The Perfect Life
“Oh, go blow on a tailpipe, Giada,” I growled at the iPad, irritated because I had been stirring the damn risotto for over ten minutes and all I had to show for it was a tired arm and a skillet full of chicken broth and flat rice.
Blowing out an exasperated breath, I dropped the wooden spoon and stepped away from the stove, ready to call for delivery. I knew better than to think I could cook Colin’s favorite dinner, even if his mom had walked me step-by-step over the phone through the recipes for the chicken Marsala and the garlic parmesan risotto that afternoon. Cooking just wasn’t my thing—never was, never would be. I could manage to prepare a few simple things without total destruction of myself, the house, or the food, but anything with more than like three or four ingredients just never turned out right. Not to mention, I was usually cooking for only myself, and that wasn’t very much fun.
However, that Sunday night, four weeks to the day since Colin had left for treatment in Florida, he was finally coming home and had promised to join me for dinner so we could catch up. Having flown into the city earlier in the day, he’d headed straight to the stadium to watch the team take on the Steelers for an early afternoon kick-off. Much to my chagrin, the Pats had lost . . . again.
With Colin out due to his injury, the team had lost three of four, and suddenly, their playoff spot was in jeopardy. I was well aware that his mood wouldn’t be the best when he arrived home, so I’d called his mom for help when I stopped off at the market on my way home from Oliver’s, in hopes his favorite home-cooked meal would help him relax, as well as soften the blow when I told him about the whole boyfriend thing.
As luck would have it, Oliver returned to Boston from Thanksgiving with his family on the same day Colin came home, their flights landing within an hour of each other. And although I was ecstatic to see Colin after going a month with only text messages and a couple of Skype sessions, I wasn’t all that devastated when he told me he wouldn’t be home until later in the evening, once the game was over.
Oliver, on the other hand, I was dying to get a piece of the minute he stepped off the plane, though I was smart enough to wait for him at his apartment and not at the airport. With the key he’d given me before he left, I’d let myself in that morning and waited in his bed until he joined me shortly thereafter—both of us eager to show the other how much they were missed. Even though it sucked not being able to spend the night with him while Callie was staying at his apartment, we at least had a blast roaming around the city for those three days, goofing off like carefree teenagers and sneaking kisses and touches anytime we got a chance. But the four nights he was in Illinois, when I couldn’t sleep soundly or snap out of my overall funk, were absolutely abysmal and seemed to drag on for an eternity. My Thanksgiving dinner with the kids was the only time I didn’t think about how much I missed him and enjoyed myself.
I was neither too stubborn nor blind to recognize the impact his absence had on me and what it ultimately meant, but before I could drop that three-word-bomb on him, I needed to talk to Colin first. If I deserved more, he at least deserved that. For everything that we were. For the love and respect we had for each other.
Which brought me to the epic failure of a dinner that I was scraping into the trash receptacle, burying all of my hopes to butter him up under the heap of inedible food. If this talk doesn’t go well, it’s all Giada’s fault.
A half an hour later, Chinese food was delivered to the front door, and not ten minutes after that, I heard Colin pull up and the engine turn off. My stomach rolled with nerves as I waited for him to come in, but the second I saw my husband’s red-rimmed eyes and tear-stained cheeks as he came through the back door, all of the things I planned to say to him were pushed aside and replaced with his need for me to comfort him in whatever way necessary. I had only witnessed Colin cry a couple of times in all the years we’d been together, so I knew something or someone had seriously upset him.
“Colin, babe,” I gasped, throwing the kitchen towel I was carrying down on the counter and rushing to him. “What happened? Why didn’t you call me?”
We converged in the middle of the living room and immediately wrapped each other up in a tight embrace, my face smashed against his chest. After taking a little bit to soak in the therapeutic qualities of the hug, he pulled back far enough that we could look into each other’s eyes.
