Mr. Wonderful Lies (14 page)

He set aside the damp kitchen towel he’d been holding and reached for his keys. Out of habit, he slid the ring over his index finger. I watched his strong, tanned hand as his slender fingers fiddled with his car key. The dusting of gold hair on his arms gleamed in the fluorescent lights overhead. His jaw was set, teeth clenched and mouth in a carefully neutral expression.

Pausing, he leaned back against my countertop. Slender, yet tightly muscled, everything about Jared was understated. There was nothing in his manner that suggested arrogance or pride in his physique. He never preened to an audience or used his good looks to gain an advantage. Even his facial expressions were honest.

“I’m sorry, Megan.”

His voice was rough, as if he was trying to keep his emotions tightly held in check. I didn’t know what he might be feeling inside. Anger at me for being so gullible or anger toward Ollie for duping his friend; it could’ve been anything.

“When did you find out?” I finally managed to ask.

“Saturday.”

I exhaled in a rush. He’d known for almost four days. Four days. How could he keep something like that from me for four days?

“Anna called me Friday night.” Jared paused to clear his throat. “She was upset you hadn’t texted her about where you were, so I agreed to do some checking to see what was up with this guy. She just wanted you to be safe.”

“And you?” I managed to say. “What did you want?”

“I told you Sunday what I wanted.” His voice grew stronger. “I said it again yesterday.” His key ring swung around and around his index finger, creating a metallic rhythm that punctuated his words and expression.

“You knew what Ollie was when you said those things to me. You knew and you didn’t tell me.”

The keys stopped and his expression turned stormy. “Would you have listened? What would you have said if I told you Ollie was married and just using you like the player you’d accused me of being? What do you think you would have said if I told you that your stupid list hadn’t protected you from the very thing you’d been avoiding? That it had
never
protected you?”

I reeled back a step, stunned by the venom in his words.

“You know, I always wondered,” Jared began bitterly. “Did you create that list to eliminate guys that weren’t good enough for you, or just to eliminate me?”

He left after that, but I didn’t see him go. I sank back into my kitchen chair and stared at the damning information on the table before me, unable to do any more than absorb the things that were happening.

When recovering from severe emotional trauma, it is possible to sit in the same position for hours on end and do nothing more than carefully examine small, superficial parts of your world. Sometimes it’s the only thing you can do. Your heart needs a quiet moment in which to start the healing process and your mind must begin to reflect.

Maybe that’s true and maybe it’s not. But that’s what I did for the thirteen hours following my discovery of Ollie’s dual lives. I burrowed my way into my overstuffed chair with a much-washed and somewhat threadbare fleece blanket and stared at the texture of the chenille on the arm of the chair.

Sometime during the small hours of the morning, when I could no longer make out the fabric’s details in the darkness, I took to gently running my fingertips over the soft, bumpy contours. By the time pink dawn kissed the horizon and the pale rays of morning sunlight began to filter through the blinds into my living room, I had slipped into a fitful doze.

What seemed like moments later I was jarred awake by the jaunty Marimba of my iPhone. My whole body jerked in response, as if I were conditioned to leap up and answer that ring. As if I still wanted to talk to the person I knew waited on the other end.

There was no doubt in my mind that he had a plausible excuse ready to go. And really, if Jared and Anna hadn’t stepped in, would I have been unwilling to buy it? Why wouldn’t I want to hear his excuse and forgive him? I’d just slept with him. Any woman would be dying to know that they hadn’t taken that irreversible step in error. We wanted affirmation, someone to tell us that we were the one, the only one.

But I did know. And there was no taking that back.

Knees creaking in protest, I climbed out of my nest in the chair and stretched. For the first time in forever, I had no plan. So I did the only thing I could think to do. I went to work.

After so many days of emotional ups and downs, it was a sweet kind of relief to lose myself in the familiar rhythm of work. I didn’t bother to change clothes. I didn’t have to. That’s one of the perks of not only working for yourself, but working out of a home office. Ratty sweatpants and an ancient hoodie are perfectly acceptable business attire.

My inbox was flooded with client emails, reports, requests and all sorts of correspondence that I’d been neglecting while immersed in what had turned out to be a pseudo relationship.

I started slow, but it didn’t take long to get back in the swing of things. I ran statements and reports, sank into the welcome monotony of stuffing envelopes, and put together three large boxes to take to the post office.

It was nearly noon when an email from Ollie popped into my inbox.

