Over Her Dead Body(20)







CHAPTER 15




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NATHAN


I woke up to the text I’d long dreaded was coming: I need to see you.

It was a sunny Sunday morning, and I had plans to play eighteen holes with some buddies from law school—a whole day affair, and night, too, if you include the drinking afterward, which was arguably the best part.

I have a golf game, I texted back, even though I knew she wouldn’t care.

I only have today. Nope, didn’t care.

It happened how all dumb shit happens—with too much free time and too much to drink. We had met a few times before—the first time was actually at her wedding, but that’s not the most inappropriate part of this story. I was attracted to her—she was all curves with pouty lips and perky calves—but she was marrying someone else, so I resigned myself to just enjoy the view.

Over the years I saw her at various gatherings—a birthday party, a concert in the park, a trip to the zoo with her husband and young son. And then came the ski trip. She and I were the only ones who didn’t ski, which made for some long afternoons with nothing else to do but stare out the windows and at each other.

I told myself she made the first move when she slipped a nip of whiskey in my morning coffee. “We’re on vacation,” she’d said with a wink as she made me another Irish coffee, minus the coffee. It wasn’t the wink that got me—it was the way she rolled her tongue over the rim of the cup when she took a sip, leaving a puffy mustache of whipped cream across her upper lip. I think I said something clueless like, “You want a napkin?” Instead of a yes or no, she leaned in toward me with those cream-covered lips and responded with something absurd like, “You be my napkin.”

I knew I should have walked away right then and there—put on my coat and gone out into the cold and snow. But I didn’t have a car. And there was nothing but trees and icicles for miles.

I was too scared to kiss her (she was another man’s wife!), so I reached up with a tentative finger, which she claimed with her mouth as soon as I touched it to her lip. Her tongue was lively and determined to ensnare me, and we were naked with our limbs entangled in a matter of minutes.

After, I felt like a total shit. But that didn’t stop me from doing it again. And again. Every day of that damned trip, sometimes twice. As I saw it, once I soiled the sanctity of her marriage, what difference did it make if I did it one time or a thousand?

I thought when we packed up our parkas and I went back to my town and she to hers, that would be the end of it, and we would never speak of it again. But a few months later she started texting. At first they were sexy and playful (my whipped cream is lonely, wishing for a snow day, I wish every vacation was a ski vacation). But then they became insistent (I’m dying here without you, I need a fix, Don’t make me wait any longer!). I didn’t encourage her, didn’t even respond, and I thought she’d get the hint. We didn’t live near one another; I thought the situation would eventually take care of itself. Until I got an alarming text while I was watching college ball on a rainy Saturday afternoon (I’m at your door, let me in).

That she’d come without being invited scared the shit out of me, but I couldn’t leave her out in the rain. So I buzzed her up.

I quickly planned a speech—you’re beautiful, the best lay I’ve ever had, but we can’t—all of which was true. But then she walked into my condo wearing nothing but a raincoat and red lipstick and my tongue was tied.

“How’d you get away?” I’d asked her as she toweled off after a quick shower, and she told me the lie she’d spun about a friend with a new baby who needed a break. “She might need lots of breaks,” she’d said, and I got that scared feeling again. Not that I didn’t enjoy the sex—it was spectacular. She was fiery and creative and inexhaustible. But she was someone else’s forever. Or so I thought.

“I’m going to leave him,” she said as she slipped back into her raincoat. “Wait for me.”

I told myself it wasn’t my fault that her husband couldn’t satisfy her. I told myself that she was the one who was cheating, that her husband deserved better than a woman who wanted someone else, that he’d be better off if she left him. And while all of that may have been true, it didn’t make what we had done OK. Somehow between Irish coffee and that rainy-day romp, I had become her fatal attraction. And, like the movie, there was no way it would end well.

I called her a week after our rainy-day hookup. “We can’t do this again,” I insisted. “I won’t let you leave him for me.”

“Why are you denying what you feel for me?” she’d asked. But the only thing I was denying was that I was a pathetic piece of shit.

“You should go to couples therapy,” I’d said. And her reply was as flattering as it was mortifying.

“You can’t turn a draft horse into a stallion.”

“You and me, it’s not going to happen,” I’d insisted. “I’m sorry if I led you to believe otherwise.”

I’d thought I’d gotten through to her. That it was finally over. But now she was texting again.

I won’t be here when you get here, I texted back, putting on my shoes in case she was already in the building. So don’t come.

I stared at my phone for a long, tense beat, waiting for her response. Nothing. Good God, what if she was in the elevator?

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