“I don’t know what happened,” he finally replied, wiping the wetness away with the back of his hands. “I was fine one minute while driving home, and then the next, I was crying uncontrollably. It was like I’d suppressed all this sadness and disappointment I felt after everything that happened with Seth, and then it felt like you were trying to pull away when you told me that you felt a special connection with Oliver, and I got scared.” Oh God, please don’t say it. “It seemed like everyone I love was just trying to leave me.” Yep, he said it.
“Then that stupid, freak accident at the lock-in . . .” He paused to shake his head in disbelief. “You, Seth, and football—that’s all I want in life. It’s all I need to be happy. And this last month has been hell without any of the three. The game today was just the tipping point. It nearly killed me watching my teammates out there, knowing I couldn’t do anything to help them win. And I guess all the emotions finally just got the best of me . . . I snapped in the car.” Ruffling my hair, his offered me a small smile. “But now that I’m home, here with you, I surprisingly feel a million times better. And I know that starting tomorrow morning, my life will be nothing but New England Patriots football for the rest of the season. I’ve got four weeks to lead this team back to the top of the division, and I don’t care if I have to move in to the practice facility. I will make sure I’m mentally and physically prepared each and every week to do just that.”
My muscles tensed with the guilt coursing through my body while apprehension held my tongue quiet; there was no way in Hell I could tell him about me and Oliver right then, not unless I wanted to further trample on his already bruised and battered heart. And I loved him too much for that.
I encouraged him with an affectionate pat on the arm, ignoring my own inner turmoil. “Whatever you need, babe, I’m here for you. Until the very end.”
“Until the very end, baby girl,” he repeated, his small smile widening into a full-out grin as he stared down at me from his massive height. “Now what’s the big surprise you mentioned for dinner? I’m starving.”
With a sheepish grin, a nervous chuckle escaped from me as I glanced over my shoulder to the kitchen. “Well, uh, you see,” I hee-hawed around for a minute before blurting it all out in a single breath. “I tried to make your mom’s chicken Marsala and risotto for you, because I knew you were going to be in a not-so-great mood, but that ended up a total disaster, so we’re now having Chinese takeout.”
He howled with laughter at my confession and demanded I tell him the full cooking fiasco as we sat on our stools at the kitchen island, stuffing our faces with Mongolian beef, fried rice, and eggrolls. We didn’t talk about Seth. We didn’t talk about Oliver. And for a little while, we were just Colin and Monroe like back in college. Best friends until the very end.
Only the end was coming faster than either of us knew.
“I’ve narrowed it down to these—Elephant’s Breath, Skipping Rocks, and London Fog. What do you think?” I asked Oliver as he joined me in the upstairs bedroom, carrying the ladder I’d asked him to bring up.
As I backed away from the wall, my eyes bounced back and forth between the paint swatches I’d been staring at for over an hour. It was Wednesday, our second full day of working in the MH house after we’d signed the mountain of closing paperwork on Monday afternoon, and I’d been working on the kids’ bedrooms, choosing paint, furniture, and décor. Well, it was almost noon, and I hadn’t made it past the paint part yet.
Oliver leaned the bulky metal equipment against the opposite wall then sauntered up next to me, dramatically crossed his arms over his chest, and narrowed his stare on the three gray squares
I’d taped to the sheetrock, pretending he was in deep, serious thought.
“I think whoever comes up with these names should stick to writing Hallmark cards, and if this is gonna be your room, you’re forty-seven shades short,” he announced before erupting in a fit of laughter.
Rolling my eyes, I lightly slapped his arm as my face heated with embarrassment. Ever since I’d admitted to him a couple of nights ago that I was intrigued by the thought of using a blindfold in bed, he’d been making Fifty Shades jokes every chance he got. Naturally, when we’d gone to the home improvement store the previous day for things we needed at the house, the abundance of rope, cable ties, and tape provided him an endless amount of opportunities.
Admittedly, most of it was pretty funny, especially since there was not a chance in this lifetime I’d allow him or anyone else to restrain my hands and/or feet. Oliver had opened both my mind and heart up to so many things that I never thought possible for me, but with my past, I didn’t care how much I trusted him—it was a big N-O on the bondage. But the blindfold . . . the blindfold I would consider, because I could remove it myself if I started to get freaked. I needed that control.
