In Medias Res (17 page)

“How long have you wanted this?” she asked.

I groaned as her fingers slipped inside me. My back arched against her and I pulled her closer. “Since the day I met you.”

“Then what took you so long?”

“Better late than never,” I said, staring into her loving eyes.

I had heard that when one woman makes love to another, the pleasure is twinned. You feel what she’s doing to you, but you also feel what you’re doing to her.

I knew what to do because I knew what I wanted Jennifer to do to me. I knew how to touch her because I knew how I wanted her to touch me. I knew how to kiss her because—well, because she had already shown me how.

My hands on her were hers on me. Her mouth on me was mine on her. My name on her lips was hers on mine.

The spasms began. Gently at first, then with greater and greater intensity. My initial “Oh” of surprise quickly turned into a full-throated cry. Jennifer echoed the sound.

When it was over, she said in a voice filled with awed surprise, “I can’t believe we’re here.”

Neither could I.

“I always wanted it to happen,” she said, her fingers drawing lazy circles over my bare back, “but I never thought it would.”

I held her hands in mine so we could talk about the thing we had never talked about before. The thing that had kept us together and apart for over twenty years: our love for each other.

“Why didn’t you ever say anything?” I asked.

“What did you want me to do, club you over the head and drag you back to my cave by your hair?”

“If you had, we could have been here a long time ago.”

She shook her head. “You weren’t ready.”

“But I am now?”

“You’ve taken the first step. The question is, can you go all the way?”

I grinned at her to remind her what had just happened. “I think I just did, don’t you?”

She shook her head again. “The first step was admitting it to yourself. The second step was admitting it to me. Going all the way is admitting it to everyone else. Are you ready to do that?”

I didn’t respond to her question because I didn’t know the answer. I wasn’t eager to leave the safety—the sanctity—of my bedroom. There, we could be anyone or anything we wanted. No one could interfere. No one had to know.

I kissed her, then pressed my ear to her chest, listening to the steady beating of her heart. A heart that I would soon break. “I love you, Jen.”

She kissed me on the top of my head and closed her eyes. “I love you, too, Syd. There. I said it. Better late than never, right?”

We went to sleep entwined in each other’s arms and woke up the same way.

Everything looked different in the light of day. It felt different, too. I wasn’t the only one who noticed.

“Any regrets?” Jennifer asked as if she expected me to respond in the affirmative.

“No,” I said, wrapping her arms tighter around me.

“When are you going to tell him?”

The night before, I had been reckless and impulsive. The morning after, I was much more deliberate. I didn’t want to screw anything up. Not when I was so close to getting everything I had ever wanted.

“I’ll tell him tonight at dinner. Sometime between the appetizer and the main course. I don’t want to hit him in the face with it when he first walks in, but I don’t want him to get too comfortable or I might lose my nerve.”

“I would offer to come with you, but I think I’m the last person Jack would want to see.”

“You think?” I rolled over to face her. “No matter what happens, last night was the best night of my life. Never forget that. Being with you is something I’ve always wanted. Don’t let anyone, including me, ever tell you otherwise. Deal?”

“Deal.”

*

I spent the whole afternoon planning what I would say to Jack. I would break the news to him first, then Patrick, then my parents. Jack would be hurt. He would be angry. But I felt prepared to take the barrage of abuse he would throw my way. I couldn’t predict my family’s reaction, but I didn’t expect it to be positive.

Jack and I had reservations at Ambria. When I’d made them several weeks before, I’d had no idea then that the restaurant’s romantic setting would prove to be so ironic.

I arrived first. Jack called from the hospital to let me know he was going to be late, so I treated myself to an extra glass of wine while I waited. When he arrived half an hour later, he looked like he had been put through the wringer. His eyes were red-rimmed and his hair and clothes were disheveled. When I asked him what was wrong, he said he had lost a patient. A routine procedure had gone horribly wrong with no obvious explanation why. A surgeon’s worst nightmare.

It would have been incredibly callous to tell him about me and Jennifer at that moment, so I decided not to. Jack needed comfort, not additional grief. My big announcement could wait.

I broke the news to Jennifer the next day.

She gave a presentation at the hospital about the genocide in Darfur. Her words were powerful, the pictures that went along with them even more so. Many people in the audience were moved, me included. I was so proud of her. My confidante. My best friend. My lover. My all of the above.

Afterward, we met for lunch in the cafeteria. Frequent interruptions from well-wishers made talking—and eating—difficult.

“How did it go last night?” she asked, pushing away the remains of her grilled chicken sandwich. “I got worried when you didn’t call. I almost drove over to your place a hundred times but I didn’t want to interfere. Are you okay? How did he take it?”

I toyed with my salad, moving the wilted lettuce around my plate with my fork. “I didn’t tell him.”

I looked up expecting her to be surprised. To be angry. Instead, she looked disappointed. And vindicated. As if she had expected me to let her down. That was even worse. “May I ask why not?”

I told her what had happened.

“He’s like you when he loses a patient,” I said. “The world comes to an end until he can figure out what went wrong. I couldn’t kick him when he was down. I
will
tell him but not right now.”

“When?”

“I don’t know. When the timing’s right.”

“I understand your reasons for not saying anything last night, but the longer you wait, the harder it’s going to be for you to tell him. If you keep waiting for a perfect time, you’re never going to find one. There’s always going to be something in the way.”

