“The same woman,” she began, “who practically crucified me for making a snap decision and traipsing off to Ireland with a man I barely knew is now okay with the idea of letting one of that same man’s best friends move into her house…with her son?”
Meg swirled the ice in her soda and watched the bubbles in the dark liquid rise and pop. “He’ll be in the guest room. It’s just for show.”
“Uh-huh. For how long? What are you going to do? Annul the thing? Or will you hold out a little longer and have another divorce?”
“I don’t like your tone.”
“And I don’t like you stringing Seth along.”
Meg snapped her gaze toward her friend and did a quick reading of Carla’s face, hoping perhaps the woman was pulling her leg.
Didn’t look like it.
“I thought you were my friend. And if I recall, you were on-board with this scheme. You flew to Bermuda, remember? You were one of our witnesses.”
“That’s right.” Carla eased off the fridge door and strode to the table. She pulled out the chair to Meg’s right and folded onto it. “Look, I guess we all thought this would be a convenient sort of thing,” she said softly. “We figured the two of you would just lay low and wait for the drama to go away on its own.”
“That’s a reasonable expectation, but you know almost as well as I do that Spike isn’t a reasonable man. I thought the same thing you did: that I’d marry Seth and people would leave me alone because he’s not famous. I’d fall off the radar and could have a normal sort of life after a while, but Carla…” Meg lowered her voice to a whisper as one of the children streaked past the open double door. “You should hear some of the messages he’s been leaving in my voice mail. He’s gone ape-shit. When everyone was feeling sorry for me for getting dumped, it made him look like a bad boy and somehow all the more desirable.” That made her scoff. She took a long sip of her soda and gathered her thoughts.
It wasn’t necessary. Carla could more or less read them. “And now that you’ve appeared to have moved on, he’s taken it personally. Probably pissed he didn’t do more to screw you up.”
And that’s precisely why they were best friends. Even if they didn’t always immediately warm to each other’s choices, they generally came around to understanding why they made them.
“I feel really awful. Toby doesn’t understand what’s going on. All he knows is that Seth is going to come around, and he thinks he’s going to have a buddy, but for how long? And what if people start to recognize Toby? How’s that going to affect him in school? Are other kids going to tease him? Are the teachers going to shame him for his father being an epic douche bag?”
Carla’s upper lip curled. “I hadn’t considered that. Toby’s the first out of all the kids to start school. I haven’t even so much as browsed that list of preschools my mother brought over.”
“Yeah, and there’s another issue.”
“What?”
She didn’t know how to put this delicately, but it was Carla, so she just spit it out in a hoarse whisper. “I know it muddles things, but I can’t—no, I don’t want to keep my hands off Seth. The more he says yes, the more I want him. I feel like some kind of rampaging nymphomaniac.”
Carla pressed her lips together to stifle her words, but her watery eyes gave away her amusement.
“What?”
“I’m sorry, it’s just… You’re probably far from being diagnosable by the American Psychiatric Association’s mental disorders manual.”
“Just how often is considered clinical?”
“I took introductory psychology, what, ten years ago? Twelve? Why the hell would I know that?”
She had a point.
“I suspect you’re comparing your level of urges at the moment to what society thinks is right and proper for a woman of our age. Well, guess what? Not all married women endure sex and roll over and put out every ten days with a weary sigh. Some of us like it. Ask for it.”
Meg leaned back in her seat and located her redheaded offspring standing in the corner with his back turned to the room, counting. “One. Two. Three. Seven… Ready or not, here I come!”
After he’d zipped past on the heels of Emma, Meg whispered, “It kinda feels trampy.”
That was her honest-to-God truth. On the rare occasion she’d actually ask for it from Spike, he’d demean her. Tease her. He’d made her feel like some sort of aberration for having physical needs. The same needs he’d gladly met when she was an idiot undergrad and he was a skinny, greasy, barista moonlighting as a singer.