The Other Guy (13 page)

A very sensible part of me knew I couldn't segregate all these aspects of my life forever, but there was also a much bigger, much less rational part of me that insisted that it was all fine, that somehow these hideous complications would work out on their own if I just sat back and let things take their course.

And the longer I let things lie, the worse an idea it seemed to bring them up after all that time, especially given how time seemed to accrue compounded interest in addition. It was admitting to everyone that I had been keeping the truth from them for
x
amount of time, the
x
being whenever it was that I had even come to acknowledge that wanting Nate was something very real, and
x
+ 1 every intentional day after that.

I was now on approximately
x
+ 90, and with each day that passed and with each additional number telling me how many days I had been lying, raising the subject seemed almost an insurmountable task.

And that wasn't even counting the number of days ago that Nate and I had first met and fallen into bed together. That would be almost four times as long a period, and four times as unfathomable a truth to tell.

I wouldn't just be Emory: Now Involved with a Man anymore, I would be Emory: Now Involved with a Man Plus Bonus Web of Deceit. Pull his string, and he'll lie right to your face.

To be perfectly fair, I hadn't out-and-out lied to anyone yet, mostly because nobody had thought to ask yet; omission wasn't quite the same thing, but the distinction wasn't one that most courts would rule acceptable, and I suspected neither would my family and friends.

"You know what you're doing?" Linn said one weekend, obviously well in possession of the answer and so ready to hit me with it.

"What?" I said anyway.
"You're acting like you're just waiting for the end." "... of days?" I hazarded. "Okay, just because I have an

Linn cut me off with an impatient hand gesture. "You know I'm not talking about the inevitable zombie apocalypse, okay? And wielding a packet of water purification tablets is not going to deter anyone from eating your brains."

"Hey," I said, "you survive our imminent dystopia in your way; I'll do it in mine. With clean, potable water. You can build all the munitions arsenals you want, but they're not going to do anything for you if you're dehydrated."

"Well, I guess we'll see who gets to rebuild civilization in the end," she sniffed, clearly banking on a limitless supply of sawed-off shotguns to carry her through.