“Nothing has changed,” I said, trying to salvage the situation. “I’m not giving up on us. I’m simply putting us on hold for a while. I still want to be with you. I just can’t right now. I’m his in name only. In every other way, I’m yours. We both know that. Isn’t that enough?”

“You know the answer to that question so don’t ever,
ever
ask me that again.” She pulled a pen and a piece of paper out of her bag and scribbled a quick note. “I’m late for a meeting with the hospital administrators. They want me to crisscross the country giving the little speech I just gave, but HR wants to know when I’ll be ready to make rounds again.” She looked at the note in her hands as if deciding what to do with it. Then she folded it in half and slid it toward me. “We’ll talk later, okay?”

“Jen, wait.”

She waved her hand to indicate that she didn’t have time. She punched the Up button on the elevator and stood in front of it with her head down until the doors opened. I read her note as she waited for the other passengers to disembark.

“I won’t be the lie you tell,”
she had written.

She boarded the elevator and I ran after her, shoving my hand between the doors before they could slide shut. I stepped inside. The doors closed behind me. I held up her note. Since we were the only ones in the car, we could talk without worrying about being overheard. I was going to ask her what her message meant, but she wouldn’t let me get a word in.

“I’m not going to have an affair with you,” she said, punching the button for the next floor. “I’m not emotionally equipped for that. If you’re mine, be mine. You don’t have to tell the whole fucking world about it, but telling your husband would be nice.”

The elevator stopped on the floor that housed the neurological unit. When the doors opened, Jennifer stalked out and headed for the stairs. I trailed her. I would follow her up each of the remaining ten flights to the personnel department if I had to.

“I love you, Jen,” I insisted, my voice echoing off the walls.

“That’s what you keep telling me.” She took the stairs two and three at a time, running—
leaping
—up them like a gazelle fleeing from a pack of hungry cheetahs.

“I never meant to hurt you.”

“Or use me?”

“That’s not what last night was about.”

“Wasn’t it?”

She turned on me. I had to pull up short to keep from running into her.

“You wanted to know why I didn’t tell you how I felt?” she asked, her eyes filled with equal parts anger and hatred. “This is why. Because I knew you’d say anything to make it happen, then run away and hide after it did. Why would I tell you how much I loved you when I knew you’d do your best to make me feel ashamed of it? I’m not you, Sydney. I don’t give a shit what anyone thinks. Anyone except you.”

She shrugged as if that was about to change.

“But it’s okay. You got what you wanted,” she spat. “You got to experiment a little and that was enough for you. Now you expect things to go on being as they were. I can’t pretend to be just friends with you after we—” She paused. “You know me better than that. Or at least I thought you did. You can hide from the world in your sham of a marriage if you want to, but I’m not going to help you do it. The best thing for you to do is forget last night ever happened. Forget you ever met me. I’ll do the same with you. In fact, I already have.”

“Jen—”

She continued up the stairs. This time, I didn’t follow her.

She needed time to cool off. She needed time away from me. I gave her that time. It was the worst mistake I’ve ever made. I should have fought harder to get through to her. To make her hear me. To make her understand. But I let her go. I let her go and she didn’t come back.

I called her and e-mailed her over and over again, but she didn’t return any of my messages. The day after our aborted lunch date, she flew to the East Coast to begin her speaking tour. She made one stop—a seminar in Durham, North Carolina, at Duke University Medical School—then abruptly left the country without saying good-bye.

With no one to talk to—no one to share my feelings with—I did as she asked. I forgot about her. Her and everything and everyone else, including myself. But the memories—and the feelings that went along with them—refused to remain hidden, no matter how deeply I tried to bury them. When they returned, they brought with them a reserve of untapped strength. I found the resolve to attempt to regain what I had lost. What I had let slip through my fingers.

I had let Jennifer get away once. Twice. Never again.

She was the person I wanted to be with. And this time, I didn’t care who knew it.

My flight to Honduras was a commercial one but it felt more like a charter. Nearly three-quarters of the seats in the small plane were filled with teenagers and their chaperones about to embark on a month-long religious mission designed to bring the native tribes in the area closer to God. When the plane skidded off the dirt runway in Tegucigalpa, I thought I was about to meet God face-to-face.

I gripped the arms of my seat with both hands as the plane slid inexorably toward the freeway. Traffic on the busy thoroughfare ground to a halt, policemen in fluorescent vests holding up progress in both directions.

“Don’t worry,” the passenger across the aisle from me said with a wink. “This happens every time.”

“And that’s supposed to make me feel better?”

“It could be worse,” he said.

“How?”

“We could be those guys.”

I followed his finger as he pointed out the window. Several uniformed men were jogging across the “tarmac,” a narrow, rutted patch of land that looked more like a cow pasture than a runway.

“Who are they?” I asked.

“In the States, we have guys on cute little vehicles to tow planes around the concourse. In Honduras, these guys are the cute little vehicles.”

As soon as we disembarked, I turned around to see if my travel companion had been pulling my leg. True to his word, though, the men lined up on both sides of the plane and pushed it back toward the terminal.

“I told you so,” my new friend said. Dressed in cargo shorts, a Save The Planet T-shirt, and well-worn hiking boots, he looked like he had escaped from the pages of an adventure novel or an Abercrombie and Fitch catalog. He stuck out his hand. “Alex Matthews.”

“Sydney Paulsen,” I replied, using my maiden name. Though it wasn’t official yet, in my mind, my days as Sydney Stanton had come to an end.

“Where are you headed?”