“Well, that wouldn’t be the man for me,” Paige said, following it up with a casual laugh, as if they were only talking hypotheticals.
Rosie sighed. “Maybe not. I best get back to the kitchen and guard the blender. There’s a fine line between taking the edge off and a bunch of wasted women shoving random crap in boxes.”
Paige took another sip of the margarita, then grimaced in the mirror. She wasn’t a big fan of the drink and, damn, she’d forgotten to call Mitch.
Chapter Sixteen
Showered, shaven and packing a fresh batch of condoms in his wallet, Mitch whistled as he left his room and walked down the stairs. He had no idea where anybody was, and he didn’t care. All that mattered was knowing where he was about to be, and that was with Paige.
A knock on the kitchen door took him by surprise, since he hadn’t heard a vehicle pull up. And the occasional random guest looking for a place to crash for a night would go to the front door.
By the time Mitch got to the kitchen, Drew was already letting himself in. And to say the man looked like hell warmed over was putting it kindly. Only two things made a man look like that and Drew wasn’t sick, so Mitch knew he wouldn’t be using those condoms after all.
Drew made eye contact for a second, and Mitch could see the moisture threatening to gather before he looked down at the floor. “She’s packing right now.”
“Shit. I’m sorry, man.” He went to the fridge and took out a couple cans of beer, one of which he handed to Drew. “I really hoped you guys would work it out.”
“Maybe we could have if we ever talked about the same thing. My problem is the lying. Ten years of it. But she thinks the problem is that I care more about kids that don’t exist than I do her.”
“You driving tonight?”
“I was hoping you’d spot me a room. I don’t want to sit around and watch Mal leave me.”
Holding his open beer in one hand, Mitch reached back into the fridge with the other and grabbed a full six-pack. “Let’s go sit on the back porch and put a dent in this.”
Drew took the beer. “Sounds like a plan.”
“Go ahead. I’ve gotta make a quick call, then I’ll be out.”
“Tell Paige I said hi.”
“Hey, it could be for work.”
“Sure it is,” Drew called over his shoulder on his way out.
Paige answered on the second ring. “I was just about to call you.”
“Let me guess. You’re helping Mallory pack.”
“And I guess you’re probably helping Drew get drunk?”
“Something like that. He’ll be crashing here tonight and I’ll be drinking a lot slower than him, so don’t worry about him showing up and making a scene.”
She sighed. “This sucks.”
That it did. And it was proof, as if he needed any, that love didn’t trump two people wanting different things in life. “If there’s drinking involved in that packing, don’t drive. Call if you need to and Rosie will come get you.”
“Umm…Rosie’s here. She’s making the margaritas.”
Mitch walked to the window and, sure enough, Rosie’s car was gone. “She’s getting sneaky in her old age.”
“I won’t tell her you said that. Anyway, Fran’s not drinking, so she’ll do any driving that needs to be done. And I’m only having one anyway. Drinking or no drinking, my alarm’s going off at four-thirty tomorrow morning.”
He made her promise to call if there were any problems at Mallory’s and then ended the call before he could ask what she was doing tomorrow night. He’d been falling off his game plan lately, a key component of which was not letting a woman get too accustomed to him being around, but the suffering on his friend’s face had been a sharp reminder of the messy emotional stuff he wanted nothing to do with.
Drew was downing the last of his first beer when Mitch joined him on the porch, and he made a mental note to scrounge up some food in a little while. A few beers was one thing, but getting falling-down, puking drunk wasn’t going to help the guy feel any better.
“I keep asking myself if I would have married her if I’d known from the beginning she didn’t want kids.”
There was no going back in time, and what-ifs didn’t help anything, but Mitch popped open a beer and settled back to listen.
“I think I would have. I probably would have assumed she’d change her mind after we’d been married awhile. And when we first got married, it’s not like having a baby was the first thing on my to-do list anyway. There’s a good chance we would have ended up in the same place we are now—we just would have taken a different road to get here.”
“Would that have been easier or harder, do you think?”
Drew considered the question, then shrugged. “I don’t know. I think being pissed off she lied to me for ten years is keeping some of the hurt at bay. I guess there’d be a lot more hurt and sadness if it had gone the other way.”