Sex, Not Love

Mom nodded.

“So why didn’t you?”

“I was afraid to trust anyone. You know the old saying that hindsight is twenty-twenty?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, it wasn’t for me. For years I looked back at my relationship with your father for signs that I’d missed. But even in hindsight, I couldn’t see any. Same goes for my friendship with Margie, too. To this day, I don’t know how that woman looked me in the face and never showed any signs that she was sleeping with my husband. I think if I’d been able to see it after the fact, it would’ve been easier for me to trust again. I could’ve chalked it up to missing the signs. But without that, I was afraid I’d be blindsided again.”

I understood that. I’d looked back for signs that Garrett shouldn’t have been trusted a million times—not to mention that I hadn’t seen what’d happened between my parents coming either.

“It’s hard to move on from a mistake without knowing what your mistake was.”

My mother shook her head. “The first step is not thinking it’s your mistake, Natalia. It took me years to stop thinking, if only I’d been thinner, or fixed myself up more before he came home at night, or even been more adventurous in the bedroom, maybe he wouldn’t have cheated. But you know what?”

“What?”

“None of that would have changed anything. Because it was never about me. It was about him—his own inadequacies that made him need to prove something to himself. I was a good wife.”

My chest felt like there was a weight sitting on it. “I’m so sorry he did that to you, Mom.”

She smiled sadly. “Likewise. I hate what Garrett did to you. But the greatest gift a mother can give is teaching her child. I want you to learn from my mistakes, sweetheart. Move on. That’s why I push you so hard to find someone new. When you spend too much time looking back and trying to figure out what went wrong, you’re missing out on moving forward.”

“I just need to focus on my career and Izzy right now, Mom.”

She smiled. “Okay, sweetheart. Whatever you say. Although those things are doing pretty great, if you ask me.”

My sisters blasted through the back door, effectively ending our conversation. But Mom had given me a lot to think about.

She was right that I’d also spent a lot of time focusing on missed signs that my husband wasn’t the man I’d thought he was. Maybe it was time to focus on finding peace with who he is and move on.

But it was easier to admit that I kept people at a distance because I was afraid of getting hurt by the same thing, than to admit I was just afraid of getting hurt.

Chapter 18

Natalia

Hunter Delucia.

That’s what the return address read on the package I’d been staring at since the mailman delivered it. Just seeing his name, looking at the heavy ink of his slashy handwriting, made me happier than I’d been in the last week-and-a-half.

Hunter had kept to his word of not making contact, leaving the ball in my court. And even though I’d thought about him more than a few times each day, I still hadn’t taken the initiative to reach out.

I sat at my desk in my home office, typing up notes on Minnie Falk, a patient with a severe compulsive counting disorder. Unlike many patients, she didn’t have a specific fear of what might happen to her if she didn’t perform her counting rituals. Nonetheless, she suffered a profound sense of incompleteness when she didn’t do many of her tasks in sets of four.

I sat back into my chair with the package still in my hands and took a deep breath. My fears of Hunter were really no different than Minnie’s fears. I obsessively thought about the man, felt the compulsion to talk to him each day, and had a profound sense of incompleteness when I didn’t.

What had my advice for Minnie been this week?

We’d been working on interrupting her pattern. She’d quit smoking a few years back and had recently started again when her sister passed away. Although I would’ve loved for her to quit altogether, my job was to work with her on her OCD behavior, so I focused on her four-cigarettes-in-a-row habit. Today we’d worked on changing that pattern as the first step in changing her compulsion. While she still smoked her four cigarettes in a row, I had her wait sixty seconds between smokes rather than light one cancer stick off another. And after the third one, I’d had her eat a quick snack—just a piece of cheese—to break the pattern a bit more.

Maybe this contact, a package, would give me some relief from the unsettled feelings I’d had as of late, yet still keep some distance between Hunter and me. Anxious for relief, I ripped into the box like a kid on Christmas morning.

Inside was what looked like a black wrist brace of some sort. King Wrap Strap. Below the name was a description of the product. Comfortably

stops wrist and thumb from off-hand shot veer. Underneath it was a note on a piece of Khaill-Jergin stationery, the firm where Hunter worked. The handwriting fit the man—very dark, as if he was heavy-handed with a pen, and tall, slanted downstrokes, masculine-looking. Was I insane to think his handwriting was sexy? The note itself was short and sweet, but boy did it hit the target.

Now you have a reason to think about me.