“Keep making fun of me and we’ll see who’s laughing tonight when Iron Chef goes to sleep without dinner,” I warned before sticking my tongue out at him.
Doing his best to wrangle in his amusement—but failing miserably—he scooped me up in his arms and kissed me long and hard. My limbs instinctively wrapped around him. “Rizzo, you know I’m just teasing you ‘cause I like you,” he said when we came up for air.
“Mhmm,” I mumbled, pretending to be unconvinced. “‘Cause you like me, huh?”
Oliver caught my lips with his again, this time softer and slower. I clung to him, giving as much as I took. The man could make me forget about the entire world when his mouth was working its Bat Magic, the coarseness of his facial hair mixed with the soft, silkiness of his lips creating the perfect, mind-blowing sensation.
“You know I do a lot more than just like you, right?” he whispered as he tenderly rubbed the tip of his nose in small circles against mine, our eyes locking on one another’s.
My heart skipped a beat, maybe two, before it began thumping wildly in my chest. I couldn’t speak, my tongue a dried up rag in the middle of the desert. “Yeah?” I breathed.
“Yeah, beautiful girl, don’t act like you don’t know.” He grinned wolfishly while tugging on my hair. “But I’m not gonna tell you how much until we’re in the clear. At least with him. I know we don’t know what happens after that, in the future, but we face those hurdles as they arise. Just like in every relationship, there are risks we both have to take, and I’m willing to take every single one of them for you, Monroe, but Colin has to know.”
I nodded my agreement. “I know. And I swear to you once the season is over, which could be as early as four weeks from now, I will tell him. I just couldn’t Sunday with the way he was . . .” Furrowing my brow with annoyed confusion, I asked, “You said you understood?”
“I do understand, and I’m not upset with you. But I just want you to understand what’s keeping me from crossing that next barrier. I’ve given you everything I have but that. It’s all I have to hold on to until you can give me all of you too,” he replied, kissing my forehead until I relaxed it. “There. That’s better.”
Even though I didn’t like his reasoning, there wasn’t much I could say, because in the end, he was right. All I needed to do was talk to Colin and it would be a non-issue. Plus, the longer I carried on with Oliver without telling my husband, the more hurt and upset Colin was going to be once I did. But I really didn’t want to let him down, not when he needed the stability I offered more than ever.
If we could just make it until the season was over—somewhere between four and nine weeks depending on their playoff run—then we could all sit down together and talk about what’s next. Hopefully, that would include me getting to be with Oliver on a permanent basis. I loved him enough to ask Colin for a divorce, but I couldn’t just yet.
“Ollie, you know how I feel too,” I gently nipped at his full bottom lip, “and I’m giving you my word. As soon as football is over, I’ll tell him everyth—”
“Hello? Anybody home? I brought lunch for everyone!” Effie’s voice filtered into the bedroom seconds before she appeared in the doorway.
Somehow, Oliver managed to lower me back to the floor and we both turned to face the paint swatches in just the nick of time. Well, I hoped it was in time. We must’ve been so absorbed in our own conversation that we didn’t hear the alarm chime when she came in the front door, and it was only by sheer luck that she called out at all. I didn’t want to think about if she hadn’t.
“Hey, Effie!” I spun around to greet her, hoping she didn’t hear the shakiness in my voice. “Oliver just came in to help me choose a paint color. I could use your opinion too. What do you think of these three?”
Distract and redirect. Distract and redirect. My training as a therapist kicked in immediately, and all I wanted to do was to make her think and talk about anything but discovering me and Oliver in the middle of a tense conversation.
“My choice is definitely the elephant one,” Oliver announced matter-of-factly then turned to smile at Effie. “And yes, food! I knew I liked you, pixie girl. Let’s go set it up downstairs in the kitchen. I’ll help you.”