I nodded wisely. "I plan to run on a platform of more stringent gun control laws."
Linn narrowed her eyes at the screen. "I think we've gotten off track. What was I talking about before?"
I was loath to remind her.
"Oh, right," she said, and frowned at me. "You distracted me with your post-apocalyptic nonsense. Stricter gun control, my ass."
I lifted my hands, having nothing to do with it. "You were the one who brought up the end being nigh."
"Stop it," Linn said. "You can't weasel out of this forever."
"But I really want to. Doesn't that count for anything?"
"No," she said firmly. "And you can't just sit and wait for someone else to take the burden from you. It's all yours, and you have to deal with it."
I sighed heavily. I knew she was right, and it was maddening.
"Okay, think about it this way. What if Nate just up and left right now? Never came back. What would you do?"
"File a missing persons report after the requisite waiting period?" I guessed, not sure where Linn was going with this.
Her head dropped out of frame, and I heard a muffled groan. When she popped back up, her face filled with vexation, she said, "I'm trying to ask how you feel about him. If the heartbreak of him walking out of your life forever is going to be easier to deal with than what you're going through right now, then let him walk."
"I don't--" I said, having absolutely nothing to follow it up with.
"Okay," Linn continued, taking my speechlessness as an encouraging sign. "Well, then, if you don't want him to walk out of your life forever, you have to sack up and deal with this. He's a great guy, Em, but he's not going to wait around forever."
"You don't know that," I countered lamely.
"Really? You want to test my theory?" Her voice was soft, and her eyes concerned. "Look, you know I don't care who you're in a relationship with as long as they're good to you. Nate is good to you; I mean, you should see your face whenever you talk about him. If he makes you happy, and I know he does, then I'm happy. Have faith in everyone else to tell you the same. They will."
I shook my head, besieged with doubt. "You don't know that either."
"Em, if you lose someone over this, they weren't worth keeping anyway."
"That's really easy to say, but..." I bit the inside of my lip, wondering how to put words to the vertiginous, indefinable clutter of fears in my mind. "Did I tell you Nate hasn't spoken to his parents since high school? They threw him out, Linn, when he came out to them. It's not that easy."
Linn took in a long breath. "Okay, first of all, fuck them. And second, they're not your parents, and they're not representative of any other parent in the world."
"There's a chance that they might be," I said stubbornly.
"Yeah, well, there's a chance you might win the lottery, too, but you won't know unless you actually buy the ticket."
I was saved from having to one-up her analogy at the loud ringing of my door intercom. "Hang on, that's Nate with food," I said to Linn.
When I returned to my laptop after buzzing him up, Linn said perkily, "Let me talk to him."
"Not about..."
"No, don't be stupid," Linn scoffed. "Of course I'm not going to tell him we've been discussing him this whole time. I just like talking to him."
"Yeah, I know. I'm beginning to suspect you like him a lot more than you like me."
"Only beginning to?" she laughed.
"You suck. Oh, there he is," I said, when there was a smart rap at the door.
I ran over to open it, getting rewarded with a sweet kiss as Nate came in, bearing a large plastic bag of our evening sustenance.
We were likely visible in the webcam on my laptop, sat atop the kitchen's breakfast counter, but I didn't care this time. The nice thing about Linnea knowing about us, and thoroughly approving, was that I didn't feel like I had to keep anything under wraps and then throw myself into a massive swivet at the possibility of the wraps coming undone.
It was only in front of everybody else that I found great cause for divers alarums.
"Linn's on Skype," I said, relieving Nate of his burdens.
"Oh, great," he enthused, and commandeered the laptop over to the living room while I dealt with the cartons of Chinese in the kitchen.
Linnea was my one concession to Nate when it came to my battle of lassitude. She knew it, and he probably did too, which might partially explain why they had forged, within a single accidental Skype meeting weeks ago, a fast friendship almost as soon as introductions were over.
I usually tried not to listen in while they chatted unless I was invited to, but I suspected they were forming some kind of alliance against my stupidity. Occasionally I would hear one of them mention my name, followed by scattered laughter, which was proof enough.
It was a bit of a relief to find that Linn liked him so much, and vice versa, especially as she hadn't been Michelle's biggest fan by any stretch of the imagination, but it was something I was careful not to get used to. Linn liked him wholeheartedly and made a point of saying so often, but I couldn't count on her voice as the general consensus. For all I knew, she was the lone, crazy independent in a sea of single-party voters. True enough, her voice was loud, but she was only one.
"Emory," Nate called out. "Linn says bye."
"Bye," I shouted from the kitchen.
I grabbed plates and utensils, clattering them onto my small dining table, and Nate traipsed into the kitchen, pressing a quick kiss to my cheek as he passed by to wash his hands.
The familiarity with which he moved around me, in my home, was so unreservedly domestic that it caught me by surprise. It felt as though he had been here forever, and would always be somehow a part of this place and a part of my things.
It wasn't just that he knew his way around, not like a roommate or a frequent houseguest, it was that he moved like he belonged. And I wanted him to belong.
We sat down, picking our way through the contents of the cartons until our plates were filled and proportioned to our satisfaction.
"What do you and Linn even talk about?" I asked.
Nate grinned. "You."
"I knew it. About how unutterably awesome I am?" I said hopefully.
"Yeah, that's it," he said, chewing a dumpling thoughtfully. "Hit the nail right on the head there."
"And that is a bald-faced lie," I said.
He gave me an impish smile, which was corroboration enough. "She tells me incriminating things about you in case I need to use them against you later," he said, with no small amount of glee. "Needless to say, I quite love her."
"Well, this is alarming news. If you'll excuse me, I need to go and renounce our friendship now," I said, shifting in my seat as if to stand.
Laughing softly, Nate put a hand on my arm to keep me there. "She says you're pretty happy recently. With me," he said, a sudden touch of diffidence in his voice.
"Oh. Well, yeah. Did that not occur to you on your own?"
He shrugged, smiling. "It's nice to be told."
It struck me then, what Linn was doing. In all my dithering over how to articulate to other people what Nate meant to me, I had all but neglected to articulate it to him. Trust Linn to show my appreciation for him better than I could. She yells at me a lot, but she also looks out for me in ways I rarely even consider.
"Well," I said, "she's right."
"That usually seems to be the case."
We turned the conversation elsewhere for a while, talking about things that had happened at our respective workplaces, things we'd seen in the news, an Internet meme that had cracked Nate up for about five minutes straight.
Even as he tried to explain it to me, he had to keep stopping to laugh to himself and then apologize for laughing so much while I sat in amused bewilderment, the pieces of his anecdote missing all their connections. It was moments like this I lived for; reveling in the knowledge of the simple fact that I was able to share the minutiae of my life with someone who wanted to share his with me. We could be so interminably boring and so indescribably contented together.
Once dinner was finished and the dishes done and put away, we adjourned to the living room, as had become normal practice, to watch Season Two of
The Wire
, which Nate had been horrified to discover I had never seen.
His tastes ran along the same lines as mine did, so I turned out to like the show quite a bit, but at the moment I was having trouble concentrating on it, thinking of what Linnea had said to us both.
I
was
happy. Why couldn't I admit it to anyone else?
I looked over at Nate, the TV casting flickers and shadows over his profile, alternately sharpening the razor edges of his cheekbones and daubing away the nascent laugh lines at his eyes.
Mine
, I thought. It stirred something deeply sweet within me, and I couldn't believe I had never noticed how far gone I truly was.
Reaching over, I took Nate's hand, ran my fingertips over the crests of his knuckles, and pulled him slowly toward me. He came easily, compliant and curious, the look in his eyes softly expectant.
"I am really happy," I murmured against his lips, and I could feel a smile unfurling against mine. "With you."
I kissed him, and kissed him again, because I could, because I wanted to, because I was meant for nothing but this, even if nobody else knew it.

