He nodded. “Another teacher. She’s married with three kids. She said she was getting divorced. And instead of waiting for her to do it, I jumped the gun. I knew better, but I was lonely, she was bored. I hadn’t been in a relationship for a while, and I fell madly in love with her. Three years later she’s still married and has a thousand reasons not to leave him. It goes against everything I believe. I can’t do it anymore. I just told her.”
“Maybe she’ll leave him now,” she said, thinking about Andrew. But he hadn’t left his wife when she broke it off. She still believed that if he had loved her, he would have. Some people just never leave. They get away with what they can for a while, and then do it again with someone else. “I did something like that myself.” She was honest with him, and he looked at her, intrigued. “I knew it was wrong too. Same story. Only he lied to me, and said he was in the process of divorce. He wasn’t. He just lied. And I believed him for a year. Then the house of cards came down when I found out he’d lied. I broke it off, and I figured he’d leave her then and clean it up. He never did. He’s still with her four years later. He still calls sometimes, and I talk to him. I know I shouldn’t, but there’s no one else, so I talk to him anyway, and he makes me feel like shit all over again. Some people have a real knack for doing that.” She looked at him ruefully, and he smiled.
“I hate the dishonesty,” Simon said, looking pained. “She lies to him, she lies to me. How can you have a relationship built on lies?”
“You can’t,” she answered for him. “I tried. And I thought he was honest with me, but he wasn’t, which is maybe a little worse. But either way, the lies catch up with you in the end. I learned a hell of a lesson, and I haven’t dated anyone since. I don’t even miss it.” And then she corrected herself with a thoughtful look. “That’s not true actually. I do miss it, and even him sometimes, but I don’t miss the pain of what we had or the price to pay. I wouldn’t do something like that again.”
“Neither would I,” Simon said. “You don’t miss having someone in your life?”
“I do, just not him. And I’ve always been in love with my work, that helps. Probably too much so. Whenever there was a choice to make about priorities, I picked work. I feel guilty about it for Salima, but she’s very forgiving and seems to accept me as I am. It’s the way it is. When I was married to her father, I was more in love with my career than I was with him, and he knew it. Success is heady stuff. I have no regrets though, and we wound up friends. My only regret is that married a*shole who lied to me and I should never have gotten involved with. Probably the only man I’ve ever really loved is my first husband. I was married to him when I was barely older than Salima, and widowed when I was twenty-three. He was a cameraman for CNN and got killed by a sniper. After that, all I cared about was my career. It didn’t hurt as much as loving a person. People die, they cheat, they lie, they disappoint you. And work is just work.”
“That’s a very solitary way to live,” he said, looking sympathetic. “My parents are still in love with each other, and they’ve been married for thirty-five years. They’re kind of cute together, although my mom is pretty nuts, and says whatever comes into her head. It used to embarrass the hell out of me when I was a kid. She’s outrageous, but he loves it. It was a little dicier as their kid, and not quite as charming.” Blaise smiled at his description of his parents. They sounded interesting to her.
“My parents were pretty ordinary. My father was a butcher, my mother was a teacher, they had a strong work ethic and good values. My father always told me work was everything and to do something I loved. I got the message. But they didn’t say much about loving people. I was their only child, and they were both killed in a car accident when I was in college. They left me a life insurance policy that got me through school, and after that I was on my own. I grew up in Seattle, and I started in news there, as a weather girl,” she said with a grin. “It was a stupid job, but it got me in. And after that it was San Francisco and New York, and now here I am, trying to cover my ass every day. They don’t tell you that in the beginning. It must be in the small print in the contract.”
“You make me feel like I should be doing more,” he said honestly. “I’ve taken the easy road till now, and took a job I could do without too much challenge. By the time you were my age, you were a big star, had been married twice, and had a kid. Not bad,” he said admiringly. She had come a long, long way from being a butcher’s daughter in Seattle. And he had had an easier start. His father had a prestigious job in the academic world, his mother had money, and they were still alive and married. He wondered if that was the difference. Maybe he’d had it too easy. His family had always been behind him. Blaise only had herself.