Thirty-five and Single

With the remote in my hand, I’m just about to unmute it when a loud giggle can be heard on the other side of my door.

“Joel, you are so funny.” The voice is unmistakable.

I close my eyes and turn the volume up high. I don’t want to hear whatever else Cara has to say. He’s brought her home on hump day. That’s all I really need to know.

The thing that sucks is I can’t be mad at him. He wanted something with me, and I turned him down. Furthermore, I was the one to set them up. Good for him.

Liar, the invisible devil inside me shouts.

Chapter Eleven

Earbuds block me from hearing all the painful details of Cara’s date with Joel that next day. Instead, I try to decide if I’m happy or disappointed I didn’t run into Joel at the gym this morning.

It’s my lunchtime visitor who throws me for a loop.

“Corey, what are you doing here?”

Cara and Janet watch. I’m sure they were about to dish about Cara’s night until my boyishly sexy ex showed up.

“Can I take you to lunch?”

There are so many questions I want to toss to the man, like how he found out where I worked. Then again, he’d been at Amelia’s over the weekend. I’m so going to kill my sister.

“Sure.” I don’t want to air our dirty laundry to the peanut gallery.

Once Corey’s hand lands on the small of my back, I hear snickering behind me. I roll my eyes, wishing I worked at a big corporation lost in a sea of cubicles and anonymity.

Outside on the sidewalk, crushed by the foot traffic of other lunch-goers, I grit out, “How did you find out where I work? And why aren’t you in Baltimore at work?”

He doesn’t answer, only points at a café a few doors down. I nod and bide my time. Once we are seated in a corner near the front picture window, I ask him to explain himself again.

“Should I order your usual?”

Not that we’d frequented this café, but he reminds me that he’s known me long enough to order on my behalf.

Feeling little more than a bobblehead, I nod again. He walks toward the counter, and heads turn to take notice of him. He’s that good-looking, but the jealousy I used to feel doesn’t manifest. It’s like going to Belgium and eating chocolate and coming back to the States and having chocolate here. It’s good, but it’s not the same.

If nothing else, my drunken, shameful night with Joel opened my eyes to something new and quite possibly better. Even though I can’t be with him, he’s inadvertently shown me what I’ve been missing out on.

Corey comes back to the table with a turkey and bacon sandwich on a succulent looking croissant. It is what I would have ordered before I moved to D.C. and decided to work on my weight. I say nothing, though. I’ll probably need the calories to make it through the upcoming conversation.

“Are you going to answer me?” I ask in a harsh whisper with my sandwich halfway to my mouth.

His heavy sigh and crow’s feet at the corner of his eyes spark worry in me. Has he been sleeping? Why do I care? I chide myself. He’s probably sleeping with someone else in our bed. That’s why he looks so damn tired.

“I miss you,” he declares.

I try not to choke as I laugh. “Really. Did your girlfriend leave you? She probably doesn’t want to wash your tighty-whities.”

He doesn’t wear them, but the words slip out of my mouth as a verbal slap.

His glare burns out as quickly as it fires up. “You’re wrong. She can’t wait for our divorce to be final so I can marry her and make babies.”

Disgust covers his handsome features as my bite of sandwich curdles in my stomach.

“You should.” I’m proud of myself for eking out my agreement.

“What?”

I swallow, holding back tears. “You should be with her. She can give you what I can’t.”

His hand covers mine. “Don’t you get it? I don’t want those things if I can’t have them with you.”

Slowly, I draw my hand back, to his dismay. Shortly after I left him, there were days when I’d wanted to hear those words and go back to the man I thought I would grow old with.

“We can’t.” Then I realize my mistake. “I can’t.”

His brow creases and he looks like a defeated man. “Livvy, please.”

I shake my head. “Don’t you see? You broke us. If I went back to you now, which I’m not, I would resent you. I would always think about how you chose to experiment with others before making a decision about who you wanted to be with.”

“What are you saying?”

Our food, which looked so appetizing before, suddenly makes my stomach turn.

“I’m saying I want that opportunity too. I want to date other people and see what it’s like.”