Crush(73)

Inside the room, it was apparent that Heidi had left in a hurry. The drawers were all pulled open. And as I glanced around, everything seemed slightly disheveled—not just the rug or the dressers, or the bed, but the closet door was wide open, with hangers on the floor.

I kicked the rug back into place, and that’s when I saw a yellow piece of paper in the wastebasket. It was from the type of pad Michael used all the time. With a quick glance behind me to make certain I was still alone, I uncrumpled it. It read, Pick one. Below those words was a web address: www.evanmarks.com.

That was all.

I’d never heard of the site.

Didn’t know what it meant.

But I’d seen the words before in Michael’s ex-secretary’s drawer.

I was curious and continued to glance around looking for something else.

Footfalls on the stairs alerted me that Michael was coming up. Tossing the paper back into the trash, I began to straighten the bed.

“What are you doing?” he asked.

I pretended to be startled and grabbed my chest. “Oh, you scared me. Sorry, my OCD kicked in. Heidi seems to have left a mess. I thought I’d straighten up a bit.”

Michael stepped inside the room and glanced around.

My heart was pounding.

His eyes landed on me, and for a moment I thought he might have seen how perplexed I was by the way Heidi had cleared her things out, but then he shoved a drawer closed. “She wasn’t the neatest houseguest.”

I tugged the corner of the bedspread. “No, she wasn’t.”

He was behind me, his arms around me reaching for the spread. “Another reason she didn’t work out,” he whispered in my ear.

I smelled liquor on his breath. Images of my father came to mind, and I tried not to shudder as I ducked out from under his body and made my way to the other side of the bed to straighten it.

Michael walked toward the door and stopped just short of it. He held out his hand. “Come on, dinner’s ready.”

After a few seconds of silence, I stepped toward the dresser, not him. “Let me just finish.”

He let his extended hand drop. “Traci will take care of this mess when she comes on Monday. You know she lives for cleaning.”

Even though I forced myself to laugh, he wasn’t wrong. Traci, Michael’s housekeeper, certainly did love to clean. She spent more time here than she needed to. I think she preferred to be here during the day than at home. Her husband worked long hours and she was home alone a lot.

Michael stood at the door and waited for me to pass him. As soon as I did, he closed the door behind me. “Did she go down okay?”

The hallway was wide. Shaped like a square, it had six doors. Four were for the bedrooms, each with its own bathroom; another led to the attic, and the last to a terrace that overlooked the backyard. I glanced toward Clementine’s room. “She was exhausted. Poor little thing fell right to sleep.”

“I thought she might. Erin didn’t give her much of a nap.” His hand went to the small of my back as he guided me toward the stairs I needed no help locating.

Each step I took, it remained in place. By the time I got to the first step, I considered grasping the doorknob to the attic because the walls were beginning to blend into the floors. I wondered how much longer I could hold my breath.

The answer came soon enough when his hands shifted. “You feel so tight.”

My breath was still in my lungs.

His fingers began massaging into the knots that had to be spreading throughout my entire back by now. This was the time to tell him to please keep his hands off me. That I wasn’t interested in him in any way other than as a friend. Yet, I knew I had to be careful. Do it with tact. He held my future with his daughter in those hands.

“Michael,” I tossed over my shoulder, very unsure of what I was going to say and how I was going to tell him that not only was my heart in a thousand shattered pieces right now, but I wasn’t the least bit attracted to him.

The smell of something burning wafted through the air and had him rushing by. “Shit, I must have left the rice on.”

Relief whooshed through me.

I was wrong—things weren’t back to normal between us.

A very unsavory feeling struck when I began to fear this might just be the new normal.





DAY 32





LOGAN


It was hard not to wonder what would have happened.

If I hadn’t gone to the beach that day twelve years ago, if Emily hadn’t looked so innocent wearing shorts and a T-shirt when all the other girls were wearing bikinis, if I would have left when the guys wanted to leave, or if I would have just listened to them and not gone after her.

The problem was, in the parallel version of my life, everything would be different. I probably would have ended up like most of the guys I went to prep school with, James excluded. Unhappily married with two small kids, having dreams about girls on their knees and blow jobs that never came, and then waking up next to a Stepford wife in training who closed her vagina after her last pregnancy.

In this alternate future, I wouldn’t be sitting here staring up at the green-painted steel frame of an empty bunk in a place that smelled like perspiration and disinfectant for two f*cking nights wondering about what might have been.

I also wouldn’t have met Elle.

So f*ck the might-have-beens.