Chapter Twenty-Six

With another double bourbon in hand, I went back into the private room. No one was seated at the table anymore. People were standing and chatting in small groups, balancing drinks and their dessert plates.

Should I just go straight to Max and tell him about the work situation bluntly, like pulling off a Band-Aid? Or would it be better to wait until we were alone later and ease into it? I honestly didn’t know. Max and I were so new. I didn’t know the best way to deliver bad news to him yet.

Kat bounded up and gave me a huge hug. I let her squeeze me, breathing in the scent of her hair. Kat still used the same shampoo as when she was a teenager. Sometimes when she hugged me and pulled away, I’d jerk back when I saw her face. Part of me still expected her to be fourteen years old. “This was so wonderful,” she said in my ear. “Thank you.”

“Anytime,” I managed. “I’ll throw you a party anytime you come back to visit. So you should visit a lot.”

She laugh-sobbed. “I will, I promise.” We clung to one another for a long minute, until it got sappy and embarrassing. Over Kat’s shoulder, my mother watched us, giving no clue what she was thinking.

Clearing her throat, Kat took a step back and swiped at her tear-stricken face. “I’m such a mess. Do you have makeup in your purse? The college girls want to take a picture.”

“Of course.” I pointed to the door of the private room, grateful for the pedestrian subject change. Between Paul’s call and the bourbon and Kat’s hug, I was on the verge of crying too. “It’s out by the coat check.”

“Hey, I loved meeting Max. He’s great.” Kat waggled an eyebrow. “Are you changing your ways? Is it serious?”

“Oh, I don’t know.” Really, I didn’t. Did I want it to be serious? Maybe. But we were just starting and I was about to fire him. I couldn’t really explain all that to Kat though, so I hedged. “It’s not really my modus operandi to get serious,” I said lightly.

Her face tightened, then fell. “I guess I feel sorry for him then.”

Huh? “Why?”

She widened her eyes and cocked her jaw. “Why? Good God, Tess, he’s Daniel 2.0. You’ll crush him.”

As the shockwave of her words hit me, she was pulled into a sea of sorority girl good-bye hugs. I backed myself slowly into a corner of the room and drank my bourbon. She couldn’t be right. Max wasn’t anything like Daniel. But the moment that sentence hit my brain, I was bombarded by an onslaught of comparisons.

The way Daniel’s brow had furrowed when he was deep in thought over one of his calculations. The way Max rolled up his sleeves and leaned forward until the glare from the computer screen reflected in his glasses.

How Max carried Aria’s bags and opened doors. In the years I’d dated Daniel, I hadn’t opened a single door when I was with him. He even opened the passenger car door for me every time. He made sure I was the first person on and off the elevator.

Daniel had prided himself on taking care of me. He cooked, he fussed, he pampered. In my mind’s eye, I saw Max drawing me a bath.

Regardless of what happened later, for a long time I saw Daniel as a knight in shining armor, swooping in to rescue me when I was downtrodden and weary. And duh. Max was a rescuing knight as well, saving me and all the other Sex Ghost victims from the consequences of our sex tapes.

Oh no. No, no, no.

In the months leading up to my wedding, I lost a bunch of weight for the first and only time in my life. I wasn’t trying to look my best for photographs or fit into a smaller-sized white dress. I just couldn’t eat.

Which was odd because Kat was happily off to college and thriving at Northwestern. She made a ton of friends easily and still found time to call me and Daniel every day. Her favorite topic of conversation was the stunning Monique Lhuillier dress she would wear as my maid of honor. She emailed Daniel her calculus homework so he could review it before she turned it in.

I loved my first job after graduation. I was working as a systems analyst for a large consulting firm and learning more about technology and corporate culture every day. It was a “work hard, play hard” environment, and I soaked up the intense and competitive atmosphere. I was already trying to figure out which technology niche I wanted to pursue and how I wanted to shape my long-term career.

