All the Dangerous Things(81)

“From the beginning, I guess.” Waylon exhales, rolling his neck like he’s preparing for some kind of fight. “Allison and Ben met in high school. He was a few years older than her, and I think she liked that—the attention of an older guy. How it made her feel older herself.”

I picture Ben as a teenager, roaming the high school halls the same way he roamed around the office or up on that rooftop: with purpose and poise. He was popular, I’m sure. Letterman jackets and pockets of friends flanking him on either side. I picture him catching Allison’s eye at her locker, shooting her a wink and a grin. The way she probably looked around before mouthing: “Me?” Like she couldn’t possibly believe that his attention was directed at her.

“I can relate to that.”

“He eventually went away for college but came back every weekend to see her,” he says. “He proposed pretty much as soon as she turned twenty, got married when she was twenty-one. She never dated anyone else. My parents loved him.”

“And you didn’t?”

“I mean…” He shrugs. “I was a kid when we met. He used to suck up to me in that boyfriend kind of way, but I always felt like I saw through him. Like his whole perfect person persona was an act.”

Ben was always good at making himself the most well-liked person in the room—the way he always knew just what to say and when to say it, moseying through a crowd with an easy confidence and perfectly placed hand that seemed to pull people toward him like gravity. Kids don’t fall for that kind of thing, though. They always seem to sense something the rest of us can’t.

“Anyway, Allison was always such a vibrant person. She loved to argue.” He smiles. “She wanted to be a lawyer.”

“I didn’t know that.”

“Oh, yeah, and she would have been great at it, too, but she followed him to college—a big journalism school, because that’s what he wanted—and by the time she graduated, Ben had talked her out of it. Law school was expensive; he was a few years in at his job and had finally saved enough for them to start enjoying it. It was like she just shrunk herself down to make more room for him.”

I feel the familiar sting of tears in my eyes. I can relate to that, too. The way I had justified it at the time, as if my leaving The Grit and my life slowly dwindling down to nothing wasn’t his choice, but ours. I remember gossiping about Allison that night of the party, Kasey’s champagne breath in my ear. Judging her for being unemployed, staying at home. Her body gliding next to his like an oversized accessory, unaware of the fact that she had a passion worth pursuing. Something she was good at, something she loved.

Just like me.

“It just sucked to watch,” Waylon continues. “But it wasn’t like he was all bad. I couldn’t point to anything inherently wrong about their relationship. It seemed like he treated her well when I saw them together. He made her laugh. I figured that if he made her happy … I don’t know. I should just stay out of it.”

“Relationships are complicated,” I say, blowing on my coffee to give myself something to do.

“Yeah, but that’s the thing,” he says, shifting in his chair. “I was nine when we met. Allison and I were seven years apart, so I didn’t know what a healthy relationship looked like. But as I got older—as we both got older—Ben and I started growing into two completely different kinds of guys. And I realized that whatever a healthy relationship was … that wasn’t it.”

I’m quiet. I decide to let Waylon keep talking, let him tell me what he knows, before I chime in again.

“Anyway, the years went by, and Allison kept shrinking. She tried to talk to him a few times about going to law school, getting her own thing going, and he would guilt trip her out of it every single time. It was like she was just this thing meant to check a box in his own life and not even live her own.”

I remember that night, when I had decided to go back to work. The touch of unease as I had brought it up, like I knew I was flirting with fire. The way Ben had taken Mason from me afterward, like a punishment. A warning of what was to come.

“Whatever makes you happy.”

I did it anyway. I went to North Carolina, I wrote the story. I started working again, part-time, traveling once or twice a month. It ignited a spark in me that I knew I needed—I knew I couldn’t be a good person, a good mother, without first being good to myself—but now I wonder if it had ignited something in Ben, too. Something dangerous. I had made him a father when he never wanted to be one in the first place, and then I started leaving him alone with Mason for days at a time. It was as if all those small little acts of defiance had lit some kind of fuse, and we had been inching closer and closer toward the explosion without me even realizing.

“One night, I was in town visiting family,” he continues. “I decided to go into the city for a drink, so I walked into this bar and saw Ben sitting there by himself. It was late, a couple hours after he should have been done with work. I figured Allison was there with him, maybe in the bathroom or something, but just as I was walking over to say hi, another woman sat down next to him.”

I feel the heat crawl up my neck. I already know where this is going. All of those late nights together, nursing drinks for longer than necessary because neither one of us wanted to walk away. Waylon is looking at me now like he’s seeing me again for the very first time. Like he’s remembering the way I had sauntered back to that table, my fingers grazing Ben’s shoulders, touching the bare skin of his neck and pretending it was an accident. The way I would willfully ignore his left hand, the gold band he would always fidget with, spinning it around his finger, like if he wore it down enough, it might just dissolve. Disappear on its own.