“No problem. Working?”
Again, he stared at the damn phone. He should just say yes, that would be easiest. The truth couldn’t be a good idea, right?
Or maybe it was.
Maybe it was exactly the right answer.
His Willow problem had evolved; initially it had been so much worse because he had hurt her, but it seemed like more of an affair at that point… and that was a much simpler fix.
Maybe he could get away with coming halfway clean, after all. Willow had let him off the hook time and again, and he really didn’t think about it a lot anymore since she had proven such an overall distraction… so maybe that was the ticket.
If he was just honest with Amanda about that, she would be pissed at him, yes, but maybe then he wouldn’t feel so shitty and secretive all the time.
Maybe it was time to cut Willow loose. He had never intended for that to turn into a relationship to begin with, he’d only wanted to help her.
Part of him hated that idea—he would miss Willow if he never heard from her again. He would also hate to hurt her feelings again, since it seemed like he had before.
Before he could talk himself out of it, he quickly typed, “Date night.”
The phone showed that she read the message, but no matter how many minutes he sat there staring at it, no message was typed back.
He eventually regretted sending it. If he would have regretted it fast enough, maybe he could have turned it into a joke or something, but… he had not.
Muttering a curse at himself, he finally gave up waiting for a response—he wasn’t sure why he expected one—and shoved his cell phone in his pocket, going out to spend a little time with the kids before the sitter got there.
---
Ethan was not surprised when, the day after his date text, he checked Willow’s page and saw a picture of her with a new addition to her parade of horny teenage guys. He told himself that was a good sign, she was moving on, he was moving on—although he had not come clean to Amanda, despite the golden opportunity to do so—and the situation was finally resolving itself.
That seemed to be the case, too. She didn’t text him again after he sent that one, and all night he had checked his phone to make sure.
Things at home did not magically return to normal. There was no discernible difference, with one exception: his dreams about Willow came back.
Not the good ones. Not the real memories of the night at the hotel, or the imaginary ones about fucking her in the Jacuzzi, but the vivid, tear-filled, unpleasant ones from that one night in that goddamn house with those assholes crowded around, watching him hurt her.
When he woke up, he was surly as hell. He couldn’t even remember the last time he had one like that, and when he woke up with a fucking hard-on, i
t soured his mood for the whole day.
That bullshit was supposed to be over.
He didn’t even check her accounts that day. He felt too shitty to look at her face, even through a computer screen.
Finally, right before bed, he decided to try to bait his mind—if he was going to have sex dreams about Willow, he would at least like to remember something consensual, so he went to look for the picture of her in the witch costume.
Then he noticed something he hadn’t been paying attention to before—game posts. In the middle of the night. That previous night, from around 1:30 to 4:15 she had been awake playing some game, posting requests that were all in a little game box that he hadn’t noticed before because he was so busy watching for pictures like an asshole.
What a fucking idiot.
Scrolling back, he saw the posts had been like that several nights—not all in a row, she skipped a day or two now and then, and it would only go back to the most recent 100 requests, so if she had been doing it for longer, there was no record.
Willow wasn’t sleeping.
Sinking back into his chair, he felt like all of the progress he thought they made had been wiped away.
Had she been having the dreams all along? And if she was, frankly, how the hell was she able to talk to him?
Sitting forward, he went back to the recent pictures she had posted, but none were up close enough so that he could see if she had circles under her eyes.