If anything could be described as a typical week, my week was it -- seeing clients, writing reports, spending time with Nate; nothing extraordinary, nothing to call attention to itself. In hindsight, this should have been sounding off all kinds of alarms in my head, because there is nothing the universe likes better than screwing with you five minutes after you've gotten your breath back from the last time it sauntered into town to make a mess of your life.

At least this time it had the decency to knock first. I wended my way to the front door and peered through the peephole, at which point my stomach dropped several stories below, skittered out into traffic and got run over by a semi. My hand curled around the doorknob, but it took a few seconds before I managed to work up the fortitude to turn it.
"Michelle," I said, when I finally managed to pull the door open.
"Hi, Em," she said, her voice light and shuddery. She'd been crying, that much was obvious, her eyes red-rimmed and her nose bright enough to lead a reindeer brigade. There was a suitcase at her feet. "Can I come in?"
It would have been so utterly gratifying to simply slam the door in her face and walk away. Here was the scenario I'd imagined so many times in those early, angry days, nearly a year ago now, her standing before me, small and fragile, and I, the one left behind, with the power to break her with a single word.
I stepped out of the doorway, into the light of my apartment, and let her follow me in.
Michelle picked up her suitcase and slinked in, looking around the living room. "You redecorated."
"Yeah," I said tersely, unwilling to give up any further ground.
As noble as I felt for not giving in to the urge to turn her away, it quickly ebbed away in favor of irritation as she ran her fingers absently over pieces of my home that she used to know, that she used to be a part of. She always liked curling up in the blue armchair in the corner, used to disapprove of the habitually broken clock over my nonfunctional fireplace, loved watching the sunrise from the deck.
I knotted my arms over my chest, discarding the recollections. "Why are you here?"
She didn't appear to hear me, as she approached the armchair and picked up a pair of Nate's fingerless gloves, absent-mindedly left behind whenever he'd been here last. He was probably missing them; they matched his scarf. Michelle's face creased with bemusement.
"I thought you always hated these," she said with a small smile. "Every time you see someone wearing them you talk about how pointless they are."
It's true. I do think fingerless gloves are kind of pointless; when I said this to Nate he called me an old man and continued wearing them with impunity.
I looked away from the gloves and didn't say anything.
In my silence, comprehension dawned. "Ohh, these aren't yours. Are you-- Are you seeing someone?" she asked, her voice laced with equal parts accusation and amused disbelief.
"What? No. We're just friends," I said. Why was I lying? "Wait, why am I explaining myself to you? You
left
."
Michelle held her hands up in surrender. "I know, I know, I'm sorry. I didn't mean it to come out like that."
I sighed, rubbed a hand over my face. "What do you want?"
"Did you get my messages?"
"I deleted them," I said flatly.
"Oh. Okay." To my horror, her face suddenly crumpled and the tear tracks in her makeup deepened. "I'm so sorry, Em," she cried. "I was awful to you. What I did was inexcusable. You deserved so much better than that."
"Well, I won't argue with that," I said, and got a box of tissues for her, unsure whether I was obligated to provide any comfort beyond that, or whether I wanted to.
Despite my best efforts to systematically beat it into oblivion, a part of me still cared about her. She had inconvenienced me in a horrible way, and it would have been nice if she hadn't chosen our wedding day to do so, but see it from another side, from anyone else's eyes but mine, and here was a woman who'd had the courage to go after what made her happy. It was just that what made her happy didn't include me.
That same part of me wanted to put my arm around her, as I used to, and extinguish some of the hurt, even though I hurt too.
Michelle hiccupped, and dabbed delicately at her face with my proffered tissues. "I'm not asking you to forgive me; I know I don't deserve it," she said, once she'd gotten her breathing back under control.
I wasn't yet sure whether or not I agreed, so instead I sighed and said, "Let me get you some water."
Dutifully, I fetched a glass of water for her, and she took it with gratitude radiating from every pore.
"You've always been good to me, Em," she said, a crack in her voice threatening to break the dam again. She took a deep breath. "That's why I broke up with Will."
"Oh, Christ," I said, taking several agitated steps away, my living room suddenly way too small to contain all this.
Well, hell. If Plucky Heroine and Good-Looking Bastard can't make it, what chance do the rest of us second bananas have?
