He took my container of curry and my chopsticks and put them next to his. I wiped my mouth with the back of my hand while he was distracted. Something big was happening. I could feel it.
He pulled me onto his lap so that I was straddling him.
“I’m only going to talk about this once. No questions, okay?”
I nodded.
“I was with her for three years. I loved her … love her,” he amended. Jealousy rushed. That’s all it did — rushed through me with nowhere to go. It felt like I was going to pop from the pressure. I bit the insides of my cheeks.
“You never quite stop loving someone when you're in that deep.” His eyes kind of glazed over at that point. “Anyway, we were really young … and stupid. I couldn’t control her the way I wanted to; she was too strong for me. I made a really bad decision one night and she caught me.”
“You cheated on her?” Up until that point I had kept my mouth shut, too afraid to speak in case it broke the rare chatty moment he was having.
The muscles in his jaw clenched, and his nostrils flared.
“Yes — no.” He rubbed his forehead. “I was...” He dropped his hand to my hip. He looked so tortured that I reached up to put my palm against his cheek. I knew a little about Caleb’s father. He was a notorious womanizer. Currently, he was married to a woman younger than me. It was his fourth marriage. From what I gathered from Caleb, he highly disapproved of his father’s behavior, so cheating was coming as quite a surprise to me.
“I’m not a cheater, Leah. But, God that woman doesn’t trust anyone…”
I took a deep breath and let it ooze from between my lips. He watched me carefully, trying to gauge my response.
“But, did you do anything with her?”
“Not technically — no.”
I didn’t understand what he was saying. Did he think that he cheated just because he wanted to cheat? Did he want to cheat?
“Leah,” he swiped my hair over my shoulder, his fingers brushing against my skin. I shivered. We were having a serious discussion and all I could think about was —
I shook my head in frustration. “Either you f**ked her or you didn’t.”
He sighed. “I never cheated on her. Not in the traditional sense of the word.”
“God, I don’t even know what that means.”
He tilted his head back and laughed. “Obviously our moral compasses do not point in the same direction.”
I blushed. A rare thing for me to do.
“Leah,” he said. “I like you. More than I should at this point. But, I’m still a mess. I can’t be in a relationship if I’m only in halfway. I still love her.”
My eyes filled with tears. He was telling me that he couldn’t even try to love me because he loved someone else.
“Fuck.” I swung my legs off of him and sat on my side of the bed. The sheet was pushed down to his waist. I looked at him out of the corner of my eye. His face was wiped of emotion.
“So what are you saying? May I remind you that you showed up on my doorstep, not the other way around?”
He laughed, and tackling me to my back, he leaned over me.
“I am very attracted to you.” He kissed my nose. “I care about you. When you left the other night, you were hurt.”
“Yes, I was.”
“And now?”
I smiled up at him. “Now, I’m hurting in a different way.”
He laughed. He had a great laugh. It started as a rumble in his chest and then rolled out in a smooth, raspy wave. Every time I made him laugh, I felt triumphant.
I suddenly grew serious. “I can make you forget her.”
His lips were still curled in a half smile. His eyes grew foggy as he looked down at my mouth.
“Yeah?”
I nodded. “Yeah.”
“Okay, Red,” he said, softly winding a piece of my hair around his finger.
I giggled — also an unusual thing for me to do. Red. I liked that.
He kissed me softly and slid on top of me.
We made love. It was the first time in my life that someone made love to me. It had always just been sex.
I fell hard that day.
Chapter Nine
Present
I am in my Juicy sweats and a tank top, making a smoothie in the kitchen, when Sam arrives for work the next day. I am supposed to be watching Estella — who is napping in her movable bassinet — while Caleb takes a shower, but by the time I let Sam in the front door, I have forgotten where I parked her.
“How are you?” Sam greets me warmly, carrying a duffel bag over his shoulder. I wonder if he is planning on spending the night. I am creeped out by the thought of it.
“So, where’s my charge?” he says, rubbing his hands together and smiling. For a minute, I think he is referencing a credit card — because it’s something I say often as I browse the mall and scrounge around in my purse for my American Express — and then I realize he’s talking about the baby. It takes everything in me not to roll my damn eyes.
The baby’s insatiable hunger rescues me as she begins to mewl from somewhere over my shoulder. It is then that I remember wheeling her into the dining room. I glance toward her bassinet in annoyance.
“I’ll get her,” Sam says, taking control and walking past me. I shrug with indifference and wander toward my laptop. He walks back into the room, cradling her in his arms, just as Caleb bounds down the main staircase — his hair still damp from his shower. I feel a surge of lust just looking at him. Caleb ignores me and walks over to slap Sam on the back like they're old friends. He hasn’t spoken to me since our late night trip to the hospital, other than to ask a question about the baby or to spout an instruction. I turn away and sulk while they discuss things that don’t interest me. I am planning a trip to the spa and deciding how many treatments I can fit into eight hours when Caleb calls my name. Desperate to be the center of his attention, I forsake my computer and look up at him hopefully.