One Last Time (Loveless Brothers 5)

“Then next month, my period was a week late,” I go on. “I’ve had two panic attacks in my entire life, and they were both during that week. I didn’t tell Nolan.”

I take another drink.

“But I did go to my gynecologist and get an IUD,” I say. “Which I didn’t tell Nolan about until we’d been ‘trying’ for another four months and he was starting to think we had fertility issues.”

Ava is agog. She’s full-on staring at me, wide-eyed, open-mouthed. Wyatt’s giving the fire a dude, did you hear that? look.

In some fairness to me, we were a bad match and shouldn’t have gotten married. It wasn’t until a few years later that I finally recognized some of his manipulative, controlling tendencies, and I think he sometimes saw me as more of a prop than a person, but I was definitely still an asshole.

“And then, we got divorced, and then I ran off and fucked Seth in a hotel in Harrisonburg and we’ve been stuck in this stupid fuck-and-fight cycle ever since,” I say quickly.

I think Ava’s eyes might fall out of her head.

“I thought you hadn’t seen him since you broke up?” she gasps.

I grimace.

“You guys have been together this whole time?”

“Not together,” I say. “Extremely not together.”

We drink the rest of the beer while I slowly and excruciatingly tell Ava and Wyatt everything. I’m not sure I like it, and it’s sure not how I thought today would go when I woke up this morning, but they’re both cooler about it than I expected.

“Oh, yeah,” Ava scoffs when I get to the very end. More drinks have appeared, and she’s now had three. “We knew there wasn’t a brewery emergency. We’re not total idiots, we could hear you two screaming at each other like you’d found him in bed with a farmyard animal.”

“Damn, Ava,” says Wyatt.

“Sorry,” she says, but she’s grinning.

“Do you at least feel better about Thad?” I ask.

She sighs.

“Yes,” she says. “It’s just so hard! Why can’t things just always be great? I don’t want to have to ask him to appreciate that I always buy the pasta, you know? Can’t he just do that?”

“Ava,” I say. “My sweet baby angel. Listen. You like Thad more than you like being angry at him about spaghetti, right?”

Her face scrunches.

“Being angry is fun,” she says. “But, I guess.”

“Then talk it out and let it go,” I tell her. “It’s not rocket science.”

In my peripheral vision, I can see Lainey turn her head and give me a look. I ignore it.

“All right,” Ava says, standing. “I’m gonna — oh noo.”

She wobbles on her feet, arms out for balance.

“You’re more than welcome to stay in my guest bedroom,” Lainey says, then looks at me. “You too.”

“Thanks,” I say. I’ve only had two beers, but Lainey’s house is nice and warm and cozy and comfy, and mine is far away and feels like all the times Seth’s been in it.

“I should call him, though,” Ava says. “Do you think he’s worried? I hope he’s worried.”

“He’s worried,” I confirm.

Wyatt walks over to me and offers his hand, pulls me out of my chair.

“Do you need a place to crash?” Lainey asks him as Ava wanders away, on the phone.

Wyatt looks down at her, and I swear he almost says yes.

“Nah, I only had one,” he says, holding up the beer bottle. “But thanks for the offer.”Lainey’s guest room has a bed and a couch. Ava insists that I take the bed, and she also insists that it’s not because I’m old and decrepit.

Even so, I have a hard time falling asleep. The new tattoo on my wrist itches under the bandages. I can’t believe I actually told my sweet baby sister — who, at twenty-two, is not all that sweet, nor all that baby — the whole sordid truth of my relationship with Seth, and I also kind of can’t believe she wasn’t fully scandalized.

And worst of all, I can’t stop thinking about the very good advice that I heard coming out of my mouth: do you like him more, or do you like being angry more?

I finally fall asleep, only to jerk awake, my mind still spinning like it’s a flywheel set in motion. Fall asleep, jerk awake.

I wonder if I actually learned anything from my shitshow of a marriage and divorce. Asleep. Awake. I wonder if I’m mad at Seth for any reason except that he’s mad at me because I’m mad at him because he’s mad at me, and maybe we’ve been digging this hole deeper for years and there’s nothing at the bottom of it.

Asleep, awake. How dare he think I want a boyfriend who talks about golf. Asleep, awake. I’m not enough. I can’t be enough. Statistics and probability and mathematics all say that I won’t ever be enough.