Not Perfect(86)

“Why then?”

“Because you walked away from me,” he said. “And I didn’t like that at all.”

“I’m sorry,” she said.

“The bottom line is: I don’t care. I don’t care about the bad things you did,” he stopped.

She thought to herself, If you only knew. Then she thought, No, you should know.

“Let me tell you about all of them, and you can decide,” she said, getting up to check on the kids before continuing. She lowered her voice. “Stealing is not the worst of it, believe me.”

He raised his eyebrows. She motioned for him to follow her, back past the living room and the kids and into her bedroom. She was glad she’d made the bed that morning. She let him walk by her and then she closed the door so it was just slightly open. He stood waiting for an instruction of some sort.

“Sit,” she said.

He did, on the edge of the bed. She sat next to him.

“You know what?” he said. “If this is going to be a day of confessions, can I go first?”

“You have a confession?” she said. “Sure, you can try to one-up me, but I don’t think you’re going to win.”

“I’m not trying to win,” he said. “And I’m not trying to one-up you. My point here is that we all have confessions to make. We’ve all done things we’re sorry we did, things that if we could do over, we might do in a different way. Not a single one of us has a clean record. Not a single one of us is perfect.”

“Okay, I’m interested,” she said, but really she wanted to sit closer to him, rest her head on his shoulder. Or maybe his lap. His lap would be nice. “What did you do that you want to confess to me?”

“I have to warn you, it’s possible that this is going to make you not like me,” he said, so seriously that she started to laugh, but she realized he meant it.

“Really?” she said, not laughing anymore. What could he possibly have done? She was a little scared. She didn’t want to not like him anymore.

“Here goes,” he said. “Remember how I said there was an incident with my wife, and that’s why we aren’t together anymore? Well, that incident was me having sex with her cousin on a family trip. It is the worst thing I have ever done, and I still can’t figure out why I did it. If someone had said to me, even that morning—no, make that an hour before it happened—that I was going to do that, I wouldn’t have believed them for one second. I loved my wife. Our marriage was actually pretty good. We still had sex, we loved being Tara’s parents. But that night, Tara wasn’t feeling well, and Jane took her back to the hotel room. We were all in Cancun, celebrating Jane’s dad’s seventy-fifth birthday. Can you imagine the scandal? I mean really, and I was not ever the one in the middle of a scandal—before that night, that is. Jane’s cousin had always been a little off. Maybe off isn’t the right word. But something. She isn’t married. She’s used to getting a lot of attention from men. At first, I just thought she was overly friendly. That night, though, we had all been drinking. I drank way too much, I completely lost control of myself. She was so pretty. I hadn’t realized how pretty she was until that night. She laughed at everything I said. She stood so close, then she was touching me, then we were alone. It was like she was irresistible, though I know that’s no excuse. The thing is, ever since then, I can’t put my finger on what was irresistible about her. She should have been fully resistible. I have gone back to that moment so many times, when I went from just being a cousin by marriage to kissing and then being alone in her hotel room and having sex. Jane couldn’t find me, she was worried something happened to me. She thought that I drank too much and went swimming, or that someone abducted me. She had her mother sit in our room with Tara, and she went room to room. I had fallen asleep. I was naked. You can probably imagine what happened after that.”

Tabitha felt nothing. That wasn’t true. She felt everything she felt before, but nothing from his story. No dislike or repulsion. She simply didn’t care that much. Or maybe it just seemed so unreal.

“Do you think there’s a chance you were drugged?” Tabitha asked practically after a few seconds had gone by. It seemed like the obvious question. “By her or by a bartender?”

Toby hesitated, then he shook his head.

“Drugged or not I did it and I have to own it. Even if I had been drugged, and I have to admit I have considered that, I still did it. It is still something I did.”

“Okay,” she said. She was quiet for a minute. She didn’t want to say that it was nothing, or, at least he didn’t kill anyone. She didn’t want to make it a competition. “Thank you for telling me.”

“Oh, I get it,” he said, sitting up. He had slumped over more and more as he talked, like the weight of what he was saying was pushing him down. But now he straightened and shifted on the bed. “You’re going to be all polite, and then I’ll leave, and that will be it. You’ll never answer my calls and you’ll never agree to see me again.”

“Let me tell you my things, and then we’ll see who never agrees to see who again,” she said. She felt like she was playing a game. How Honest Can I Be? or What Will It Take to Push You Away, and Can I Do It? It was like Nora’s Monopoly money—it felt real and not real. He sat back now, ready.