I’d avoided logging into my Facebook account for just that reason. Since meeting Ollie I’d worked almost constantly with my Facebook page open on my computer screen and the little chat window in the bottom right corner. We would tell jokes, chat, comment on our work, anything to keep the day moving. I had expected to miss that contact. I knew I would eventually. But right then I was too spent to miss anything.

Feeling strangely detached, I dumped Ollie’s unopened email into my cyber trash without a second thought and blocked his email from my inbox. Five seconds later my phone began frantically playing the Marimba at full volume.

I pushed ignore.

That was harder than dumping the email. I wanted to talk to him. I wanted to yell at him, actually, to rant and rave and demand he explain why he would do such a horrible thing to me and to his wife. I wanted to meet him face to face and make him admit to the lies he’d told while simultaneously promising to tell the truth.

I took a shower instead.

The hot water sluiced over my skin, turning it pink. My long hair stretched to my waist, thick and heavy on my back. Resting my hands against the tile, I closed my eyes and consciously relaxed each muscle group in my body until I was as limp as a bowl of spaghetti noodles.

That’s when the tears began in earnest.

Sobbing in heaving gusts of emotion, I cried until there was no more hot water. My feet ached from standing and I shifted position, squirming beneath the cooling spray. And sometime in those minutes, while my body heat began shifting beneath the colder water, I began to feel better. Not because I was over Ollie. I wasn’t even sure what it was I was trying to get over.

Had Ollie’s lies really robbed me of a relationship or the idea of one? I’d wanted so badly to stick to my ridiculous plan of marrying by thirty-five that I’d ignored all the things that should’ve warned me it was less than an ideal match. Why?

Jared’s accusation rang in my ears as I shut off the water and stepped out of the tub.

Wrapping a towel around my body, I began to wring out my long hair. The face that greeted me in the mirror was pale and hollow eyed. I looked as if I were recovering from some dreaded disease. Although in some respects, I was.

After brunch, when we’d walked in the park, Jared had accused me of having an inferiority complex. Then days later he’d accused me of creating my undateable list just to exclude him. It was a ludicrous idea. I hadn’t had that intention at all. I used my undateable list to avoid throwing myself at men who would be likely to have little or no interest in a long-term relationship with me. I’d really been doing Jared a favor, avoiding the potentially awkward scene where he had to politely explain that we were just friends, and could I quit shamelessly throwing myself at him. That he could have possibly felt the opposite had never entered my mind.

So what was I supposed to do now?

On the counter downstairs, the Marimba jangled its way upstairs and through my nerves. This was getting crazy. I had to do something. It was getting impossible to just hang about and wait for nothing to happen.

* * *

The gym was crowded that afternoon. I was glad I had opted to walk instead of drive, because there was no place to park. I pushed open the front doors and maneuvered my way through a duo of boxers taking turns wrapping each other’s wrists, and several groups of soccer moms waiting for their yoga class to start.

The locker room was just as crowded as the floor outside. Careful not to clock anyone in the head, I swung my locker door open and grabbed my bathing suit. I had no desire to wait ten minutes for someone to finish their workout before climbing on a treadmill. Water aerobics classes and lane swimming took place in the morning. The pool would be nearly deserted this time of afternoon.

Hungry and Desperate were tucked into a corner of the locker room, heads together and whispering with serious expressions on their faces. I stifled the urge to apologize for something I hadn’t really done. I felt bad for Gillian, but there was nothing I had done, intentionally or otherwise, to aggravate her situation. It was something I was going to have to accept as unfixable, by me at least.

There were two other swimmers doing laps in the pool when I pushed open the glass door and stepped into the humidity. I tossed my towel down onto a deck chair and kicked my flip-flops aside with more force than usual. Ollie had now called my phone a total of nine times. No doubt the thing was still doing the jaunty Marimba within the confines of my locker.

I chose a lane and dove in, relishing the feel of the water against my skin. There’s something utterly perfect about the cleansing quality of water. I don’t know what it is, but there’s no amount of stress or tension it can’t wash away.

I surfaced and reached out with long, powerful strokes. I concentrated on the feel of the water parting before my hands and the resistance of it against my feet as I kicked. There was no confusion in that tiny slice of time. It was all smooth and clear.

I lost track of time, giving myself over to the rhythm of my strokes and the flow of air in and out of my lungs. When I finally stopped and surfaced, I was alone in the water.