Despite loving my job, along with losing my appetite, I also stopped sleeping. Sometimes I fell asleep at 10:00, but I’d wake at 3:00 a.m. for the day. Or I might never fall asleep at all. I’d just lie there, listening to Daniel’s deep breaths and counting down the hours until I needed to get up and shower.

When I think back to that time now, everything is blurry except the arguments. Daniel and I had never argued in the course of our entire relationship—except for those last few months. Because of that, it was easy for him to brush them off. “You’re hungry, stressed, and exhausted,” he’d say, walking away.

But I couldn’t brush them off or blame them on the fact that I was tired. Why did he get irritated when I wanted to go out with my coworkers for happy hour? Casual friendships were something I’d been denied as a teenager, and I wanted to make up for lost time. Except Daniel couldn’t understand why I wanted to laugh over a martini with coworkers instead of coming home to make dinner with my fiancé.

Then one day my boss asked if I wanted to be transferred to one of the most coveted teams in the company. It was an exciting opportunity, but I had to be able to travel from Monday through Friday, three weeks out of the month. I’d burst through the door of our apartment that evening, so exhilarated I could barely talk. In my entire life, I’d barely left Chicago. Now I was going to be given the chance to see cities all over the country.

At first, I thought Daniel was just as happy as I was. He popped the cork on a bottle of champagne and toasted me and my boss, for “recognizing brilliance.” But then he said, “How did they take it when you turned down the offer?” Stunned, I said I didn’t turn them down. Daniel gave me a look of pure disbelief. “You want to start our married life living so much apart?”

I turned down the offer the next day.

Finally, a month before the wedding, I found him poring over real estate listings for the North Shore. “I don’t want to leave the city,” I’d protested immediately.

“Not right away,” he soothed. “Not for a year or so.” He gestured around his one-bedroom condo. “But when we’re ready for children, we’ll need a real house.”

I’d been holding a smoothie, one of the few things I was able to ingest in those months. The instant he said children, my stomach closed and I threw the cup in the garbage. He wanted children in a year? I wasn’t even twenty-five. I was just starting my career. Goddamn it, I’d just finished raising a child.

By the time my wedding weekend rolled around, I’d lost almost thirty pounds. Everyone told me how beautiful I looked. Well, everyone except my mother. She’d been conspicuously absent during a lot of my engagement, and even when she was around, she usually talked to Kat or Daniel instead of me.

At the rehearsal dinner, Daniel gave a speech to thank everyone for coming, to celebrate along with him and his “darling angel.” I actually didn’t know who he was referring to at first. Maybe I wasn’t quite sure who exactly I was at that point in time, but I did know I wasn’t a darling angel. I was the girl who’d just lied to his face and told him I was drinking a club soda when it was actually a vodka soda. My fourth of the evening. While I couldn’t get food down my throat, alcohol slid down just fine.

As the night went on, more and more of Daniel’s parents’ friends came over to say hi and congratulate us. They joked that soon we’d be neighbors up in Lake Forest or some other hallowed suburb.

Somewhere after that fourth vodka soda, everything that had been fuzzy and blurry in my sleep-deprived mind became suddenly clear. The girl Daniel fell in love with was not the girl I actually was inside. The girl inside wanted to start screaming and never stop. The girl inside wanted to stay out all night and go dancing. The girl inside wanted to work hard and go for every single promotion and not think about having kids for a damn decade. The girl inside didn’t want to be taken care of anymore.

But my fiancé didn’t know the girl inside, and she was too much of a chickenshit to introduce herself.

Daniel and I were sleeping in separate rooms at the wedding hotel that night. He dropped me at my door and reminded me that he and his mother would be by at 8:00 a.m. to pick me up for my salon appointments. “I’ve got a key to your room, just in case you oversleep.” Of course he did. It was just like Daniel to plan for every possible eventuality. “I love you, darling.” He kissed me good night for the last time.

