The Guilt Trip(44)

“If you had to sleep with a woman you and Rachel know, who would it be?”

The question hangs there, heavily, as the seconds stretch out. Rachel imagines Jack shifting uncomfortably in his chair as he contemplates the safest answer. Ali’s clearly only started this to put him on the spot; to see if he’s going to admit that it’s her he’d have sex with over Paige or any of their other friends. What is she trying to achieve? Apart from making herself look foolish.

Unless, Rachel wonders, it’s all part and parcel of their relationship. Perhaps this is what they do to turn each other on when they’re unable to physically be together: play sick mind games that risk their affair being exposed; the pair of them aroused by the danger of it being put out there under everyone’s noses, all the time thinking they’re in control, or that everyone else is too stupid to notice.

“I think I’ll refrain from answering that,” says Jack wearily.

“Awwww,” Ali whines, like a child who’s had her favorite candy taken away. “You’re no fun.”

“Maybe I’m just not in the mood to play tonight,” says Jack tersely, his voice coming closer.

Rachel realizes she’s still holding his wallet in her hand and rushes to put it back where she found it. There’s a part of her that wishes she had time to get herself into bed and pretend that she’s asleep, so that they don’t have the fight that otherwise feels inevitable. Though, it occurs to her that they’d be having two very different arguments; she’d be demanding to know what the hell is going on between him and Ali, and he’d no doubt harp back to her and Noah. She shudders as she realizes he doesn’t yet know the half of it.

Thankfully, he’s still not up by the time she turns the lights out, and as she lies down on the bed, looking at her phone, she smiles as she sees that Josh has replied.

“Love you too,” he says, alongside a goofy photo of himself, with his head cocked to one side, his tongue poking out and each eye going in opposite directions. Despite smiling as she caresses his face on the screen, Rachel can’t help the tears from pooling in her eyes as she contemplates the enormity of the lie she may have lived.

She’d told herself twenty years ago that it wasn’t so; convinced herself it couldn’t be so. At the time, the dates had been crystal clear in her head; she’d not seen Jack for two weeks after she’d said goodbye to Noah. But over time, the days had become fuzzy and now she couldn’t be sure that her last period had been exactly when she thought it was, which, coupled with Josh’s surprise appearance ten days early, all added to the melting pot she’d tried so desperately to stop boiling over.

But now she has to face the fact that that million-to-one chance is a very real possibility. Josh does have the same jawline and single dimple that Noah has, and although his eyes are the same color as Jack’s, there’s just something about the profile of his face that reminds her so much of Noah.

As she lies there, the more she thinks about the similarities, the more she finds. The way they push their hair back from their face. How they stand with their hands on their hips when they’re frustrated. Their laid-back demeanor …

She runs her hands through her hair and silently screams. What has she done?

There’s not a morsel of regret attached to spending that one night with Noah. Jack was probably out doing exactly the same, yet, while he might not be able to recall the girl’s name if you asked him now, Rachel would be able to describe with a burning intensity how it felt to have Noah make love to her.

Sleeping with him wasn’t where she’d gone wrong. Getting pregnant wasn’t where she’d gone wrong; just looking at Josh’s kooky face on the screen tells her that. No, the only mistake she’d made was passing him off as Jack’s child, without question. That’s where she was at fault.

Stop! she says to herself, banging her hands on the mattress in frustration. This is crazy. She’d put these doubts from her mind for years and now she’s allowing a passing comment from a stranger to stir it all up again? The invisible barrier that she’s relied on to buffer her emotions for all this time has just had a chip knocked out of it.

“That’s all this is,” she says aloud.

But now that Noah has shown his hand, possibly in the presence of Ali, she feels a gut-wrenching fear that, one way or another, her secret is about to be revealed.

She can’t even begin to imagine the damage that would be caused if either of them voiced their suspicions, even if they were proven to be misplaced. She can’t remember when exactly they’d decided to not tell Jack and Paige that anything had ever happened between them; she couldn’t recall an actual conversation, they’d both just silently decided that it was best kept between themselves if they had any chance of remaining friends. They hadn’t exactly lied; they’d just not told the truth.

And for the sake of their friendship, it had been the right thing to do. That part of their relationship was over, almost as quickly as it had begun. And there had been no prospect of it ever being rekindled. Until tonight.

Rachel imagines the shoe being on the other foot and it being Jack and Paige who were best friends before she came along. She knows she would have grilled him incessantly, unable to believe that a man and a woman could ever be truly platonic. Suddenly, seeing it from Jack’s perspective makes her not only feel guilty, but grateful that he too hasn’t asked the question that she realizes has been buried deep in her psyche all this time: “Is Josh mine?”