Cheating on Myself (14 page)

I opened the card, and my stomach squeezed when I saw the note: “Stella, I miss you. Erik.” That was all. The card was even written in Erik’s distinctive, looping handwriting, which meant he’d taken the extra step to actually go to the florist and fill out the card. Most people just called in their order and had the lady behind the counter write a dictated message. The card, the flowers, the message, it was all so unlike Erik that my body went a little cold at the significance of the gesture.

“Pretty flowers,” Lily had snuck up behind me, and was peering over my shoulder to try to see the card. “Booty call offering?”

“Ha ha. No.” She was probably right. Did Erik just want to get some? I suddenly realized that wasn’t actually that terrible… hadn’t I always wished he was more impulsive, more romantic, more
exciting
? Would I have broken up with someone who sent me flowers for no good reason at all, except to tell me he missed me?

“Who are they from? The mouth breather or stat boy?”

“Neither. They’re from Erik.”

“What did he do wrong?”

“The card just says he misses me.”

Lily scoffed. “He’s obviously feeling guilty about something specific. I bet he slept with the blonde. Erik isn’t the kind of guy to send tulips just because.”

“I know he isn’t. But he did. So maybe he is, and maybe I just never inspired him to send tulips before. It’s not as if we’ve seen how he acts as an adult man trying to woo a woman. We got together when he was still sort of a kid, and he never had to woo me.”

“Don’t let him fool you. You can’t fall for it.” Lily sat in the guest chair that was squeezed into the corner of my cubicle. “Might I remind you of the time you brought home that bouquet from the Farmer’s Market and Erik told you you’d wasted twenty bucks because you were going away for the weekend, and they’d be dead before you got home to enjoy them?” I nodded slowly, and she nodded along with me. “You’re not enough of a sucker to fall for this, are you?” She adjusted her suit coat, and I caught a glimpse of something red and sparkly underneath.

I shook my head and laughed, but I could hear Joe’s comments from Friday night taunting me. Was it stupid to give up on something I’d spent so much time building up?

“I won’t fall for it. Why are you wearing sequins?”

She grinned mischievously and leaned in to whisper, “Because it makes me feel like a Barbie doll. Corporate Barbie.”

“Don’t let anyone else here hear you say that. You sound a little less fierce when you’re comparing yourself to Barbie. She’s not exactly a model of professional success.”

“Maybe I’m tired of being a model of professional success,” Lily grumbled.

“Coffee?” I asked, and stood up. We walked together toward the elevators, then emerged into the skyway. In Minneapolis, you could go an entire winter without going outside if you wanted to. I liked that. “What’s wrong?” I asked, when we were finally away from Centrex offices.

“I’m just a little messed.” She put on her usual Lily veneer, and made a funny face to play it off as nothing. “I don’t know—just thinking about things lately.”

“What kinds of things?” Lily was often dramatic, but I’d never seen her get really down. She almost looked like she was going to cry.

“I think I fucked up.”

“Lily Sparrow does not fuck up.” That was true. I’d never known Lily to do something she regretted. She made mistakes, but never actually considered them mistakes—just changes of course.

“I slept with a married man.” She stopped suddenly and faced me. “Multiple times.”

“Who?” For some reason, that’s the only thing I could think of to say.

“He has kids.” She looked horrified. “I’m a bitchy, slutty whore. I know. Please don’t say it.”

“Of course I wouldn’t say that. You’re my friend. I’m on your side—I don’t care what you did.”

“I slept with a married man, Stella. I’m the ‘other woman.’“ She was starting to get loud, and we were still in the skyway. We were far too close to Centrex headquarters for her to get shrill. I pulled her toward the pizza place that was notorious for giving people food poisoning—I knew we wouldn’t run into anyone we knew there. We bypassed the bored-looking kids working at the counter and settled into a booth in the back without buying anything. “I don’t know what I was—
am
—thinking.”

“It’s still going on?” I asked, a little surprised.

“Yes. And I think I’m in love with him.”

I tried hard not to show my reaction on my face. As confident as Lily always seemed to be, I knew she was really vulnerable and would read into my facial expressions. “Does Chad know?”

“Of course not.”

“Does the guy’s wife know?”

“No,” she cringed and looked straight at me, scared. “I threatened to tell her. I had a psycho moment last night, and just went off on him. I told him I was going to tell his wife.”

