Commitment (55 page)

“I’m sitting here, something’s obviously wrong and you . . .” she sighed. “Forget it.”

“No, speak your mind.”

“You called, so
talk
to me. What’s going on?
That’s not a difficult question.
I share something, you share
something.
I want to feel like you trust me enough . . .”

“
We ta
lk all the fucking time, Riley. And talk and talk and talk.
I do
n’t know what you want from me.
And w
ho said anything about not trusting you?”

“It doesn’t feel like you do,” she said quietly.
“I can feel you holding back.”

“
Well, if you want to get technical about it, you were cheating on your
man
when we got together, so some people might
say
you’re not the most trustworthy to begin with,” he said.

“
Wow.
I kn
ew that would come
back
up one day.
That’s a rotten thing to say.”

“But it’s a true thing to say,” Shawn said.

“I was with
you
.
You’re the person I was with.”

“Yeah, I’m sure that mad
e him feel a lot better.
Wh
at did you tell him anyway, t
o
make it
okay?
That you fell in love?”

“I did fall in love,” she said quietly.

“
Yeah.
From the moment we met?
That’s what all that sne
aking around was about for you?
Love?”

“What do you want me
to say?
That I was
in it for the sex?
Okay, I wa
s in it for the sex. At first. Just like you.
Why is what I did any worse?” she demanded.

“Be
cause you were
‘
with
somebody’
,” he raised his voice.
“
Isn’t that what the fuck you said
after
I hit it
?
But
you lied to that mothe
rfucka like a pro.
For months.”

There was silence for awhile and then he realized she was crying. He’d never made her cry before, but instead of feeling remorse, Shawn was surprised
to feel a surge of resentment. The fact that she could still cry about that shit with Brian just pissed him off more.
Did she still have feelings for that motherfucka, or what?

“I didn’t lie to him,” she said. “I . . .”

“
You
just didn’t tell him the truth. Semantics, Riley.
Looks like that fancy English degree is coming in handy after all.”

“I can’t believ
e you’re doing this,” she said.
“That you’re trying to make me ashamed
of
what happened between us, no matter how imperfect the circumstances were.”

“How imperfect the c
ircumstances,” Shawn repeated.
“Right. There you go agai
n, trying to dress the shit up.
You were fucking
me
when you were with
him
.
I agree
that’s pretty
damn
imperfect.
How many times did you leave my bed and go straight to his? Lay up with me one day and then him the next?
”

She was
really sobbing now and seemed
unable to
get out what she wanted to say.
Shawn shook his head. H
e didn’t need this shit.
Not right now.

“
You
want
to preach to me about give-and-
take in a relationship
?
”
he
continued.
“
Well y
ou better check yourself first.
Looks to me like you’re real good at the ‘take’ when it suits you
.
Hell, for all I know,
y
ou might fall in love again.
With someone
else. Someone
who doesn’
t have a hard time
sharing
. Someone who talks your fucking ears off about
what he’s thinking
and doesn’t get into fights and shit.”

“That’s not how it works,” she said,
gulping, trying to catch her breath
. 

“So go ahead
, Riley. T
ell me how it works.”

“Are you seriously saying you think I would cheat on you?”

“
I don
’t know what I’m saying, okay?”
he
was
suddenly exhausted.

“Then
maybe
I should just let you go.”

“Yeah.
You should.”

He hung up before she could say goodbye.

g

Greg looked up at her, took a deep breath and then looked down again at the sheaf of papers on his desk.

“I have to be honest, Riley,” he said. “I’m not sure this gets us where we want to be.”

Riley felt herself deflate, even though she’d known, walking into this meeting that the conversation would go precisely as it had. Greg had spared her the public flogging of th
e writers’ meeting for a reason. H
e hated her piece on Chris; it was as simple as that.
He hated it enough not to want to humiliate her by describing the full dimensions of that hatred in a public forum.

“Honestly Greg, I’m not sure where we want to be,” she admitted.

“Well then help me with this, Riley. Tell me what you were thinking with this “Softer Side of Scaife” piece.”

The way he said the title,
which Riley act
ually thought was quite clever,
was
vaguely disparaging and didn’t make her feel particularly forthcoming.

“Does it matter at this point what I was thinking?” she asked
wearily
. “You didn’t get it. And if readers don’t get it . . .”

Greg held up a hand to stop her. “Or maybe I don’t get the readers you’re writing for,” he said. “I freely acknowledge that this is new ground for me, and for the magazine.”

“Maybe I don’t get these readers either, Greg. That’s what I tried to tell you. This is not my audience. This is my
husband’s
audience.”

Greg looked at her, his face blank and Riley suspected she may have gone too far. He slid the pages across the desk toward her.

“You’ll see I’ve written some notes,” he said. “Read them and see what you can do. Bring me a revision on Monday.”

