She shrugged.
“Neil and I don’t have an open marriage,” I corrected her. “An open marriage implies that we could seek out other sexual partners individually. Maybe go on dates with them or whatever. We don’t do that. Right now, we’ve just got one guy.”
“Ah yes. Emir.” Holli fluttered her hand against her chest
and pretended to swoon. “Seriously, you two better lock him down. He won’t stay single for long.”
I sighed. “Yeah, I don’t know about that.”
“What? You don’t know if you could handle having another dude worshipping at your feet? If Neil will share your feet,” she amended.
Sometimes, maybe I didn’t need to tell her everything.
“It’s not that. It’s more like…” I hated to admit this to cool, sexually adventurous Holli. “I don’t know if I could handle sharing Neil. There’s already something kind of between them that I can’t quite put my finger on. I’m not threatened by it, but if we made it official? I don’t know.”
“I get that.” Holli shrugged. “I couldn’t share Deja. We’re doing the sexually monogamous thing, because that’s what she’s into and I love her more than I love getting freaky in bathrooms at clubs. But, even if she was down to have sex with other people, I wouldn’t be cool with bringing someone into the relationship full time.”
“Is it weird that hearing about your monogamy made me feel a lot better about my non-monogamy?”
She shook her head. “Nah. You’re probably just happy to be the sexually adventurous one, now.”
There was definitely some truth there.
As fun as my sleep over and heart-to-heart with Holli had been, life continued as normal, with no sign of any forthcoming communication with Neil. I went back to work at the Brooklyn office, but only three days a week. Deja acted like my return had saved her life, when, in reality, I felt like I was just taking up space. The magazine ran fine without me. Deja knew exactly what she was doing. So, it was yet another place in my life where I didn’t feel needed.
The only place I did feel needed was at home, with Olivia. And that turned out to be a good thing, because Mariposa’s grandmother died the first week of May, and she had to return to Trinidad for the funeral.
“You’re sure it’s not going to be a problem?” she asked me for what had to be the four hundredth time. We stood in the foyer, waiting for Tony to take her to the airport.
“It’ll be fine,” I reassured her, though my stomach did clench a little at the thought of being truly alone in caring for Olivia. I’d always had either Neil or Mariposa to help. “You just worry about you, right now.”
Yeah, the “I’ll be fine” careened wildly off the tracks somewhere around the third morning. Mom had offered to come up and help, but I had this weird feeling that accepting her help would be akin to admitting defeat. Emma and Michael had put me in charge of caring for Olivia, and I was going to do just that.
Our housekeeper didn’t usually work on weekends, and I refused to ask her to when I was trying to prove my self-reliance. So, I had Olivia on one hip while I stirred a pot of mac and cheese when the house phone rang.
We so rarely received calls on the landline that it actually startled me. I grabbed the cordless handset from the wall. “Yeah?”
It was the security guard at the end of the main driveway. I couldn’t remember his name, because my brain was like mush. “Ms. Scaife, there’s someone at the gate for you?”
I frowned and moved the pan off the burner, then reached for my iPad to turn down the music. We didn’t tend to get a whole lot of drop ins, considering most of our friends lived in the city. “I wasn’t expecting anyone.”
“It’s a Mr. Ati.” The guy paused. “How would you like us to proceed?”
“Let him come up. Always, by the way.” I thought Neil would have told them that, by now, considering all the time he’d spent here. Then again, El-Mudad rarely came by the front entrance. He usually flew in.
“Yes, ma’am.”
I hung up the phone and looked wildly around the kitchen. I hadn’t exactly been keeping up appearances. Olivia was wearing the same onesie she’d slept in, complete with milk dribbles on it, and my hair was up in a looped ponytail on the top of my head. My yoga pants had a hole on the front of the thigh.
Of course, he would pick today to show up.
“Okay, okay. Don’t panic, but a hot guy is here, and we look awful,” I told Olivia. One of her toys lay on the island, a dopey looking doll with big buttons and crinkly texture parts, but most importantly, a flower-shaped mirror sewed into one hand. I picked it up and tried to be positive, but I didn’t have any makeup on, and my under-eye bags were tragic.
A car engine echoed as it pulled beneath the porte cochere. There wasn’t time to fix anything.
He knocked on the kitchen door, and I went to open it. I was going to be confident and in control of everything, and I would totally not focus on the fact that Neil wasn’t here to be with us.
All of that flew out the window the second I saw El-Mudad standing on the welcome mat. His dark hair was flopped to the side, careless but cool, at the same time. He wore sunglasses and a leather jacket despite the fact that it was frickin’ May, and his full lips parted in a wide smile. “Sophie.”