No Strings Attached(28)

Robin nodded. “That doesn’t mean I didn’t have feelings for her. We’re still close. I talk to her every week. She’ll come visit me in a couple of months. But we’re not together, because we never were.”

This caught Micky’s attention more than anything else Robin had said. “So, when this Michelle comes over, will she be staying with you?”

“Yes, of course. She’ll be sleeping on the couch, though.” Robin scrunched her lips together. “The only way to know if you’re really cut out for this, is to try, Micky. I promise to take your feelings into consideration as much as I can and to always be completely honest with you. I will never deceive you and will always be up-front about everything. That’s how I live.”

Then the alarm on Micky’s phone buzzed. She’d set it just before she left the house so she could return home on time without rousing suspicion. “I have to go.”

Robin nodded. “I’ll see you at The Pink Bean this week, and if for some reason I don’t, I’ll call you. Is that okay?”

“Yes. That would be fine.” Micky stared into Robin’s eyes a bit longer than she would into a friend’s without benefits. Then, she couldn’t stop herself. She slid off the stool and kissed Robin on the cheek. She had to feel her skin against her own, even for the briefest of moments. “See you,” she said, and turned on her heel.





CHAPTER TWELVE





Because of what her mother had told her on Sunday, Micky wasn’t overly surprised when Darren called later that week, asking if she could meet him for lunch at a restaurant near his office on Friday.

“My shift ends at twelve,” Micky said. “I can be there by one thirty.” She wasn’t going to meet Darren at one of the upscale restaurants he frequented for lunch straight after serving coffee for five and a half hours. She needed to go home and shower first. And there would be traffic to contend with. Perhaps she should try to get Darren to come to her and finally put a stop to how she had always accommodated him, because, after all, he was the one who brought home the bacon.

He still did. Micky’s lawyer had negotiated generous alimony payments for her, allowing her to afford the rent on her small but expensive new house in Darlinghurst. Micky didn’t feel guilty about it because she knew he could easily afford it and because, when she really started thinking about it, she had worked for Darren for eighteen years. She had given birth to their children, raised them in his frequent absence, and dealt with everything that comes with running a household on her own. All Darren ever had to worry about was going to work and making money. She wondered how he was coping now during the weeks he had the kids. Of course, they were so independent now, and Darren paid someone to cook them healthy dinners.

“Oh yeah, Liv told me you’re working at a coffeehouse now,” he said, with no audible judgment in his tone.

Micky could only conclude that Darren was feeling some kind of negative emotion about having to tell her about Lisa, otherwise he would surely have made a snide remark or, at the very least, inquired about whether she needed more money.

“One thirty is fine,” Darren said. “See you then.”

Now Micky was negotiating traffic, which was always such a pain in the ass in this direction, no matter the time of day. But she tried to keep an optimistic attitude, and it gave her some time to think. She imagined having to have the conversation that Darren wanted to have with her, having to tell him there was someone new in her life and it being a woman.

In the very beginning of their courtship, Micky had told Darren about Janet, the girl she had had a crush on in her last year of high school. But nothing had ever happened between Micky and Janet, and in the end, there hadn’t been that much to tell.

When Micky first breached the topic of separation, almost three years ago, one of Darren’s first questions had been whether there was someone else, but it wouldn’t even have occurred to him that, if there had been, it would most likely have been a woman. Or not. Micky was still buried so deep in the closet then. She didn’t even know what she wanted. All she knew was that she couldn’t be married to Darren anymore. That her life needed to change drastically and that the time had come for Micky Ferro to put herself first after giving the best years of her life—gladly and willingly—to her family.

What had Sheryl said last Saturday? That it took a lot of courage to do what Micky had done. To uproot her life the way she had. But for Micky, courage wasn’t what had made her take the first step away from Darren. It was pure necessity.

In the beginning, she’d had to put all her energy into making Darren understand that it wasn’t about him. It wasn’t. Darren Steele was a perfectly good man. He worked too hard, spent too much time away from home and his children, and when he was home, his mind was often elsewhere. But he was never aggressive in any way; he didn’t drink too much; he didn’t have time to even think about other women. But that was also what he had become to Micky. Acceptable. When she looked at him, she no longer found him dashing, sexy, or even particularly relevant apart from being the father of her children. They didn’t sleep in separate bedrooms, but they might as well have.