“Fine,” I said. She had helped me plan a killer lesson, and I was using it first with my honors kids. She was going to try it the following week with her on-level students. “They came up with some really great examples.”
I had thought about telling Quinn that Richard and I were over about a million times, but I still hadn’t. She had become my very best friend over the past five years. We had a great time together, laughing at lunch until we both had tears streaming down our faces at the most ridiculously immature things, and we gave each other solid advice and could have lengthy, deep talks. But something about the fact that she was the one who helped me find Richard made me pause when telling her. I literally had told not a single soul about the separation. I just wasn’t ready for the assured looks of sympathy I’d receive and the advice about how to fix a marriage. It was too broken to recover. We weren’t just bent; we were broken beyond repair, and the bigger issue was that neither of us wanted to fix it anymore. We’d given it the old college try for two years, and sometimes things just don’t work out.
I had always believed that marriage was once and forever, but suddenly I found myself about to become another statistic. That thought saddened me, but it wasn’t the end of the world; it was just the end of Richard and me. I knew I had to start telling people eventually, but really nothing had changed from the outside. Things still looked fine, and I’d tell people when I was ready. I’d tell people once we made it official. And the more I thought about it, the more I realized that it was really silly to sit around waiting for something to happen.
I finally made the decision that I was going to file the paperwork for divorce. The sooner we could end things, the sooner we’d both be able to move on.
“Earth to Veronica,” I heard Jesse’s deep, raspy voice next to me, close to my ear.
I snapped out of my thoughts. “Sorry,” I muttered.
“Where did you go just now?” he asked.
“Just a lot on my mind,” I said, skirting the question.
“Care to share?” he asked, a look of concern washing over his warm brown eyes.
I shrugged. “Maybe later,” I said, looking away before I lost myself in those eyes.
I felt his hand on my arm. It was warm and rough and electrical and perfect. I felt all of the blood in my body rushing to that one spot where he touched me, and then I felt my neck warm and my face heat up as a blush spread across my cheeks. I knew I was being ridiculous. This was my friend. This was my Jesse, my trusted colleague. Wait. Not “my” Jesse. Just Jesse.
I was still married, I reminded myself once again. But a little corner of my mind was also justifying that I was separated and there was no hope left for my marriage.
“Irreconcilable differences” meant no fault. If I acted on these feelings that I was developing, we wouldn’t be able to claim “no fault” anymore. If I cheated, I would be at fault. And right now, things were going to end fairly amicably. We’d already pretty much divided our things, and we had been in talks about selling the house and splitting the profits. So I had to maintain the steady line until things were fully over between us, until the judge declared that in the eyes of the law, we were officially divorced.
All of that ran through my head in the split second his hand touched my arm. I glanced down at his fingers, and I noticed not for the first time how beautiful his hands were. Seriously, he could be a hand model or something. His fingers were long with trim, neat fingernails. I could tell that he spent time working out, because his hands looked strong and powerful. I suddenly wondered what his naked chest looked like, or what his abdominal muscles looked like under that shirt and tie he wore every day except Friday, when he wore a polo shirt with CVHS emblazoned over the top left pocket and well worn jeans that made his ass look incredible.
Okay, so maybe I’d spent some time checking him out in the past.
“V, you know you can talk to me,” he said, his voice low and intense, that wonderful hand still artfully placed over my skin.
I loved when he called me “V.” Something about it was sweet and intimate and intense all at once, and I suddenly felt like it was only the two of us sitting at that table, even though we were surrounded by friends and colleagues.
I did know that I could talk to him. He was a counselor, after all. If there was anybody that I trusted to keep my confessions to himself, and if there was anybody who could give me sound advice, Jesse was it.
I nodded, suddenly unable to speak around the lump that had formed in my throat. I felt those tiny pricks behind my eyes, and then the waitress appeared with my drink and I grabbed it from her gratefully, gulping half of it down with one long pull. I felt the cold liquid slide down my throat. I needed it to clear the threat of tears caused by the man sitting beside me who wanted to comfort me, and I needed it to cool down after the heat that I’d felt rush through me at the skin to skin contact. While it helped with the threat of tears, the vodka had the opposite effect on me than I had intended, causing my body to heat even more rather than cool down.