Sucking in a deep breath, I dove to the bottom of the pool and brushed my fingers over the rough surface. Pressure built behind my eardrums and my lungs felt as if they might burst. Pointing my head toward the light, I pushed off with my feet and gasped as I broke the surface with a splash. Sinking onto my back, I once again stared at the massive lights overhead, drifting through the calm water. I hadn’t bothered to braid my hair and the long mass fanned out around me. I tried not to think about what a monumental chore it would be to comb it out later.

It was easy to look back in hindsight and start dissecting Ollie’s actions and the things that he’d said. I could think back to his muttered comment about Carissa and the way he’d always seemed to encourage me to drink. How our conversations had always seemed to turn into sexual innuendo and how he’d never been eager to meet my friends or really join into my life. He had been all for keeping our relationship isolated. Those things were big red flags. Now.

It would’ve been even easier to try and convince myself that I’d really never been taken in, that I’d suspected him from the beginning. But that would’ve been a lie. The truth was that I’d fallen for every line and every well-planned romantic assault. I hadn’t suspected him because I hadn’t wanted to.

Anna had been right that first night we’d celebrated my birthday at Cheeky’s. It felt like forever, though it had been less than two weeks. If I’d been certain about Ollie from the very beginning, I would have called Anna right away to tell her all about him. That was what friends did. But I hadn’t. And I hadn’t told her because I knew it was too good to be true.

Water seeped into my ears, insulating me from sound. I stretched my arms out to the side and let my body sink into the pool. Slowly opening my eyes, I ignored the brief burn of chlorine and gazed around me at the hazy underwater world. The black tiles forming lanes and numbers were stark against the pale blue background.

Something at the far end of the pool caught my eye. It was bright against the mottled blue, gray and black of the room above me. Surfacing slowly, I realized there was a person standing at the end of the pool near the stairs. It was Hungry, a.k.a. Gillian.

Once upon a time, less than forty-eight hours before, I might have felt apprehensive about approaching her for what was obviously going to be a confrontation of some kind. She wasn’t dressed in a bathing suit, so she obviously wasn’t out to catch an evening swim.

I was too emotionally exhausted to care what she wanted. If she wanted to rant and rave about Jared, now was the time to take her best shot. I was too tired to give a shit.

“Hi.” I smoothly pulled myself through the water toward her.

“You’re a really good swimmer.”

Her compliment caught me completely off guard. “Thanks. I was on a swim team all through grade school. I was never very good at organized sports.”

She absently nodded her head. It was obvious she’d come down here for more than just a casual chat about my swimming. Her brightly colored stretch camisole top emphasized her narrow waist and professionally designed cleavage. Paired with her black yoga capris, she looked very pretty. She was wearing her glasses again.

“I like the glasses better than the contacts,” I said suddenly, not caring how she interpreted my words.

Her eyes opened wide and she touched the ear piece of her glasses in a self conscious gesture. “Thank you. I forgot to get my contact prescription refilled.”

“I’d never be organized enough to wear contacts.” I danced a little on my toes to keep from drifting away. “Did you want to talk to me about something?”

“I wanted to apologize, actually.”

It was my turn to be surprised and self conscious. “For what?”

“I shouldn’t have said that to you the other night. I was hurt and angry and you just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

“It’s okay.” I was surprised to realize that I meant what I said. I didn’t care about her ugly accusation. I understood a little where she was coming from.

“I’ve been chasing Jared for years and for all the wrong reasons,” she said ruefully.

“Sometimes we want what we can’t have.”

“But that doesn’t give me the right to take my disappointment out on you.”

I nervously ran my tongue over my lips. “Jared and I were only ever friends, you know.”

Her face eased into a knowing smile. “He loves you, Megan. You’ve got no idea how much. You’d be silly not to take a chance on a guy like him.”

“He’s one of my very best friends. I don’t want things to get weird between us.”

Gillian pursed her lips thoughtfully. “So everything thing up till now has been normal?”

The door at the top of the stairs swung open loudly and Desperate poked her head inside with an expectant look for Gillian.

“I’d better go on up.” Gillian offered me a hesitant smile. “Holly and I are starting a new Cardio-Kickboxing class tonight.”

I sucked in a deep breath, gathering my resolve. “Thank you for the apology. There was nothing to forgive though. We all have those moments of brief insanity over a guy.”

She chuckled a little, a smile curving her full lips into a pretty smile.

I watched her go, trotting up the stairs toward Desperate—Holly. She met my gaze with a brittle smile. She’d obviously not been on board with the whole apology thing, but that was okay. They were friends like Anna and I were friends. Everybody needs their friends.