I took a deep breath, and then ran for it.
Scott yanked open the door and stood on the step. His body filled the doorway, and the light spilled out around him.
“All soaking wet and on my doorstep,” he drawled. “To what do I owe the honor?”
“It’s actually still raining,” I pointed out. “Can I come in or do you want to mock me some more?”
“You can come in,” Scott said, with a flicker of his usual mischief. “But I don’t think it’s an either/or situation.”
He stepped back and I pushed past him into his living room, deliberately avoiding looking at the stairs that led up to his bedroom. It had been a long night, that night. It was better not to think about it, or the fact that tonight he was half naked and when he’d opened the door I’d almost swallowed my tongue.
“I was working out,” Scott said. “I can put on a T-shirt if you’re going to go all coy and keep staring at my feet.”
“I didn’t even notice,” I sniffed, and looked directly at him.
“Liar.”
“You’re setting a new record in antagonism.”
“Must be a knee-jerk reaction to seeing the person I’m sleeping with suck face with some blond guy on a public street,” Scott replied in a silky sort of tone, which I didn’t mistake for anything but furious. “I’ll try to work on that.”
“That was Travis.”
“Oh, good. At least there’s only the two of us.”
He had the television on in the background. The rain was still pounding against the side of the house, and I could hear the traffic swishing past on the street outside. I still didn’t know what to say. Scott’s eyes were cool and compelling and I felt far too vulnerable.
“I’m going back to Atlanta,” I announced, finally.
Scott let out a breath, and looked away for the first time. His hands rested on his hips and one of them clenched into a fist. But his voice was even.
“When?”
“Tonight. When we—when I leave here.”
Scott looked at me. Expressionless. “Have a safe flight.”
I rolled my eyes over the sharp sting of that.
“Fine.” I headed for the door. “I don’t know why I bothered.”
“Neither do I,” Scott snapped. “What am I supposed to say? ‘Please, don’t go’? Would it get you to stay?” His voice was angry.
“My life is in Atlanta!” I exclaimed. “Not in my parents’ house. Not in this town. Not—” I broke off.
“I get it.”
“Scott. Listen. I never—”
“Why did you come here?” he demanded. “To say good-bye? To let me down easy? I kind of got the picture when I saw you and Southern Comfort. Don’t be so conceited, Meredith.”
“God!” I whispered fiercely. “You make me so angry!”
He made a small sound, and then:
“I realize that I started this whole thing, so I have no one to blame but myself, but I fucking hate that you’re leaving, and I hate that you’re going back to your life, and I really hate that guy, and you, Meredith—” He stopped abruptly. “It was a lot easier,” he continued quietly, “when I just hated you.”
“I’m sorry,” I whispered, because I didn’t know what else to say, and I thought it might keep me from crying.
“So am I,” he said.
I realized there were already tears wet against my cheeks. I backed away from him, and then forced myself to run.
As Hope pulled out into traffic, I couldn’t help but turn back to look out the window.
Scott stood there in his doorway, watching me disappear.
Chapter 12
Every day, I woke to the alarm at six, hit snooze once, and got up at nine minutes past the hour. I turned on the coffee maker on my way into the shower, and poured myself and Travis a cup when I got out at six-twenty. I delivered Travis his coffee in the bedroom, where he was just swinging to an upright position, and started dressing when he went to use the shower and shave.
Dressed, I ate breakfast (cold cereal with a banana, toast, or a bagel with orange juice) and then dealt with my hair and makeup once the bathroom mirror cleared. At seven-fifteen, Travis left the house. At seven-thirty, I got into my car and began my daily commute—a solid half-hour of traffic from our apartment in Virginia Highlands to the Morrow School in Decatur.
At work, I kept a tidy desk and dealt with various chores: the latest mailing, alumnae calls, development meetings. All these required a ready smile and a certain chirpy confidence I produced by rote. At exactly five o’clock, I left the office and retraced my commute to the Highlands, which often took longer. I spoke to Travis on my cell phone and discussed dinner plans. Often, I stopped at the Kroger and bought something, or restocked Travis’s beer, or ran other errands for us. By seven at the latest, I was home, and usually either had dinner ready around eight or we went out around eight, which was when Travis generally made it home.
Some nights, Travis met friends out for drinks. If the other girls were there, I would also attend; if it was just the boys, I watched television without having to fight over the remote control or suffer through SportsCenter. We were usually in bed by eleven-thirty, where we would negotiate having sex. When we had it, it was at Travis’s initiation.
On the weekends Travis liked to go out, and so we did, with his large group of friends. There were parties, certain bars, dinners, and the same people. There were more negotiations about sex. We usually did our big shopping on Saturday, and Travis played football with the boys on Sunday while I met the girls for brunch. Sunday evening we had dinner at Travis’s parents’ house, and Sunday night we watched HBO together, and prepared for the week ahead.
The weather was good and the people were cheerful. It was sweet and easy.
It was the perfect life.
I was so depressed I thought I might drown in it.
“Your lip gets any lower and it might hit the floor,” Travis said.
