The impulse to say something I haven’t ever said out loud rises in me after a while. “I want to own my own firm one day,” I say. I keep my face down towards the roast duck on my plate like I can’t bear to look at Tomas while I admit these ambitions. “I’m smart enough. I’m capable enough. I can do it.”
Tomas says nothing, until at last, I force myself to look at him. That half-smile grows a tiny bit warmer. “Then do it,” he says gently.
What is it about that tenderness from this man that makes me want to leap across the table and mount him right here and now? We’re in a white tablecloth restaurant with dozens of people and staff around us, but if he keeps looking at me like that and saying these soft, gentle things, I might just go through with that urge.
I hold his gaze for a long moment. He doesn’t blink or look away. He just keeps staring straight at me, straight into my soul, with that uniquely Tomas mixture of arrogance and softness, dominance and caring.
He looks like the boy I fell in love with ten years ago.
He looks like the man who saved me on my wedding night.
He looks like the one who believes in me.
I’m so choked up I don’t know what to say. Until the moment ends with a vicious, unexpected twist.
Tomas’s eyes go over my shoulder. “Fuck,” he says. The color drains from his face.
“What?” He doesn’t have time to answer before a woman is standing at the edge of our table, a haughty woman with fingernails like daggers, lipstick that reminds me of ripe garden tomatoes, and eyes like green lasers aimed at Tomas. He doesn’t speak. She doesn’t speak, but he draws his hand away from mine.
Well, hell. If that isn’t a signal, I’m not getting another. No one is speaking but, he won’t look at me. Or her, for that matter. But clearly, she knows him. Or she suffers from a social disorder that doesn’t allow the signals from her brain to inform her that staring at strangers while interrupting their dinner is rude.
If Tomas isn’t going to introduce us, I’ll just do it myself. “Hi. I’m Corinne O’Shea.”
She turns a bright white smile my way and ignores my outstretched hand. “I’m Katerina Kuznetsov,” she says in a very romantic-sounding Russian accent. “Tomas’s fiancée.”
“Oh.” Then the words sink in. “Oh.” My roast duck begins a very concentrated effort to flap its way out of my stomach. “Oh. Right. Fiancée.” I widen my eyes at him in a silent fuck-you message I hope he hears screaming through his mind. I blow out a breath.
There are one too many people at our table, so I stand, sending my chair crashing backward. I feel ice-cold from head to toe all of the sudden.
“This looks like a private moment, so I’m going to go.” I look at Tomas one last time. I walk two steps and turn. “I forgot to ask. When’s the wedding? I’d love to send a gift.”
Katerina’s smile widens. “Friday.”
“Oh.” Friday? As in, this fucking week?! “Good. That’s great. I’m just going to run to …” I pretend to check my watch. A watch I don’t wear since I have a phone. “Oh, look at that. Just a freckle. Doesn’t tell time.” Oh, God. I want it to stop now. Mostly, I want to crawl into a hole and bury myself until the apocalypse.
“Corrie.”
His soft tone, the regret in his eyes, and the lie on his lips snap me out of this bullshit babbling and confusion. There’s nothing to be confused about. He’s a murderer and a liar.
I was dead wrong. There’s no trace of my Tommy left.
“I hope you guys are really happy together.” And with that, I walk away, head high, tears at bay. He’s hurt me before, and I lock down any feeling associated with it happening now. No point in crying. I damn sure am not doing it here, in a restaurant full of people and his fiancée. How the fuck could I ever compete with that?
I walk outside and take the first cab that pulls up. I just need to get out of there. My parents are still out west enjoying Beverly Hills and the quiet of their house is the perfect place for me to get my head together.
A fiancée. Really. Of course, she looks like a supermodel. And the ring … holy shit. More carats than a rabbit farm.
I sink into the taxi and let loose tears I can’t hold back anymore.
By the time I’m done berating myself in the shadow of the fiancée’s gloriousness—even her freaking name is amazing—the cab has pulled up to the curb in front of Mom and Dad’s. I pay the driver and walk inside, straight up the stairs to my room.
Since I’m alone in the only place I’ve ever felt safe, I let the sense of betrayal keep rolling down my cheeks. It doesn’t always take the form of tears, but today is special on various levels. It’s the day I’m free of my husband, thanks to the annulment papers that arrived in the mail that morning.
Plus, during the first really romantic dinner I’ve been to since I met said husband, I discovered the only man I’ve ever let myself fall for, who I thought felt the same, is engaged to someone else. Someone so perfect and lovely she probably wakes up with a full face of makeup and hair that looks professionally styled.
Ugh.
It’s my own fault. I should’ve known. Should’ve never trusted him again. Damn sure shouldn’t have slept with him. And speaking of which, a big fat thank God to birth control pills because I would hate being connected to him for the rest of my life.
I can’t believe I was wrong. All the things I imagined about the boy I knew still being in there … so wrong. Or maybe too right. He’s the same. The same guy who left me without a look back before. Only this time, he swapped in lying instead of a simple disappearance. Bastard.
Like I need a karmic reminder of my own stupidity, my eyes focus on my old photo album. Dusty. Sitting on the bookshelf next to my copy of the Twilight anthology on one side and a framed picture of me with Mom and Dad at my graduation on the other.
I sigh and pick it up, smoothing my hand over the flowered fabric cover, Maybe it’s morbid curiosity or some ridiculous masochistic need to hurt myself more than I already am, but I open the album and stare at us.
Tomas was always beautiful, but back then he was carefree and loving and mine. My Tommy. He taught me how to swing from a rope into the pond without landing on my back. And we learned to kiss together. Other things, too. This book and these pictures document it all.
This album is our history from our earliest days to the day before he left. Anger flares in my stomach. Burns. So I run, not walk, to the living room and flip on the gas fireplace. The flames poof to life, and I rip the first photo out of the album and throw it in. Then another and another. The images bubbles, the edges scorch, and…
Fuck!
I reach in and drag the pictures out. Two survived. The third—one at the lake the summer he taught me to drive a stick shift—is gone. And my hand is burned. But I’ve stomped out the flames on the pictures and my hand will heal. The copious ointment I put on it, and the amount of wine I drink to wash away the pain lets me fall asleep before the heartache and the hand pain work together to form more tears.
19
Tomas