Swooning at Oliver and giggling like a school-girl, Effie floated on Cloud Nine right out of the room. I may or may not have snarled in her direction.
“No need to channel your inner Poison Ivy, beautiful,” Oliver chuckled, swiping his thumb across my cheek. “I only see you.”
After he followed her downstairs to help with lunch, I was left alone, staring at those damn gray squares on the wall, and the only thing I could think about was where I could buy a blindfold.
“She doesn’t see what I see.
To her, she is imperfection.
She is dust on pages of torn
books and broken hands on clocks
that used to spin in lovers
homes. To me, she is perfection.
She is the sun the moment it is
washed by the sea
and the children’s heartbeat
the moment
it explodes from the water
once more.”
–Christopher Poindexter
Oliver
“YOU KNOW, YOU might as well tell me now,” my mom probed, taking a drag off a cigarette, even though she convinced my dad she’d stopped smoking ten years before. “I can wait out here as long as you want, but it’s a helluva lot warmer inside the house.”
As she exhaled, I watched the cloud of smoke dissipate into the frigid, late-night December air just past the porch we sat on. Bundled up like Eskimos with a space heater pointed directly on us, we looked like fools sitting outside watching the snow fall around us, but my mom didn’t care. This was her thing—the porch swing in the backyard. She used it with her kids like a therapist uses a couch with his patients. We knew when we were summoned there, we were about to be grilled with tough questions, and after the interrogation, we’d receive a valuable piece of Mom-advice that we didn’t usually want to hear, but always needed to hear.
Mom did not fuck around in the swing. If I was acting like a little shit, she had no problem slapping me upside the head and telling me I was acting like a little shit. And when I was about thirteen or fourteen, I spent way too many nights on the swing being told just that. Thankfully, at thirty-three, I’d grown out of the swing sessions . . . or so I’d thought until that night after Christmas dinner—once my older sisters had packed their families up and gone home, my dad had gone to bed, and Charlotte and Camille left for an impromptu late movie—when my mom knocked on the door of my childhood bedroom, where I was texting with Monroe, and told me to meet her outside in ten minutes. I knew then I was in trouble.
“There’s nothing else to tell, Mom. I’m not sure what you want me to say,” I
played stupid again, hoping she’d miraculously drop the whole conversation.
“Oliver Bradley Saxon, you may make six figures, live in a swanky high-rise, and have some fancy string of letters behind your name, but I am still the woman who gave birth to you, and I can tell when my son is in love!” she roared, her eyes wide and full of intensity. “From the minute you got here a couple of days ago, you’ve been walking around in this fog with a stupid-ass grin on your face that only gets bigger when you check your phone every other minute. I thought you were acting a little funny at Thanksgiving, always disappearing at the most random times, but then I was worried the deviled eggs had upset your tummy, so I didn’t want to say anything. But now . . . now you may as well be wearing a blinking neon that says, ‘Idiot in love.’”
“Mother, I’m a grown-ass man,” I retorted. “Grown-ass men have stomachs, not tummies. Grown-ass men also do not need to report the status of their love life to their parents until a relationship develops that warrants that discussion.”
“So there is someone!” she screeches, clapping her hands together. “I knew it! I knew it! I knew it!”
Sighing, I dropped my face into my leather gloves and shook my head. Why did I even say anything?
“What’s her name? Can you at least tell me that?” Scooting closer to me on the swing, she hooked our elbows and kissed my cheek. “You have no idea how happy this makes me, Ollie. When all of your friends started getting married and beginning their own families and you didn’t show any interest, I worried that because you grew up with so many females in the house that you would never settle down, knowing how crazy we can all be. I mean, even your friend Danny, who I thought would be single forever, finally shacked up with that Mo girl who’d been busting his balls since you guys were kids.”
She paused to take another drag from her cigarette then continued her rambling. “So tell me more. What does she do? Is she beautiful? Wait, don’t answer that. Of course she’s beautiful. You’ve always had a selective eye. How old is she? Does she live in Boston? I knew there was a reason you were supposed to go on this trip. Wh—”