“Enlighten me,” I say, hating that I sound bitter. Hating that it’s him who’s making me sound this way.
His shallow breaths sound amplified through the phone. “God. I don’t know how to tell you this. But I feel like telling you is the right thing to do. I’d want to know if it were me.”
But it’s not you. I would never do this to you.
“What is it?” What could he reveal that could hurt any more than I don’t want to marry you?
“I think I’m in love with someone else.”
Okay. I was wrong. That hurts worse.
I grip the phone tightly, my body temperature rising so quickly that I have to unzip my sweatshirt.
“Hello? Are you still there?”
“Yes,” I finally whisper as a lone tear escapes my eye, travels down my cheek, and drips off my chin before he finally starts to talk again.
I try to rub the tension out of the back of my neck with my knuckles. Max used to do that—I’d sit on the floor beneath him and he’d dissolve the kinks with such ease that I’d joke that if his lawyer thing didn’t work out, he’d definitely have another career to fall back on.
“But no happy endings!” he’d laugh. “I’m saving those for you.”
“Of course,” I’d chuckle, foolishly believing he would never so much as let his eye linger on another woman. Turns out I couldn’t have been more wrong.
“I want you to know I never cheated on you, not even a kiss,” I hear him say, his words sounding muffled like the sound you hear when you put a seashell to your ear. “We never expected this to happen. That—”
“Who?” I interrupt, but am only met with silence. “Who is it?” I demand again, running through a mental index of the women it could be. That glossy intern at his office? His ex-girlfriend from high school who’d friended him on Facebook last year? Some random girl he’d met when I wasn’t around?
“Courtney,” Max says, so quietly I think I’ve misheard him.
“Courtney?” I repeat, the shock of hearing her name smacking me across the face like a hailstorm.
That Courtney? My friend? My coworker? The one I’d busted my ass with for five years—pulling so many all-nighters at the office she finally brought in her favorite fluffy pink slippers and chenille blanket and I hauled in my Keurig coffeemaker and iPod, us laughing that at least we had the comforts of home, and each other. I feel a burn in my chest as I recall the exact moment when our partnership at work transformed into a real friendship. It was one of those long nights—the janitor was cleaning the marble floor and we were lying on the couches in the entryway as we tried to think up a slogan for the athletic socks account we’d just acquired. As I listened to the whirring of the buffer, I burst out, “You know what? This really fucking socks! We should be home in bed with our husbands. If we had husbands!” And Courtney deadpanned, “Husbands? Who needs men when we’re married to our jobs!” and I’d started crying, the really ugly snotty kind. And she’d hopped off her couch and onto mine and thrown her arms around my neck and said, “You and I will have hot human hubbies one day, but tonight we only have each other . . .” She trailed off for a moment and reached down toward her foot, and suddenly I felt a soft fabric against my cheeks. “And our socks,” she said, using hers to wipe my tears away.
I heave as all the air is sucked from my lungs like a Shop-Vac inhaling everything in its path as the memory of how Courtney and Max ended up in each other’s lives floods through me. How, when a smile had danced across my lips the morning after I met Max, Courtney was the first person I thought of telling after Jules and Liam. But as I’d reached for my cell phone, a part of me had worried she’d be resentful because being single workaholics had been our thing. I’d had boyfriends before and so had she, but we’d always known they were just seat fillers until the real thing came along.