Молли Харпер - And One Last Thing...

I stayed in the water for the sake of cover, blushing as I tried to explain. “Well, I didn’t count on you jumping in fully clothed and trying to drown me.”

“I wasn’t trying to drown you. I was trying to stop you!”

“Stop me from what?”

“From killing yourself!” he shouted.

“I’m not trying to kill myself! I’m just… It was too hot to sleep.” I finished lamely.

“Well, of all the stupid -” He grunted as he pushed himself to his feet. “Swimming alone at night? Do you have any idea what could have happened to you?”

“My neighbor could jump in and try to kill me?” I snarked.

“Look, I know you’re going through some emotionally traumatic thing right now, but I don’t have time for this shit,” he snarled. “I’m not going to be the guy who swoops in and saves you from yourself. I don’t want your Bundt cake or your lasagna or whatever you used to make for your husband that he never appreciated. I won’t be the guy who helps you get your groove back or whatever you think I’m going to do to nurse you back to health before releasing you into the wild. I don’t want to spend time with you. I don’t want to get to know you better. I am not interested in you. So the next time you’re feeling like doing something like this - don’t. All right?”

Cursing under his breath, Mr. Monroe turned on his heel and stalked up the dock. My natural tendency when faced with this sort of open hostility - well, I don’t know what that would be because I’d never faced this sort of open hostility. Nevertheless, I launched myself up the ladder and stomped after him. The limp slowed him down, which meant I was able to easily overtake him.

“Hey! Hey!” I yelled, slapping at the back of his shoulder. Carried by my own pissed-off momentum, I narrowly avoided crashing into him when he stopped.

“I don’t know who the hell you think you are or where you got such a damn high opinion of yourself, Mr. Aloof Brooding Loner Man. But maybe you should, just for a moment, consider the fact that I’m not interested in you. I didn’t come up here trolling for a rebound man. I didn’t come up here looking for anything but a place to hide. I am in exile, you ass. I was humiliated by a husband who couldn’t keep his dick in his pants and then I overreacted, just a little bit, in an extremely public way.” Monroe’s lips twitched, even if his eyes were still glaring with unexpressed urges to throttle me. “I have no interest in replacing one untrustworthy male appendage for another. In fact, if I had known there was a penis within a five-mile radius of this cabin, I wouldn’t have come up here. But I did and now you’re just going to have to live with it. But when you go to sleep tonight, comfort yourself in the absolute certainty that I have no interest in you, or the emotional baggage you’re obviously toting around with you… and I’m still naked, aren’t I?”

Monroe looked down and nodded, the barest hint of a smile quirking his lips.

“Shit.” I muttered. I didn’t have so much as a towel to cover myself with, so I did my own heel turn and stalked up to the cabin. I could only hope my ass wasn’t jiggling, which really would have capped the humiliation of the evening.

“Just so we’re clear, we have established that we’re not interested in each other, right?” he called after me. I could hear the barely contained laughter tightening his voice.

“Oh, fuck off!” I yelled, not bothering to look back at him.

The good news was that my being angry at Monroe gave me a break from being angry at Mike. It was like my ears had been ringing for weeks and suddenly it had stopped. I showered, using well water to wash lake water out of my hair, which had never made sense to me. I shampooed in anger, which is never smart as you tend to go through about half a bottle of Paul Mitchell before you realize what you’re doing. I dragged on some pajamas and pulled out my laptop bag.

I sighed, staring at the blank Word document. Samantha had asked me to come up with some thoughts on the breakdown of my marriage to Mike. She said it would help her come up with the best plan of attack for divorce court. But I sat there, mocked by the blinking cursor, and couldn’t come up with anything to say. After what happened with the newsletter, I was almost afraid to write anything. Where to start? When did my marriage start to decline?

If I was honest with myself, I typed, I would say my marriage probably started to decline before it started. About three days before we got married, I woke up in a cold sweat. I marched into my parents’ room and was about to tell them I couldn’t marry Mike. We weren’t right for each other. I wasn’t ready to get married yet. There were too many things I still wanted to do. I opened my mouth and got as far as “I can’t” when I saw my father’s face. Whatever I was about to say, he didn’t want to hear. As usual, he only wanted to hear “happy thoughts” from his youngest child. So I bit my lip. I said, “I can’t find my address book for thank-you notes. Have you seen it?” And I backed out of the room with a lead weight in my stomach.

The morning of our wedding, I woke up and vomited. And then vomited again. And part of me hoped that I was pregnant so I would have a good reason for going through with the wedding.

It turned out to be nerves.

I wrote about the pressure I felt from our families to stay with Mike, about my own feelings of obligation to Mike after being with him for so long. I wrote about losing the job opportunity at the newspaper, the shame I felt in letting myself get talked out of working, how useless I felt staying home, and how lost I was

with no expectation of how I would spend every day. I wrote about how I’d networked and entertained and worked parttime in Mike’s office during tax season. And yes, how I wrote his monthly newsletter.

It felt like automatic writing, like some filter-impaired spirit had taken over my typing fingers. I wrote about the first time I realized that Mike’s dad was a jackass and it was likely that Mike was going to turn out just like him. About getting conception advice from eighty-year-old Margaret Mason, a fellow church member who’d decided that “enough was enough” and it was time for us to have a baby. I wrote until my fingers hurt and the space between my shoulder blades began to ache. My eyes were grainy and tired. I felt hollowed out. Nothing. No anger, no anxiety. Just empty and tired. I’d lost track of time… and had written almost fifteen pages. And I hadn’t even gotten to the “Mike’s a cheating bastard” period of our marriage.

I ran a hand over my face and saved my document. I wasn’t sure how useful it would be to Samantha, but writing it made me feel… lighter. It was easier to move, like my joints had been unlocked. I stood, stretched high, and yawned. I looked at the little double bed in the “master bedroom” with the old purple patchwork quilt. It actually looked inviting. I stretched across the top of the blankets, keeping carefully to my usual side of the bed, the left, before I realized that I didn’t have to share. If I wanted to sleep lengthwise, I could. Experimentally, I slid my feet onto the right side, stretching in a long line, enjoying the luxury of unlimited legroom. I sighed, switched off the little bedside lamp, and wondered what I would write the next day.

I woke up to a pitch-black room. I panicked for a moment, unsure of where I was or whose bed I was in. It was still an adjustment to sleep alone, even though Mike wasn’t exactly an exciting presence in the bedroom, when he was there. And it was a comfort to have his warm weight balancing the mattress. Once you get used to that, trying to sleep alone feels like you’ve forgotten something. You lie there and wonder whether you left the front door unlocked or the stove on and then you realize, oh, there’s supposed to be another person in my bed.