Feels Like Falling - Kristy Woodson Harvey Page 0,9

toward the tennis courts. “What the hell was that all about?” she asked.

I rolled my eyes, and we made our way toward the beach for one of the long walks that comprised our summer exercise routine. There was nothing I looked forward to more than the sand under my feet, the surf splashing around my ankles. “Wagner’s tennis pro asked me out for a drink, but I think he must have been kidding. You know, doing it for effect because Brooke was standing there being Brooke.”

Marcy stopped, her hand frozen to the top of the pool gate. “Wait. Brooke was standing there?”

I smiled. “Yeah. It was kind of awesome.”

“Gray, the hot tennis pro wants to date you. When God gives, you take. You take and you run and you don’t look back.”

I smiled. I knew logically that my thirty-fifth birthday wouldn’t magically make me old. But I think everyone has a scary age, an age by which they think they are supposed to have it all figured out. For me, it was always thirty-five. And it wasn’t scary for a long, long time because I had it all together. And now, only months before my scary age, my perfectly choreographed life had fallen apart. I was back at square one. Barring a miracle, it didn’t seem like I was going to have it all back together by October.

We walked through the pool deck exchanging waves with the women already lounging there, watching their kids train for swim team. As our feet hit the warm sand, she said, “But don’t you remember it?”

“Remember what?”

“Dating a twenty-five-year-old,” Marcy said wistfully.

I raised my eyebrows at her.

“Oh, right,” she said. “You haven’t been on a date in a hundred years. How do I always forget that?”

I smirked.

“Seedy bars and karaoke, beer pong tournaments and sleeping on the beach just because you can. Meeting new people, kissing without the expectation of anything more, your stomach flip-flopping over whether he’ll text you the next day.…”

“So, not nice dinners followed by 20/20? No neatly hanging your clothes up in the closet and lining your shoes up by the bed before slipping between the pressed sheets trying not to get them wrinkled?”

We both laughed.

To be honest, I had kind of enjoyed the nice dinners and the 20/20. I thought my seventh year of marriage was amazing, blissful even. Wagner was old enough that having a child wasn’t super stressful anymore. Greg was making money, which made him feel like I wasn’t the sole breadwinner. ClickMarket was up 20 percent in the first quarter, and I felt like my meticulously edited staff was the dream team. Our friends were fun. The living was easy.

And then the storm broke. Seven years and eight months into the marriage, and he didn’t love me anymore. They call it the seven-year itch for a reason.

I looked down at my pedicured but unpolished toes, nauseated at the mere thought of dipping them back into the dating pool. I sighed. The cellulite-blasting exercises in my Self.com e-mail that morning ran through my mind. “It has only been sixteen months. That’s not that long.”

“Sixteen months?” Marcy put her finger in her ear and wiggled it around as though she couldn’t possibly be hearing this properly. “Sixteen months? I’ve heard after a year you go into spontaneous menopause. Your reproductive organs give up and you get chin hair and it’s over.”

I couldn’t help but laugh, which was something Marcy had been good for since the day we met. The day my now almost ex-husband, Greg, and I closed on our beach house five years ago, Marcy came by with a measuring cup in her hand.

“You need sugar?” I’d asked.

“No,” she replied. “Vodka.”

I knew right then and there that this girl and I were going to get along just fine.

“Weird that I’ve decided to get married the year you’ve decided to get unmarried,” Marcy said. “You’d probably have way more time for me now.”

I nearly choked. “What? You didn’t tell me you met someone!”

She waved her hand as if that was a small detail. “Oh, I haven’t. But I’ve decided I need to get married this year so I can have two kids before I’m thirty-six.”

“Why thirty-six?”

She shrugged. “Just what has always been in my head.”

I was getting ready to say how impractical that seemed. But Marcy, with legs up to her neck, her perky strawberry-blond ponytail, and not even a sign that a wrinkle was planning to visit her face, would probably find a husband in record