memory loss usually comes back in a few weeks. I was expecting this to be honest. Of course, I thought you’d tell her the second it happened.”
“I just…I knew the second I told her, it would change everything. What if…what if at that point, when we started working through everything she realized she didn’t want me anymore?”