“Mallory, if I have—”
“No,” I cut him off. “You have never indicated you wanted anything more from me than professional performance from seven fifty-nine to five o’clock. The rest of this was just a bonus. I don’t expect anything from you.”
I say the words and I mean them, but they still hurt like a motherfucker. My butt scoots away from him just a bit and his eyebrows shoot to the ceiling, but he doesn’t comment.
“You say I make things difficult, but I don’t want that, Graham. I’d never want to interfere with your work, with your family.”
“Mallory—”
“No. We aren’t at work, so I can put my foot down and make you hear me out.”
“Oh, like that matters,” he mumbles.
I shrug. “If this gets too difficult or hard or weird, I want to stop it before it gets out of control. I like this, but—”
“You don’t like this more than I do,” he whispers. “I just keep things in boxes for a reason. Right now, they’re a mess and I can’t handle messes.”
“I hate this for you,” I say honestly. “You must be so lonely.”
“Being alone is better than being in a relationship and making sacrifices you don’t want to make. Or having pressure put on you to choose between the other person and what drives you.”
“Who did that to you, Graham?”
The lines in his face move, and I see his surprise that I came out and just asked. Frankly, I’m surprised I came out and just asked too, but I want to know.
He sighs and gets up and heads back in the kitchen. His shoulders are stiff as he fills his tumbler again, keeping his back to me as he quickly downs a good portion of the liquid.
A ripple of panic bubbles up and I’m not sure what to do. My purse is in his car, with my phone, so I can’t even call Joy to come and get me, but I feel like I should leave. That I’ve overstepped my boundary by asking.
My mouth opens to issue an apology and an offer to just go when he turns back around. This time, I see that he’s made up his mind.
My wine glass rattles as I place it on a coaster on the table in front of the sofa. My breathing gets ragged as he gets closer. I’m unsure what he’s going to do or say.
“When I was in college,” he says, sitting on the edge of the sofa, “I wanted to go to law school. I thought it was the best way to help my dad’s company, which was the only thing I ever wanted. Growing up, Barrett would go to the movies on the weekends or to a friend’s house, and I would go with Dad to the office and just soak it up. I loved the excitement, the power I felt sitting at the spare table and listening to his conversations.”
He takes a deep breath, refusing to look at me.
“I have everything laid out in front of me. I knew from eighth grade what I wanted to do and how I was going to get there. We had career day in middle school. We had to pick four professionals to go talk to. The other kids were picking the deejay and television guy and whatever. I picked the attorney four times,” he laughs, his voice a touch shaky.
With a trembling hand, I let my palm rest against his knee. The corner of his mouth quivers, but doesn’t quite turn up.
“My freshman year of college, I met this guy. We had similar interests and started hanging out. We got an apartment together our sophomore year. It was the first time in my life I’d really kind of loosened up some, you know? It was fun,” he shrugs. “Second half of my junior year, I had a philosophy class. The first day, this woman walks in. She was a grad student filling in as a teaching assistant.”
“You don’t have to talk about this if you don’t want to,” I say softly. The somberness on his face hurts my heart. “Let’s talk about something else.”
“No.” He clears his throat and looks at me, the greens of his eyes clear. “Her name was Vanessa. I fell in love with her that first day.”
His admission is a shock to my heart, my hand slipping off his knee. He continues on, despite registering my reaction.
“I made a few passes and within three weeks, we were together. We’d meet after class at her apartment across town or we’d spend the weekend at mine. We’d talk philosophy and politics, staying up all night debating free will and morality. It was the first time in my life I met someone that I thought really understood me. Appreciated my, well, my brothers would say geekiness.”
He forces a swallow, pain written all over his face. Gazing off in the distance, like he’s replaying the time in his mind, I sit back and struggle to contain my own emotions—emotions I can’t pinpoint, but am acutely aware exist close to the surface.
“We weren’t supposed to be fucking around. We knew she could lose her position and maybe even her scholarship, but she was adamant, as was I, that we wanted to be together. So we continued. The entire semester. Each day got deeper, like stepping off a ledge with every tick of a clock. She wanted all my attention, got jealous when I would go home to see my family or my mom would call or Dad would want me to help with a situation at Landry. It just became so much bigger than I could handle. I constantly felt like I had to choose between her and my other obligations. And, no matter what I chose, someone was pissed off. I didn’t want to let anyone down.”
His eyes darken, his hands locking together in front of him. “Then one night, it was late and we’d been drinking more than we should’ve. It was pouring down rain and her apartment was closer, so we decided to just head there for the night. We’d never stayed there on a weekend,” he says, his jaw pulsing. “In the morning, her husband walks in.”
“No!” I gasp, my hand finding his thigh again.
“I had no idea, Mallory. None.”
My mouth hangs open as I both try to process what he said and the look on his face. I’ve never seen Graham angry before, but this is so severe, I’m almost scared.
“Word got out,” he says, spitting the words, “and she was exposed. Apparently I wasn’t the only one she was with. Her husband who worked out of town all week, hence why we never went to her house on the weekends, hung her out to dry with the department.”
“She deserved that!”
“Maybe,” he says. “So all this is going down and she’s still calling me, telling me she wants to be with me. She loves me. I was her soul mate. She wants to marry me, have my babies. That shit, you know?” he hisses. “I was so messed up over this girl that I was going to give her a chance to explain. I just wanted so badly for it to be real.” His jaw clenches, the muscle in his face pulsing. “Imagine my shock when I went to her house and realized . . . she was gone.”
“Graham,” I gush, wishing he’d look at me. “I’m so sorry.” I want to pull him into my arms. I have to hold myself back from reaching for him.