The Good Widow(65)

Three days later, she was pulling out a pair of her favorite white lace panties when his card had dropped to the floor. She’d taken it as a sign that it was time to at least say thank you for his generous tip. And that would be the end of it. Because she had Nick. He was a good man. One she’d just gotten engaged to. And it was dangerous to toy with this idea that she hadn’t actually found her future in the man she’d promised it to just days before.

James had responded within minutes. And Dylan had felt her heart flutter, her stomach tingle. They only dipped their big toes in at first, offering each other small scraps of their life through a daily email exchange. Maybe he’d send a funny meme of the latest political debate. Or she’d share a story from work, like when the executive chef got into a fistfight with the general manager over the very young and long-legged hostess they’d both been seeing.

But Dylan quickly found she wanted more. More than the challenge to write a witty email. More than the giddy excitement she felt as she opened his. More than the surface flirtation they’d been dancing around. She’d been staring blankly at the latest episode of New Girl when she got the courage to ask him about the one thing they weren’t talking about: his marriage.

Almost twenty-four hours went by before she heard back. So long that she’d convinced herself she had scared him away. But then she’d heard the ding of her incoming email and saw his name. He told her he’d been married for eight years. And her name was Jacqueline. That things used to be good. But she had changed, he said. And he traveled a lot, and both the physical and emotional distance between them had driven them further and further apart. They were broken. And James didn’t have any clue how to repair it.

Dylan wanted to know more—but she didn’t ask. Because if she did, then he’d know she was interested. And she wasn’t sure what exactly it was he wanted from her, or she from him. All she knew for sure was that she’d begun to feel differently about Nick. Like when she’d looked over at him on the couch recently—he was laser focused on the Lakers game, his body jutting slightly right and left with the players. She used to think that was adorable. But since meeting James, she’d feel a small prick of irritation when he did certain things—his quirks had begun to lose some of their charm.

Maybe it was the ring. The heavy oversize diamond that sat on her finger had begun to weigh down their relationship as well. Maybe it was because she knew now that all this was going to be permanent. The way Nick crunched his tortilla chips. The divide between her and her parents since she’d announced the engagement. The way he subtly tried to change her from the person she was to the one he thought she should be. More orderly (she was a self-proclaimed slob), more driven (she still felt a little lost), just more everything. Nick was incredibly decisive—it was actually one of the things she used to find refreshing. All of the other men she’d dated seemed a bit aimless, not unlike Dylan. But Nick had known what he wanted from the beginning. He’d wanted Dylan. And Dylan used to think she wanted a man like Nick.

Until she met James. He changed everything. She liked that he was older, more experienced, more worldly than Nick. And when they finally spoke on the phone, he made her laugh in a way that Nick never had—a laugh that would shake her whole body, a laugh that she would feel deep down in her gut. She quickly realized he could teach her things, show her things, challenge her.

They’d quickly graduated from emailing to texting and soon were in constant communication. Dylan’s dull life suddenly sparkled when she shared with James the bits and pieces of it. She became addicted to their banter, which had become more and more flirtatious. So when he asked her to meet him for a drink, she knew exactly what she was doing. As she pulled on her favorite tank top and skinny jeans, she understood. Once she crossed this line, her life would never be the same.

She couldn’t wait.

They’d met at a bar in Costa Mesa. Dylan sipped tonics with lime and James drank draft beers. They’d thrown darts and competed on the classic pinball machine in back that had flashing lights and a little Ferris wheel that would scoop up the metal ball each time Dylan used the right flipper to send it flying. Dylan teased James that he was so old he’d probably played it as a kid. (He had.) She’d brushed up against him, timidly at first, but as the night wore on, she became bolder. She was rewarded with his hand circling her waist. Rubbing her back. And then finally he pulled her in close for that first kiss, and Dylan arched her toes and tilted her neck so her mouth could easily find his. Dylan would play that moment back in her mind so often that she worried she might be obsessed, like that stalker woman in the Lifetime movie she’d watched. It was hard to explain (and she had no one to explain it to anyway, since no one else knew), but she’d never experienced a kiss like that, both soft and hard at the same time. Both right and wrong. It made her both incredibly happy and horribly confused. The only thing she knew for sure was that she’d do anything to feel that way again.



Dylan had made the short walk down to the pools after she parked the Jeep. She found James as he was coming out of the water, still smiling so wide the corners of his mouth practically touched his eyes.

“You have no idea—the adrenaline rush from that jump was insane. And then I floated in the water for a while; the temperature is perfect.” She’d laid out a picnic on top of two towels she’d snagged from the hotel, and he sat down beside her and popped a piece of salami in his mouth. “I really wish you’d try it too.”