He was using his joking voice, but I could hear the exasperation behind it. I looked up at him.
“I’m not pouting, Travis.” I tried to speak without snapping, but wasn’t very successful. “I’m not three years old.”
It was his old roommate Jason’s thirty-first birthday party. The little house in Midtown was filled to bursting, people spilling out onto the back deck and the small backyard. I had taken up residence inside, on one of the sofas in the back study. I was watching something on television, some movie I couldn’t identify and hadn’t even turned on myself. A woman screamed into the wind. I had no idea what was bothering her, but still, I felt I could relate.
Travis plopped down next to me, making me roll across the soft cushions into him. Annoyed, I straightened immediately.
“What’s going on with you?” he asked. “I don’t think I’ve seen you crack a smile in I don’t know how long. You going to share it with me or is this something I’m supposed to figure out on my own?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said woodenly.
“You do. Our apartment suddenly looks like a bomb hit it, and most days I think you might take a swing at me if I look at you funny.”
“I don’t know when you got the idea that all the cleaning was my responsibility.” I no longer bothered to keep the snap from my voice. “That’s not fair, is it?”
“I got the idea over the entire course of our relationship,” Travis replied at once. “You never let me so much as fold a piece of laundry, even before we started living together.”
“Well, things change.”
“I can see that.”
Travis reached over and turned the television off with the remote control, so I could either stare sulkily at the floor or look at him. I opted for looking at him like a grown-up—but it was a close call.
“Why are we having this conversation here?” I asked.
“If things have changed between us,” Travis said very seriously, “then I think I need to have some say in it. I’m still one hal
f of us, as far as I know.”
I looked at him and wanted, somewhere inside, to be able to reach out and say whatever right words I had known once. I wanted to soothe him.
But I couldn’t do it.
“I’m a little depressed lately, yes,” I said after a long silence. “I don’t know why you think it has to be some big thing. Or why we have to talk about this now.”
“Meredith, you’re hiding in the back of the house. Everyone thinks you’re either pregnant or drunk.” He cracked a grin. “And you better be drunk, is what I keep saying.”
I sighed. “I’m not hiding. I’ve been at every single birthday party Jason Westbrook has thrown since I moved to Atlanta. I don’t think he’s really going to care if I don’t feel like the life of the party this time around.”
“Come on, Meredith . . .”
“I’m perfectly happy just sitting here,” I told him. “You go on and enjoy yourself. I’m driving, anyway.”
He made one last attempt to draw me into the spirit of the festivities, but I didn’t budge, and he headed for the door—not without a heavy sigh I pretended not to hear.
I didn’t know what was wrong with me.
My plan had been to dive back into the comfort of my real life in Atlanta and never once look back. I chalked up the confusion and chaos of the previous six weeks to hometown madness. Maybe it was only to be expected when you returned to the scene of your childhood. There were hundreds of miles between me and my hometown now, which I knew because I’d stared down at every single inch of land that separated me from my past, putting it all behind me as the plane flew south. But my “real life” wasn’t going according to plan.
Instead of feeling motivated by my guilt to make things better with Travis, to make it perfect again the way it used to be, I thought that the guilt was eating me alive. Or poisoning me. It wasn’t making me love him more, lucky as I was to have him. It was making me hate him.
Things got worse that Sunday, when I decided I would much rather sleep in than make another command appearance at brunch with the girls.
Travis refused to understand. The situation escalated quickly.
“These are our friends, Meredith! You can’t just back out at the last minute!”
“Because why, exactly? They might have a seating plan for brunch? I just want to sleep, Travis. I’m tired.” I pulled the covers up around my neck.
“Is that a dig because I wanted to stay out last night? Because you said it was fine with you, and that’s about the only thing you said all night!”
“I’m just tired!” I moaned at the ceiling. “Can’t I be tired? Does it have to be about you?”
“You’re not going to stay in bed all day. If you don’t want to go to brunch, there’s about a million things you can do around here.” He finished tying up his sneakers. “Are you listening to me?”
I flipped back the covers and looked at him. “Did you just tell me to get my lazy ass out of bed and clean this apartment?”
“I didn’t say that.”
“But that’s what you meant?”
Travis stared at me. A muscle in his jaw bulged. Then his frustration took over.
“What is wrong with you? Why is everything so goddamned difficult these days? This is our life, Meredith! You never had a problem with it before!”
“Well, I have a problem with it now!” I yelled back. “Have you noticed that our life is actually your life? Why would you want to be with someone who doesn’t exist outside of her role as your girlfriend?”
He made an inarticulate sound of frustration. A loud one.
“I don’t even know what you’re talking about!” Travis shouted. “Living with you is like Invasion of the Body Snatchers! We barely have sex anymore, you don’t care about anything, and you’re mad at me because you want friends?”
“I’m not going to fucking brunch!” I screamed at him.
Travis made as if to storm out of the apartment, but turned back before he made it to the door.
“You better get a handle on this,” he told me from across the living room, his face red and angry. “I’m not kidding around, Meredith. I’m not going to live like this.”
