Молли Харпер - And One Last Thing...

I felt a panic akin to claustrophobia. I wasn’t ready to be anyone’s girlfriend. Even though I was having the tender, green beginnings of those feelings toward Monroe, I wasn’t ready to love someone else. I couldn’t think about him in the long-term, whether it was a month from now or a year from now. I just wanted a simple, uncomplicated relationship with my companionable, sexy neighbor. And if he became more than that, a sweet guy with smartass brothers and a tragically feminine first name, I wouldn’t be able to manage it. I recognized that these were selfish, shallow thoughts, but I also recognized that they were true. And I wasn’t going to be getting around them any time soon.

I needed to leave, to run, to get back to my own space and breathe for a little bit. But I wouldn’t embarrass Monroe in front of his family, not because I wanted to keep up appearances, but because it would hurt him. So I released my death grip on the table, smiled at his mother, and started clearing dishes.

“How about we leave those until after the first round of Trivial Pursuit?” she suggested. “Maybe we can keep them from beating each other bloody over the Sports and Leisure questions.”

“I don’t make any guarantees,” I told her. “I fight like a girl.”

“And I can’t tell you how nice it is to have another girl around,” she said, putting her hand on my shoulder as we joined the boys at the coffee table. When Monroe looked up at me with that content expression, mixed with familial exasperation, I couldn’t help feel a twinge in my stomach that had nothing to do with overeating.

I was stuck.

I was lounging in my hammock, enjoying what would probably be the last tolerably warm day before the temperatures took a dive toward winter. I was reading over some of Monroe’s notes on my chapters. He’d drawn little smiley faces next to the lines he thought were funny and written “ew!” next to the particularly bloody scenes, which I found to be very helpful. He also wrote “bowchikawawa” next to a particularly well-written flashback love scene, which made me giggle.

When Monroe’s family had departed the week before, I’d scrambled to find some sort of personal equilibrium. If he was hurt that I basically shut myself up in my cabin and didn’t come out for three days, he didn’t say anything. I told him I was writing, that I’d hit a groove, and he gave me this understanding smile that made feel that much worse. I knew it was a jerk move. It was something a guy, something Mike, would do. But I had to feel like I had some control, independence. And he seemed so pleased when I showed up with pages and pages of new material to critique. It helped me feel like things were getting back to normal, or at least our version of normal.

Given that I didn’t have a job and spent every spare minute at my laptop, it wasn’t a surprise that I was rounding the corner toward the last third of the book. The problem was I had no idea how it was going to end. On one hand, I wanted to give Laurie a happy ending because, let’s face it, I wanted a happy ending for myself. But did that mean helping Laurie find love? If anything, I’d learned that a relationship doesn’t necessarily mean permanent happiness. And every time I sat down to try to suss it out, or just make notes about possible endings, I froze.

And, yes, I recognized that finishing the book meant proofreading, editing, and the very scary agent search, so the fear of failure was a rather large brick in the wall that seemed to have built itself inside my head. I’d hoped that maybe seeing some encouraging notes from Monroe would help, but mostly it just made me feel guilty for not writing.

When I heard a car door slam, I assumed it was my favorite grumpy crime writer returning with the ingredients for Margarita ‘n’ Fajita Night.

I didn’t bother looking up from my manuscript as I heard footsteps approach. “Just let me finish this thought and then I’m all yours for the night.”

“Sounds good to me.”

I flinched. That was not Monroe’s voice.

I looked up to see my soon-to-be ex-husband smirking down at me. I scrambled to sit up, nearly spinning myself out of the hammock. “Mike! What the hell are you doing here?”

Mike advanced, his hand outstretched to help me stand. “A man can’t visit his wife at his own lake house?”

I slapped his hands away and righted myself. “I’m not your wife and this isn’t your lake house, jackass. You have a house. You live there, with your secretary, remember?”

It’s very difficult to appear dignified while teetering on the edge of a hammock. I swayed there, trying to maintain my seat and a level gaze with Mike. At the mention of our home, Mike’s face softened. He looked tired, older and tired. There were circles under his eyes and the slightest hint of expression lines around his mouth. “You look great… just great. You’ve done something new with your hair. It’s -”

“Spare me,” I told him. “You’ve got about five seconds to tell me what you’re doing here before I go inside and call my lawyer or animal control or whatever it takes to tranq-gun your ass.”

Mike gave a sad little smile. “You’re not going to make it easy on me, are you?”

“I stopped making things easy for you a while ago. How’s that working out for you?”

“I made a mistake with Beebee,” Mike admitted, scooting a white plastic lawn chair over to sit in front of me. “It’s just not working out the way I thought it would.”

“So you were thinking you could just replace me with another woman without any snags or inconveniences?”

Mike shrugged, managing to look the slightest bit guilty. “Well.”

When he saw the expression on my face, he said, “I wasn’t thinking! I - I made a mistake. I went through a selfish phase and I didn’t think it through. And I’m man enough to admit it. After all our years together, I think you owe it to me to recognize that and give us another chance.”

In the eternity between those words reaching my ears and my tongue’s productions of the words “hell” and “no,” the thought that kept bouncing around in my head was, “His mama probably wrote that speech for him.” Instead of saying so, I laughed my ass off.

“Are you kidding me?” I threw my hands up, making Mike take a step back.

“Lacey, please. She doesn’t get any of my jokes,” Mike said, his brown eyes as sad and lost as a homesick kindergartner. “She hates action movies. I can’t take her to Scrabble night over at Tina and John’s because she hates board games. Anyway, Tina and John stopped inviting me because the wives don’t like Beebee. I took her to a dinner party at the McClarens’. She went on and on about some lemon juice and cayenne pepper thing that would help Jolene McClaren ‘take all that extra weight off.”

Amos McClaren was one of Mike’s biggest corporate clients and his wife, Jolene, was very sensitive about her weight. I bit my lip to keep from laughing, because laughing would bring Mike to his senses and make the funny stories stop.

“I’m lonely,” Mike said. “I miss telling you about my day. I miss you scratching my back before I go to sleep. I miss the way you turned the toast over so the sides with the butter faced each other. I wasn’t thinking. I just - I shouldn’t have treated you like that. And I just want to go back to way things used to be, Lace. I want you to come home. I was blind, Lace. I took you for granted. And Beebee made me - I mean, the sex was -”

“I don’t want to hear about it!” I cried.

Mike threw up his hands, whether it was a conversational gesture or an effort to shield his face from oncoming blows, I had no idea. “I’m just saying, that’s all it was, sex. I can’t make a life with Beebee. Not the kind of life I had with you. If you want to come back, the door’s open.”