After his footsteps receded down the hall, I went back to the hotel bar and ordered another vodka soda. The bar was mostly empty, and I didn’t recognize any of the few late-night drinkers. I didn’t have a plan. I was just drunk and desperate.

When the semi-sleazy-looking guy with longish, blond hair offered to buy me a drink, I said, “Yes, please.” When he asked me up to his hotel room an hour later, I said, “Let’s go to mine instead.” I purposefully didn’t lock the dead bolt.

On the morning of our wedding, Daniel and his mother found me naked in bed with a guy who turned out to be one of Daniel’s cousins. His mother was apoplectic, but I think Daniel would have forgiven me if I’d offered the tiniest excuse. I didn’t.

I’ll never forget the look on his face that morning. Or the look on Kat’s when she learned what I’d done.

I’ll never forget how haggard and old Daniel turned in the following weeks as I moved out of his apartment.

I’ll never forget how he quit his job and left Chicago because he “couldn’t exist in the same city with me.”

I’ll never forget how I annihilated the one person in my life who had always been kind to me.

“What’s the matter?” Max’s voice snapped me out of my reverie, and my memories of Daniel’s face were replaced by Max’s look of concern. “Why are you standing in the corner drinking bourbon like it’s water?”

I glanced around the room. The last brunch guests were filing out, helpfully guided by the waiters leading them to the coat check. My mother was the only other person still in here. She was gathering up flower arrangements on the other side of the room.

“Tess?” Max tried again. “Want me to take you home? What’s wrong?”

He was looking down at me with real worry. Something inside snapped.

“Nothing!” I scooted away from him so he couldn’t touch me. My voice was sharp and cold. “I need some space, that’s all.”

He shook his head, looking confused. Ignoring my comment completely, he said, “Are you upset about Kat? Or is it something else?”

“I’m not upset,” I lied. “I just told you that I need space. From you. We’re not…compatible.”

Max went completely still. “What?”

“You’re the kind of person who wants to form a life around someone,” I explained, my eyes sliding away from his. “I’m the kind of person who makes lives explode.” Yep, I was doing this. “I’m the type of person who fucks her fiancé’s cousin the night before her wedding.”

Max recoiled as though I’d physically hit him. The corners of his mouth turned down, probably in disgust.

“Yes!” I nodded. “That is the correct response to the kind of things I’ve done. I can’t even help you at work anymore. Paul called me. Taggert reached out to Jack Sorenson and you can’t have the job. I failed there too.”

He mumbled something like, “That’s not your fault,” but I could tell he was still hung up on the fucking-the-cousin thing. Well, good. He should be.

“Paul said you can’t even contract for us anymore,” I babbled. “Effective immediately, your temp employment with us is over. Which is probably good. You know, so we won’t see each other at the office.”

Max’s mouth dropped open. I’d never heard him yell before. “Do you realize that you’re acting bats hit crazy?”

I seized on that. “Yes! I am bats hit crazy. Nothing you should be around. Ever.”

I waited for him to take my words to heart and storm out, but Max stood frozen in place, his mouth still agape. “Tess, I literally have no idea what to say or do right now.”

Those words almost broke me. They were so honest, and he sounded bewildered. Angry as well, of course, but mostly bewildered. Kind of similar to the way Daniel had stared at me from the doorway the morning of our wedding. More shocked and heartbroken than angry.

See? Max was already looking at me the same way Daniel had and we’d just begun. This was clearly for the best. I couldn’t bear the idea of hurting him someday like I’d hurt Daniel. I literally felt nauseous at the idea of putting him through that kind of pain.

“I don’t know what to do,” he whispered again, his words an angry plea.

I swallowed and jutted out my chin. Pointed at the door, just in case there was any confusion. “Leave.”

So, he did.

He tore his gaze from my face and strode to the door without looking back. His footsteps echoed in my ears. I felt them in my chest; they pounded right in time with my bleeding heart.

And the moment he crossed the threshold and vanished, Kat burst back into the room, clutching the sheaf of insurance paperwork from my mother’s hospital stay.