I slam on my brakes.
Alex swerves around me. “Jesus, Ted!”
“Sorry! Come on, let’s pull over.” I walk my bike next to him, and we both walk our bikes up onto the sidewalk, then past it, to a stretch of grass on the other side, beneath the shade of a tree. I set my hands on my hips, straddling my bike. “Alex, are you seriously asking me if I still have feelings for Ethan?”
Alex scrubs his face with both hands. “Yes. No. I don’t know. Not like,feelingsfeelings, just… feelings about him, you know, getting married again.”
I scrunch up my nose. “No. I don’t have feelings for Ethan, at least, not any positive ones. Those are long gone…” I peer out toward the water just a few blocks away, beyond the dunes, and remember the sun glinting off of it, the incessant wind curling through my hair. I take a deep breath. “The only thing I feel is… concern. For Mia and Jen. Because nothing I’ve seen from Ethan the past two years makes me think he is any better of a man than he was when I was married to him. Jen’s saddling herself with that. And Mia… she’s going to grow up seeing that. Seeing her mom love someone who acts that way. You can’t be happy about that, either.”
Alex nods, eyes down on the ground, hands planted on his hips. “I’m not. But there’s nothing I can do about it.”
I know how deeply that has to pain Alex, how hard he’s struggled and worked to learn how to cope with the parts of life that he can’t control. I can only imagine how difficult that surrender is when it comes to his child.
I tip my face toward the wind as it picks up, a soothingjuxtaposition to the hot sun beating down on us. “Maybe,” I tell Alex, “hopefully, he’s changed. Maybe he’s become somebody who deserves them both. I hope so.”
Alex’s jaw tightens. “I still want to shove my fist down his throat every time I see him, so I don’t think so.”
I laugh. “You’re always going to want to shove your fist down his throat.”
“Because he hurt you,” Alex says. “Because he didn’t even try to do better by you. And you deserved that, Ted. You deserved his very fucking best, even if it turned out to be too late.”
Alex glances out toward the ocean, silent for a moment, before he says, “Sometimes, I tell myself, I have no place to judge Ethan, to hate his guts for what he did. I fucked up in my marriage, too. It doesn’t matter that Jen and I were never going to work in the long run; I still regret that I hurt her, when I didn’t fix my shit fast enough, that I made it impossible for us to end well.
“I wish I could say I never hurt her the way Ethan hurt you, but I can’t. What I can say, though, is that when I realized what I’d done, when I finally pulled my head out of my ass and got help and listened to Jen, I tried to make it right. I fucking fought for us. And that, right there, is the point at which I tell myself, I have every right to judge and hate Ethan, because that’s the ground I have to stand on, that he doesn’t—you deserved to be fought for, Ted, to be brave for. And he fucking blew it.”
Tears streak down my cheeks, but I’m smiling. “I love you.”
I say it how I always have, but it doesn’tfeelhow it always has. It feels the way it did just an hour ago, on the beach, strangely wild and wonderfully surreal, like there was a muzzle on my heart that’s vanished, and now, finally the truth has broken through. A wild,untamed creature released from captivity after so long, it doesn’t quite know what to do with its freedom.
Alex leans toward me, tucking a curl behind my ear, beneath my helmet strap. “I love you, too, Ted.”
Thea gazed at Alex, lost in him. His fingertips as they grazed her throat. His eyes locked with hers. The heat and scent of him, the familiarity of his old Buccos shirt and black basketball shorts. The mystery of everything beneath that, hard, and firm, and warm, divots and muscles, scars, and birthmarks. She wanted to touch them, see them, learn them. She wanted to tear off her clothes and show him every mystery scattered across her skin and beneath it, in her heart, her mind.
She wanted to kiss him so badly, she could barely stand it.
My phone buzzes in my pocket, startling me from my reverie. I pull it out unsteadily, peering down at the screen, then smile.
Alex sighs. “What does Lawrence want.”
“How did you…” I frown up at him. “How did you know it’s Lauren.”
“You have a specific smile for her. Which, pettily, I resent.”
Mr. Fleischer’s words rattle through my brain.He’swildlyjealous of her. He’s jealous of anyone he thinks gets more of you than he does.
I’ve always told myself Alex is being playful when it comes to the way he gripes about Lauren. I know he loves that I have her friendship, because he sees how happy she makes me.
But… what if Alex gets jealous, too? What if he feels about Lauren the way I felt around Andi? If I were him, I’d have lost my mind by now.
Alex leans in, looking genuinely concerned now. “Everything okay?”
I glance down at Lauren’s text.ANY WORD FROM FERN GULLEY? If not, call her!! Tell her she’d be a schmuck not to say yes to you!
I pocket my phone and sigh. “Everything’s fine. Just Lo telling me the same thing you did, about reaching out to Fern.”
Now it’s Alex’s turn to look smug. “I like Lawrence when she agrees with me.”
“Of course you do.”