“Yeah, that sounds good. I’m getting pretty hungry. You want to make something together or order out?”
“I bought stuff to make enchiladas the other day. I have a rotisserie chicken we can use for the meat.”
My stomach growled. I’d been ravenous lately, eating more to compensate for my other hunger, which wasn’t being satisfied.
“That sounds good,” I said. “Let’s do it.”
I placed my cellphone and keys on the kitchen counter. “Be right back. I need to take a leak.”
I returned from the bathroom to a noticeable change in energy.
When I looked over at Heather’s face, all the color had drained from it.
“Are you okay?”
She didn’t answer me. Instead, looking like she was about to hyperventilate, she leaned against the counter.
She handed me my phone. “You got a text.”
I looked down. It wasn’t just any text, but a photo of a woman’s bare breasts, along with a message.
It was from Lindsey, the woman I’d been with before leaving Pennsylvania. This was the first time she’d contacted me since.
Oh fuck.
Lindsey: I miss you. Thought I’d send you this reminder. Wouldn’t want you to forget me. Hope you’re enjoying your vacation. I would love to see you when you get back.
My heart sank and words vomited out of my mouth. “I’m sorry you had to see that. She’s not anyone important. This is—”
“She seems to think she’s important enough that you’d be interested in a photo of her tits.”
How could I explain this? It didn’t look good no matter how you cut it.
I took a breath in. “Okay, remember when I told you there was someone last May, who I thought I had an understanding with?”
She folded her arms. “Yeah.”
“This is her. I haven’t spoken to her since I left. I don’t know what possessed her to send this photo to me tonight, but I sure as hell have no interest in it.”
“I take it you didn’t exactly end things?”
“There was nothing to end.”
Heather’s face had gone from white to red. “That’s right. She’s just your fuck toy. She’s clearly expecting to take up where you guys left off when you get back.”
God, this sucked. The future of our relationship may not have been clear, but as long as I was here, I needed to respect Heather. This was nothing but disrespectful, and the worst possible timing. She was already under an enormous amount of stress. We were both exhausted. But there was no good time for her to see something like that.
Suddenly, she covered her face. At first I thought she was crying, but then she shook her head and did a total one-eighty. “God, what’s wrong with me? I’m sorry. I can’t blame you for this. Hell, I’m not even sure I have any right to be mad.”
I looked at her a moment, trying to keep up. “You have every right to be mad. I would’ve lost my shit if the roles were reversed.” I swiped my finger along the text and deleted it. “It’s gone—where it belongs.”
“I’m sorry for overreacting.”
I took a breath in. “The guy she thinks she sent this text to? He doesn’t exist anymore. That man was empty. I’ll never be the same after this summer. I’m grateful for that.”
Before she had a chance to respond, her phone rang.
I watched as she picked it up and spoke to someone I assumed was Debbie, the realtor.
“They did?” She looked at me and smiled.
She got the house. I gave her a thumbs up.
“That sounds great. Okay…thank you for letting me know.”
She hung up and beamed. “They took the offer.”
“Fuck, yeah!”
When she hugged me, I lifted her and spun her around.
“I heard the phone ring.”
Katy’s voice startled us, and I put Heather down.
“Was that the realtor?” she asked.
Heather ran to her aunt and embraced her. “Yes! We’ve got a house.”
“Such great news!” Katy beamed.
“Wanna join us for a celebratory dinner?” Heather asked.
Katy looked over at me. “I don’t want to intrude. You two should be alone.”
Heather insisted, “It’s no intrusion.”
“I’m not too hungry,” Katy said. “You two go ahead, and if there are leftovers later, I’ll partake if I get my appetite back.”
“Okay.”
“I’ll go tell Alice the good news,” she said before disappearing upstairs.
That news shifted the mood to a better place. Heather and I spent the next hour making the enchiladas. Things lightened even more once we opened a bottle of wine. We enjoyed each other’s company, and the drama over the text I received faded considerably.
After dinner, we retreated to the living room to watch a Melissa McCarthy movie. Teddy curled up on one side of me, and Heather was on the other. This was so much better than going back to the boathouse alone.
She lay down and put her feet on my lap. I took them into my hands and massaged them.
“Look how little my feet are in your big hands. This feels so good after standing up all day.”
“You do have tiny feet.”
I wanted to kiss them but refrained.
“Have I ever told you that you have huge feet?” She winked.
“You might have mentioned that once or twice, yeah.”
She chuckled.
Her attention turned to the movie, but I remained preoccupied, thinking about what had happened earlier tonight. I wondered if she was really as understanding about the text from Lindsey as she claimed to be. Heather was strong and had the ability to catch herself when she got upset before things got out of hand. It was like she’d trained herself to brush things off. She never held grudges or let an argument go on for too long. I considered it a positive trait most of the time, but I wondered if that was good for her in the long run. Maybe she needed to let it all out sometimes, get angry before she had a breakdown.
I stared down at her feet and pressed on each of her toes. “You know, it’s okay to be mad at me.”
She sat up a little. “You want me to be mad?”
“No, of course not. But if you ever feel like you need to let it all out, it’s okay. For example, that text earlier—it clearly upset you. You were angry, but just when you were about to lose it on me, you stopped. It was like you told yourself you shouldn’t be mad, so you suppressed it. I just wonder if you deny your feelings sometimes as a protective mechanism.”
She pondered my theory. “Maybe I do that without realizing it because I don’t want conflict.”
“It’s okay to let out your frustration. I can handle it. If you’re mad about something, I want you to know you can take it out on me.”
Only after I spoke did I realize what that sounded like.
She lifted her brow. “You want me to take it out on you…in what way exactly?”
I should have known she wasn’t going to let that one slide. And that was most definitely what I wanted. I squeezed her feet even harder.
***
When Katy joined us in the living room a little while later, I went back to the boathouse to give her and Heather some alone time. I knew they had a lot to discuss about the new living arrangements and the logistics of Katy’s move from Boston to New Hampshire.
Just before midnight, I was just about to turn in when there was a knock on my door.
When I opened it, Heather stood there in a thin, white nightgown. I could pretty much see right through it. She scooted past me into the house, leaving a wave of her delicious scent.
“I wasn’t expecting a visit from you this late.”
She started to pace. “I couldn’t stop thinking about what you said. I wanted to let you know that I am really mad.”
The floodgates were about to burst open, and that was fine. This needed to happen.
“Talk to me, Heather.”
She unleashed everything. “I’m mad at my father for making me sweat over that damn money. I still don’t know if he’s serious or not. But more than that, I’m so angry that I spent half my life trying to convince myself he loved me as much as his other kids. Deep down I never believed it was true. And that hurts.”
When she started to cry, I took her in my arms. “Tell me more. Let it all out, baby.”