“Just out of curiosity,” she asked, turning to face him again, “when you guys were together,” she said, making quote marks with her fingers, “how did you keep from crushing her? She’s just a tiny little thing, and it seems like there would have been a danger of hurting her—”
Michael closed the distance between them, put his arms around her in spite of her throwing up her arms to stop him, and held her tightly in his arms.
“I guess, though, if you’re the Extreme Bachelor, you must have worked those tiny details out,” she mumbled into his shoulder.
“Stop,” he breathed into her hair, and put his hand on the back of her head. “I didn’t lie to you, baby. I love you, and I’ve loved you all these years. Granted, I haven’t been a saint, but I haven’t lied to you. There is no one else. There is no Ariel, no Nicole, no one but you.”
Instead of soothing her he was making her angry—she’d heard this song a few times too many now and was getting sick of it. She shoved against him, breaking his grip on her and making him spill his beer on the carpet. He moved to get something to clean it, but she threw a towel down and stomped on it, grinding it into the carpet. “Just tell me how many other women are going to come crawling out of the woodwork and claim some sort of relationship with you?”
“What does it matter? There is no one else, and there won’t be now that I have found you again.”
“It matters! What am I supposed to do, just pretend like none of it bothers me? Like it doesn’t hurt all over again? Or make me feel like an idiot for believing we could go back?”
“Did you believe that?” he asked, surprised.
Her hands curled into fists. “Yes,” she said bitterly. “For a moment, one single, solitary moment, I believed it. But I didn’t know you jumped back into the dating pool with both feet. Not me. It took me years to get over you. It took me years to get up the nerve to date again, because I didn’t think I could ever love anyone like I loved you, and if by some miracle I did, I couldn’t stand to go through it all again and risk being dumped like a bag of garbage one day. So it’s not exactly easy to keep running across all these women you’ve dated and been with and try and act like it doesn’t bother me.”
“What do you want me to do?” he asked angrily. “I can’t turn back the clock; I can’t do anything but tell you there is no one else. The fact that there are so many of them cropping up all of a sudden should be more evidence that I could never manage to maintain a relationship for more than a few weeks. They weren’t you, Leah.”
She glared at him. Michael glared back. She kicked her suitcase shut. He tossed the beer into her trash can.
“So?” he asked.
“So?”
“So where does this leave us?”
She gave him a petulant shrug and looked at the floor. “I’m not sure.”
“Maybe it leaves us with dinner.”
“Maybe it leaves us with a gash too deep to heal, Michael.”
“Come on, baby,” he said, moving closer, stroking her cheek with his knuckles. “Trust me. Believe me.”
Bite me, she thought bitterly. “I don’t know. I honestly don’t know if I can.”
“Okay, look,” he said, just as wearily. “We can’t expect to fix everything gone wrong between us in a matter of days, right? So let’s just have some dinner and see how it goes. What do you say?”
He was right—old, deep, gaping wounds took time to heal. She just had a funny feeling that she hadn’t quite found all her wounds, or knew how deep they ran. “All right,” she said. “Just let me change.”
He nodded and walked out, leaving her behind, the space between them opening up like a gulf.
Dinner did nothing to improve their mood. Michael tried to talk about work and how he was looking forward to finally getting to Washington and the actual filming. His talk of Washington reminded Leah that Jill, yet another woman Michael had dated at some point in the last five years, had told them when Michael had showed up to boot camp that they had gone white-water rafting with the other guys a couple of years ago in Washington.
Leah could picture herself at dinner parties and Hollywood affairs with Michael, meeting woman after woman Michael had once dated, or taken white-water rafting, or flown to Paris, or whatever. She grew more sullen. He grew more exasperated with her sullenness, professing an inability to understand why she couldn’t just accept what he was saying, and that made her angry all over again.
“So what you’re saying is that basically, I shouldn’t have any feelings about the women you’ve slept with, is that it?” she snapped.
“Hey,” he said low, looking at her darkly. “I told you, I didn’t sleep with all those women.”
“You slept with some of them. You dated all of them.”
He said nothing, but clenched his jaw tightly shut.
“And could you please just explain to me why they all have to end up on this film?”
He drove his fork into his food. “I told you that, too, Leah,” he said sharply. “Jack thought it would be funny.”
“Ha ha,” she said, and pushed her plate aside.