“White, please.”
“I should have explained about Irene.” He was obviously more ready to tackle the subject of his ex than what they’d done last night. “But she hasn’t been here for months. I wasn’t even sure she’d show up again.”
Ari hated how carefully he avoided brushing her fingertips as he handed her the glass.
“You deserve to know what happened so you understand how it affects Noah when she drops in.”
“He was so sad it broke my heart,” she said softly.
“That’s what I hate.” He rolled the glass in his hand, and despite knowing better, she couldn’t help but want to be the glass, his hands all over her, heating her. “Nothing I say makes it better. You really helped today, Ari. He doesn’t normally recover so quickly.”
“A five-year-old shouldn’t need to recover from his mother’s visit.” Maybe she was speaking out of turn, but she understood only too well how hard it was when a parent acted carelessly with your feelings.
He set his glass on the side table, elbows on the arms of the wingback chair, and steepled his fingers. “When she found out she was pregnant, she thought it was a ‘total gas.’” He laughed without an ounce of humor. “I would have married her for the baby’s sake, but Irene wanted to wait and see how things went.”
Ari curled her feet up under her, propped her chin on her hand, and sipped her wine. She wanted to put her arms around him, to erase the pain that laced every word of his story. But after this morning, when he’d made it perfectly clear what a huge mistake their lovemaking had been, she didn’t dare touch him.
All she could do was ache.
Matt didn’t say that Irene had initially wanted to terminate the pregnancy and he’d talked her out of it. He only said, “She was pretty cavalier about the whole thing.” He stared at his glass on the table beside him. “She did have some fun with the attention the pregnancy brought.”
“Until she had the baby shower and all the presents were for Noah instead of her.”
He snorted an abrupt laugh. “That’s Irene. Admitting things like that doesn’t even bother her.”
“At least she’s honest about who she is, I suppose.”
He was impressed at how much Ari had already figured out. “She told me right up front that she’d make a crappy mother. She bitched and moaned when I said she couldn’t drink or have the occasional cigarette. But she gave them up for the duration.”
Maybe he’d told Ari enough already, but he’d never really talked about this with anyone before. Not even the Mavericks—at least, not beyond the basics. Susan and Bob knew more, but they were worriers, so he was careful to edit with them too. Ari, though… Ari was different. He got the feeling she understood in a way no one else ever had.
“We met at a Silicon Valley party. I’d started Trebotics.” He’d made his first few million, and he’d reshaped himself physically and mentally from the weakling his father had believed him to be. “She was young, only twenty-three. And she made me feel young too.” He’d had women before Irene, but she was so fun-loving that she made him want to be fun-loving too. “She never took anything seriously, and for someone like me who took everything seriously, it was…different.”
Irene was a slap in the face to everything his parents had taught him—which in retrospect was probably a big part of her allure. His father would have said she was worthless and flighty and Matt was ruining himself by taking up with her. Though his father was gone by then, dead of a massive coronary during Matt’s first year in college, being with her still felt like he was getting one up on his dad.
But the Irene he’d thought he wanted turned out to be an illusion. She loved her fun to the point that she had no sense of responsibility. She was caring until she forgot about a friend and snubbed her for another. She lived on the surface of life without any deep thoughts or deep feelings.
“When she found out she was pregnant, I realized I wanted my son more than anything. So I was willing to take her too. But when the baby came along, she decided he wasn’t any fun—crying, needy, wanting to be held all the time. Noah was a month old when she handed him over to me.” He should have known Irene would never last, but he’d actually been shell-shocked—partly because he had no clue how to take care of a baby either. He’d asked when she’d be back and her answer was simply, I don’t know, accompanied by a careless shrug of her shoulders. Whatever trust there’d been between them had died in that moment. Because it wasn’t just his son who wasn’t enough for Irene. It was Matt. And that destroyed his final thread of hope that he’d one day have a real love like Bob and Susan had.