Riley grabbed the pages and stood, turning on her heel.

“Riley,” Greg said, stopping her in her tracks. “Your tenacity is one of the reasons I gave you this assignment. Your unrelenting
pursuit of ‘getting it right’.
And your confidence in your talent.
I would hate to see you lose
those qualities just because I’ve challenged you to expand your sense of what is relevant and interesting
.
”

Ouch
.

Back in her office, she stuck Greg’s notes in her bag and shut down her computer. She was due home early, because Shawn was back
today
from Houston and they were going to a party at the
home
of the head of Sony Music. The party was
an
event that she’d agreed to, long before their fight about the Cameron Cole
party.

Since then, they had both carefully avoided talking about it and about the hurtful telephone conversation that
followed
. Shawn still called her every night, but
it was nothing more than a check-in:
H
ey-I’m-here-show-went-well-how-are-
you-fine-great-goodbye
.

T
hey were distant with each other, neither of them knowing how to bridge the gulf.
She
missed him. Even though there was contact, they hadn’t had a connection in over a week. Silence would have been better.

As soon as she walked into the apartment, Riley knew he was home. It wasn’t that anything in particular had been moved, it was just a subtle change in energy
that told her Shawn was around.
In the bedroom, he’d dumped a pile of clothes for
dry-cleaning
on the bed
, and his boots at the door of his dressing room. He was considerably messier than she was, but Riley still welcomed any sign that he was home.

She grabbed a
dry-cleaning
bag from the hall closet and began stuffing it with his and her clothes, and was on her knees digging through the laundry basket, looking for
more
stuff
to include when she looked up and found Shawn standing over her.

“Holy crap!” She grabbed her chest. “You scared me.”

“Sorry,” he said
, impassively
. “I thought I heard you come in.”

Riley noted that he didn’t make any m
ove to kiss, or even touch her.
Swallowing her disappointment, she turned once again to look through the laundry.

“Anything else you need sent out?” she asked, forcing herself to sound casual.

“Just the stuff you grabbed already,” he said.

She busied herself with the clothes, wondering why he was still standing there.

“Are we going to dinner before this thing?” she asked. “Or are they going to have food there?”

“They’ll have food,” he said.

When she looked up again,
he
had
turned and
was heading
for his dressing room. Riley let out a breath she hadn’t even been aware she was holding and stood with the dry cleaning bag, tossing it over her shoulder.

“I’m going to go drop these off,” she said. She was trying to sound as normal as possible, and the effect was to make her sound tense.

“We have a concierge, Riley,” Shawn said, sticking his head out of the dressing room. He sounded
annoyed
. “I don’t know why you don’t use them for stuff like this.”

“Seems easier to do it myself,” she mumbled.

Shawn made an impatient sound and grabbed the phone from beside the bed. He punched out a few numbers and spoke to the person on the other end, telling them that he needed the
dry-cleaning
picked up.

“There,” he said when he hung up. “Done.”

Riley stood with the bag in hand, feeling foolish.

“I’ll take it to the front door,
then,
” she said.

She slow-walked to the foyer and left the bag by the door, taking a deep breath. This was not shaping up to be the reconciliation she’d imagined
and hoped for
. And following her conversation with Greg this afternoon, the last thing she needed was an evening full of tense silences.

Taking a deep breath, she went back to the bedroom and
into
her dressing room opposite Shawn’s, looking over her wardrobe and trying to decide what to wear. Thanks to Tracy’s tenacity, she had lots of new stuff to choose from.
Dresses, chic pantsuits, shoes that cost almost a month’s salary. And then there was the jewelry. Shawn bought her new things all the time; without warning adding necklaces, earrings and bracelets to her collection often without breathing a word about it. Riley had grown accustomed to walking in and finding a new lariat or ring added to the glass top jewelry organizer at the center of her sizeable dressing room.

Most of his choices were simple pieces that she might have bought herself, if she wasn’t the kind of woman to balk at spending fifteen thousand dollars on
a
bracelet. This time though, there was nothing new and she was both relieved and disappointed.

Riley couldn’t quite decipher this mood of his; unless she was mistaken, she was the
one who had a right to be upset—he
had embarrassed her by fighting at a party over some imagined pass that Cameron Cole made at her and then later suggested that she was likely to cheat on him because she’d done it before with Brian.

So why was she this unsettled?
Well, she knew why. She wasn’t used to Shawn not wanting to touch her. Usually, he was all over her, almost as though he couldn’t help himself. A
rush
of insecurity coursed through her and she cursed herself for feeling so . . . bereft
,
just because he hadn’t ripped her clothes off the minute
s
he walked in
. But the disturbing truth was that
she’d always suspected that the balance of power in their relationship depended on him wanting her as much as he did. The intensity with which he wanted her was matched only by the intensity with which she loved him.
One did not work without an assurance of the other.