"I broke up with Will because I realized I was still in love with you," she said in a small voice.
"Michelle," I said sharply from the other end of the room. "On our wedding day, you left me at the altar because you realized you were still in love with
him
." If there was a way to punctuate every single letter of every single word I would have.
She took an urgent step forward to disabuse me of my apparent misapprehensions but stopped when I threw a forbidding hand up. The room was already feeling close enough.
"I was in love with the idea of him," she said. "I mean, he could sweep me off my feet like nobody's business, but... Em, you were the one who was always there for me, and I didn't know-- I didn't realize how important that was until afterward."
I shook my head. "So, what? You're here to win me back? You think you can just waltz in here and cry all over me and then everything will magically be fine?"
"No," she said quietly. "I know I hurt you really badly, and believe me, I'll regret that for the rest of my life. I'd do anything to make it up to you."
"Well, you're just going to have to discover time travel, then. Good luck with that," I said curtly, and stalked to the front door, intent on showing her the way out.
"Em. Please," she said, her voice breaking, which then broke something in me.
It's not fair that people can do this to other people, a crack in her voice and I was in shards again. Having feelings is exhausting. I wouldn't recommend having them, it you can avoid it.
"What do you want from me?" I asked, my hand slipping from the doorknob.
"A chance. To fix everything I broke, to start over."
I shook my head, uncomprehending. "Start over?"
"Just let me be in your life again," she amended. "I miss you, Em."
Michelle took a tentative step forward, and when I didn't make her stop this time, tried another, inching toward me carefully as if I was strapped with explosives liable to go off any second. It was a fair assessment, in a way.
"We were good together, once," she said softly. "We could be again."
Could we? Did I owe it to myself to try? I had almost married her once, been prepared to pledge the rest of my life to her. How much did that count for now?
"I can't do this right now," I said. It was too much all at once; my head was a churning mess of too many questions that I had no answers for, and my heart felt even worse.
"Okay," Michelle said. "Okay, that's fine. You need time, that's fine."
"Yeah," I said. "You should probably go."
She bit her lip. "Actually, um, I was wondering if I could stay here for a little while?" she said, squeezing her fingers, a nervous tic I recognized from long ago. "I mean, not forever, obviously. I'm going to start looking for apartments tomorrow. I-- I don't have anywhere else to go right now."
My head fell back, and I silently pleaded with the ceiling for help. "You're really asking a hell of a lot of me right now, Michelle," I said finally, when the cavalry failed to arrive.
"I know, I'm sorry," she said for the millionth time. "I literally bought the first plane ticket here that I could get; there's practically nothing in my suitcase. The moment I realized what an idiot I was I just wanted to come to you, and... say everything I said."
"There's this thing called the telephone. All the kids are using it."
"You won't answer my calls."
As far as grand gestures went, this one was up there, an old standby, flying across the country on an impulse because your heart is too full to hold your feelings in any longer. In the movie of my life, this scene would probably be a lot more romantic, or a lot more tempestuous, depending on where the director wanted to go with this couple, because the screenwriter obviously had no idea what he was doing, nothing but blank pages from this point forward.
In the reality of my life, this scene was just quietly, backbreakingly exhausting.
"Did you envision this going differently?" I asked.
Her lips lifted into a mirthless smile. "I hoped it would. I'd hoped -- foolishly, I know -- that even after what I'd done, you would still love me." She searched my face, and something in it persuaded her to push her luck. "Do you?"
I shoved away from the door, turning away from her. "You can take the couch. You know where the linen closet is; there are extra blankets in there," I said brusquely, striding to my bedroom and closing the door tight behind me.
All this time I had been so focused on the possibility of creating something new with Nate, it hadn't even occurred to me that there might still be something lingering to recreate with Michelle.
I thought I had shed all the memories, all the joys and pains associated with her, but it turned out I had only crammed them into the deepest, darkest recesses of my mind, where they had just been waiting all along for a moment like this.
Everything I thought I had gotten over was suddenly flooding back, and the force of it was staggering.
***