I stared at her, seeing a whole different Lily than I’d ever seen before. “God, Lil, don’t do that.”

“Well I won’t, obviously. I’m not a psychopath. But I just kind of freaked out, and said it. We were sitting there, eating Thai take-out, nothing significant. I watched him take a bite of spring roll and it was like I was possessed by bad lemongrass. I just went off. Afterward, when he went home, I started to think through what I was doing and realized how
stupid
I am. What right do I have to take someone’s husband, someone’s father. Am I the reason Daddy doesn’t come home in time for bed?”

“That’s the guy’s problem. He’s the reason his family is fucked up. He made choices, too. It’s not like you forced yourself on him and made him have an affair.” I didn’t want to say out loud that I doubted this was the guy’s first affair. I supposed she wanted to feel special, somehow, but I’d never really had a lot of faith in guys who cheated. What had caused Joe’s divorce? Was he the kind of guy who would do that sort of thing?

Was Erik? I knew the answer to that was no. As much as I hated the way Erik fawned over interns, I knew I’d never had to worry. Honestly, Erik didn’t have the confidence to pursue an affair—he’d never assume anyone adored him enough to go for it. It’s part of what I loved about him.

Lily sniffled, and it almost sounded as though she was crying, but there were no tears. “My dad had an affair. That’s why my parents got divorced. I always assumed it was that bitch’s fault. My dad would never do something so horrible, so it must have been some slut who came in and ripped our family apart. She was the bad guy, not my dad.”

I didn’t know what to say. Uncomfortable, I ended up saying, “I take it this means things aren’t going so well with Chad?”

She laughed. It felt good to hear her laugh, but I knew I’d just put a temporary band-aid on her real feelings.

“Unlike Cat, I prefer to sleep in the same bed as my partner. I’m not sure why that inspired me to hook up with a married guy who can never sleep over, but at least he’s a warm body I can touch more often than once or twice every few weeks.” Her laugh transitioned into a giggle. “He has so much chest hair. I’ve never been with anyone hairy. Do you realize how sweaty chest hair gets during sex?” She shuddered. Suddenly, her Blackberry buzzed and Lily pulled it out of her pocket. “Fuck. I have Strategic Planning. If I’m late, James is going to stick me with the three-year-plan formatting project. I hate doing powerpoint over the weekend.”

“Lil, you can’t go back to work.” She was a mess. At least, she seemed that way to me—but to everyone else she would probably seem as hard and emotionless as always. It was her image, and she had perfected it over the last five or six years. Her success was a direct result of her stony image. “Are you okay?”

“I’m fine. Erik’s tulips threw me.”

They had thrown me, too. But I wasn’t about to admit that. “Don’t you think James is going to put you over the edge at Strategic Planning? You seem a little… shaky. Care Bear Davis has the ability to push people into the abyss.”

“Work soothes me.” She pecked me on the cheek as we walked out the door of the pizza place, and I could smell her lavender perfume and the vanilla traces of her shampoo. Lily was far too good to be with someone so terrible. She was too good for Chad, and she was certainly too good for a married man trying to fulfill a need. She always seemed so perfect, but was absolutely crippled by her own insecurities when it came to guys. “Do I smell like pizza or anything?”

I shook my head. “You smell pretty.”

That made her smile. “I need a haircut. Mine is starting to look a lot like Miranda Hopkins’ hair—from accounting?”

“Miranda Hopkins uses a crimping iron.”

“Is that how she gets it to look like that?” Lily pulled out her Blackberry and I knew I’d all but lost her to Centrex again. “I should borrow it from her.”

When we reached the security desk at the Centrex offices, Lily headed inside, but I just didn’t have it in me to go back. She waved goodbye absentmindedly, already drowning in a mess of emails and distractions. Meanwhile, I couldn’t stop thinking about the flowers, and I couldn’t stop thinking about Erik and what I’d lost when I left him. I didn’t know if I could sit in the drab, uninspiring cube and look at his romantic gesture all day. I had an idea in my head, and the longer I stood there, the stronger the urge to follow through on that idea grew.

I walked through the skyway, acutely aware of everyone I passed as I headed over streets and past salons. As I walked, I took in the pungent odor of cheap lunch deals and the enticing sweetness of fresh-baked brownies in the cookie cart. I could probably have walked this route with my eyes closed, following only scents and sounds to get to where I was going. But I wanted to make sure this choice was deliberate, and I had to do this with my eyes open.