I didn’t answer, and he kicked an old newspaper across the living room floor. I watched it hit the wall and flutter, and didn’t flinch when Travis slammed the door on his way out.
The apartment was dizzy with the sudden silence.
I thought, This has to stop.
“You’re hardly the first person in the history of the world to behave hideously to cause him to break up with you,” Hope said matter-of-factly.
“I don’t think that’s what I’m doing,” I said.
I had moved to the couch, and had wrapped myself in the comforter to huddle in the air-conditioning.
“Okay,” Hope said. “Then what are you doing? Because I think you said that before now, you guys never fought about anything. Ever.”
“It’s not that we never fought.” I considered. “It’s that I never really fought. I mean, there might have been a sentence or two about whatever, and then I would smooth it over. But now, suddenly, I’m screaming at him?”
“Let me tell you something, Meredith.” Hope sounded grim. “Anyone who got in my face about cleaning an apartment we both lived in would find himself kicked to the curb in about thirteen seconds.”
“No.” I sighed. “He’s right.”
“I hate to break this to you, but we’re in a whole new millennium and have been for a few years now. Women have the vote, the Pill, and the right to share the housework. I know you live in the South, but come on.” She sounded disgusted.
“He’s right,” I repeated, “because that was the way our relationship was from the start. I did all that stuff. If I want things to change, I can’t just decide to change them alone and then get mad at him because he isn’t psychically tuned to my every decision.”
“I know we’re different people,” Hope said. She sighed. “But I don’t understand why anyone would want to be in a relationship that was trying to re-create the fifties. If they were so great, we would never have had the sixties. Or, God help us, the seventies—”
“I have to tell him.” It burst out of me. “I have to tell him and I have to be prepared to deal with the consequences. He’s right—we can’t live this way. It’s awful.”
Hope was quiet for a long stretch, and I heard her turn over in her bed.
“I think you should think about breaking up with him,” she said finally. “But I’m not sure why you’d want to tell him you cheated on him, after the fact. It seems like maybe you kind of want to force him to break up with you by throwing that in his face.” She yawned. “Maybe you want him to know that you’re the bad guy.”
“I am the bad guy,” I replied with way too much self-pity. “The sooner I face that, the better.”
There was a pause.
“Okay, Mom,” Hope said with disgust. “Let me FedEx you a cross to hang from in your living room. Can you hear yourself?”
Travis didn’t come home until late that night. He crawled into the bed and we lay there in silence. Although I hadn’t moved or greeted him, I knew he could tell that I was awake.
“We have to talk,” he said finally.
“Fine,” I agreed, without turning over to face him.
“But not now.” I heard him settle into his pillows. “Not tonight.”
Travis was already home when I got in the next evening, which was my first clue that things were much worse than I’d thought. He sat on the couch in the late-afternoon shadows and hardly looked at me.
“I don’t know how to say this,” he said in a quiet voice. “I feel like a complete shit, like I’m abandoning you in your time of need, and maybe I am. Part of me thinks I should just weather this through, see what happens.” He shook his head. “I’m sorry, but I can’t do it. I don’t know what that makes me.”
I had seated myself across from him in the armchair, which felt unnatural and awkward, and I
let his words sink in. They took a long time to settle. I concentrated instead on the armchair, which I’d always hated. It had been a gift from his mother. Maybe it had been a sign.
I blinked. It hit me.
“Are you breaking up with me?” I asked in sudden, complete surprise.
“I think we need a break,” Travis said. Avoiding it.
“A break.”
“Nothing permanent or dramatic,” he continued hurriedly. “I love you, Meredith, but what are we doing? I feel like lately we’ve just been bringing out the worst in each other. Don’t you?”
“A break.”
“I don’t want to be this angry with you. It scares me.” Travis kept his eyes trained on his hands, which were fidgeting with a magazine on the coffee table. “I don’t know who you are anymore.”
“So—” I cleared my throat. I felt strangely removed from the conversation. I shook my head. “Wow.”
“You’ve been a stranger since you came back,” he said, looking at me directly for the first time. “But it’s not just that. Before, when I visited you, it was like you didn’t even want me there. I barely recognized you. I understand you were having a family crisis, but even before that, things were just . . . stale. We’ve been in a rut.”
“A rut which, in April, you told me you thought would lead to an engagement by October,” I pointed out, not without some bite.
“Fine,” Travis agreed. “The summer was bad, Meredith. I don’t think we missed each other much. Not the way we should have. Are you going to say you did?”
“Is there someone else?” I asked far too politely, and then thought: You unbelievable hypocrite.
“No,” Travis said at once. “I would never do that to you.”
I looked at him, those bright blue eyes and the blond hair, and believed him. There was probably a prospect or two in the wings, but Travis was a decent guy. He wouldn’t cheat.
There was a small silence. I noticed he didn’t even think to ask me the same question. It made me want to cry.
“I’m going to go and stay at my parents’ house,” Travis said quietly. “But I’ll still pay rent, of course, until you figure out what you’re going to do.”