Joe’s words from that weekend had been bothering me, and I owed it to myself and to Erik to see if maybe I’d been too hasty.

Erik’s office was in a huge tower stuffed with lawyers and accountants and consulting and design firms, everyone mashed together behind semi-transparent glass. I waved at the security guard and made my way to the bank of elevators that would take me up to my ex-boyfriend’s office in the Zoom! headquarters. I stood numbly, watching as the numbers flew from one to twenty in just a few seconds, and realized I had less than ten seconds to change my mind and go back to work. I could throw the tulips in the garbage, or give them to one of my coworkers, or simply keep them and appreciate what they represented.

But instead, I was sucked toward the comfort of my past. After all, Erik had never been truly cruel to me, he’d never cheated, he’d never done anything offensive or intentionally hurtful. My heart was telling me I was about to make a bad choice, but my head had convinced my heart to shut up and stop being so irrational already.

I knew I deserved happiness. But I’d begun to realize that it was possible I was walking
away
from happiness by leaving Erik. Maybe we could both dig deep and find those parts of ourselves that had been squashed, and become something fantastic and new together.

As I walked through the lobby of his office, I detected the smell of chemical orange hand sanitizer, a scent Erik had carried home on his hands every night. My stomach flipped, and then I was in front of his office door, and suddenly I stopped.

His door opened, and I realized my hand had reached out and turned the metal handle. He was sitting at his desk, his glasses folded and hung over the top button of his shirt. He was wearing the shirt I’d bought him last Christmas, the one I told him looked nice with his eyes. I hadn’t been wrong. When he looked up and saw me standing in his door, his eyes lit up and I felt the comfort I’d known for the past twelve years come whooshing back in a flash.

“Thanks for the tulips.” I said. He stood and brushed the wrinkles out of his pants before walking toward me. He had tiny creases in his lip and I saw him subtly slide a breath mint out of his pocket and into his mouth.

“It’s so good to see you,” he said, studying me. I could smell his body wash and the hand sanitizer, and I wished he didn’t smell so much like antiseptic. He broke into a huge smile. I hadn’t seen Erik look so unabashedly happy in a long time. “God, you look great.” He leaned back against his desk, resting in a half-sitting position on the corner of the factory-scuffed wood tabletop. There was silence for a few seconds while I continued to stare, absent of any thoughts or emotion of any kind other than nerves and worry.

I bit my lip, and noticed his eyes darted to my mouth—just briefly. He stood and walked behind me to close the door again. His office had three solid walls and one wall made entirely of glass that overlooked the streets below. Once, I’d suggested Erik and I make love on his desk, but he’d scolded me for being crass. “We aren’t exhibitionists,” he’d said, and I was quick to agree.

Once the door was closed, Erik walked back to the desk, his shoes scuffing on the rigid nubs of the cheap berber carpet. As he passed me, I felt his hand brush against my lower back. It was the first time he’d really touched me with any meaning since long before I’d left him. It made me think of the times we’d been together back when everything was new. The uncertainty, the vulnerability, the buzz of exploring new things. I wanted that back. I wanted him, and the comfort he represented.

Before I could say anything or think about what this would mean, he grabbed me and his hands wrapped around my hips. I felt his fingers dig into the soft contours of my waist, and I let him pull me hard against him. He murmured, “Oh,” as his mouth found mine and we fell into the comfortable rhythm of our kiss—the only real love kiss I’d ever known.

His cheeks were rough, and I knew he hadn’t shaved that morning. I could taste the breath mint on his lips, but also the undercurrent of sugared coffee and the lingering sweetness of his morning blueberry muffin. The smells and tastes and positions were familiar, but the passion felt new, reckless. My hands hung limply at my sides, and I melted in against him as we thumped backward against his office door. He let out a small, quiet laugh and pulled me toward his desk.

We were a mess of body parts, flailing and rubbing against each other. Me, propped up against his desk, and him, leaning over me as he kissed my neck, my collarbone, the hollow of skin between my breasts that he knew was like a trigger. I shuddered, kicking at my shoes as he lifted me onto the desk and lay me back to work his lips down my chest. He lay his head against my stomach, his chest heaving against my thighs, giving both of us a moment to breathe.