Blush - Jamie Brenner Page 0,97

feel this way again. Maybe about someone at school. It won’t be as complicated as things are here. And you have to go back next semester anyway. Try to see the positive in this: the good moments you had with him are something you will always remember. And the next time you experience this, it will hopefully last longer. I was only a few years older than you when I met your father.”

Someone knocked on the door. Sadie jumped up.

“Do you think it’s Gran?” she whispered. “I don’t want to see her. I’m a mess.”

“I’ll handle it,” Leah said, moving to the door. She opened it a hair. It wasn’t her mother; it was Bridget.

“Oh, Leah—I was looking for you. Can you talk?”

“I thought you were in the city tonight.”

“Yeah, well—I’m back. And I need to talk to you.”

Leah had wondered if Asher had told her that they should take time apart after all. But she could only deal with one crisis of the heart at a time.

“Now’s not a great time, Bridget. Tomorrow I’ll be up early and we can—”

“Um, I think now is better.”

Leah glanced back at Sadie, who was waving her hand like, Not in here. Leah stepped out into the hall. “Bridget, look—Asher is under a lot of stress. Don’t take anything he says right now too seriously. He cares about you.”

“Thanks, Leah. I appreciate that. But I didn’t come back from the city tonight to talk about my relationship. I came to talk about yours.”

Leah wasn’t following. Her relationship?

“I saw Steven on my way to dinner,” Bridget said.

“Really?” They hadn’t spoken since earlier that day. It was odd that he hadn’t at least texted her that he’d seen Bridget. “He didn’t mention it.”

“That’s because he didn’t notice me.”

“And you didn’t say hi?”

Bridget hesitated a beat—just long enough for Leah to sense that whatever was coming, it wasn’t good.

“Leah, he wasn’t alone. He was with a woman. A beautiful woman.”

Forty-four

Leah was on the road by five in the morning to catch Steven before he opened the shop. She drove through the darkness with the line from Scruples running a loop in her mind: Who can teach you about the times when the well of love seems to run almost dry and you just have to keep going on faith?

The gut punch she felt when Bridget told her she’d seen Steven with another woman made it painfully clear that her well of love had not run dry. The threat of losing her husband instantly set her priorities straight: she was going home. If not for the few glasses of wine with dinner, she would have gotten into the car the night before. Instead, she packed her bag and lay awake for hours, mentally rehashing the past few months and wondering when, exactly, her marriage had gone off the rails. With every inch she combed over, she blamed herself more.

Now, as she drove on the Long Island Expressway, the “beautiful woman” Bridget had described took on more dimensions. She must be younger. She could have sex at the drop of a hat—and did. Leah tortured herself by imagining Steven touching this woman the way he touched her, kissing her the way her kissed her.

She could barely wait another moment to see Steven. But she arrived at rush hour, and she was stuck waiting on the street as precious minutes clicked by. By the time she reached the garage underneath their apartment building, her stomach was in knots.

Inside her building, she didn’t bother with the elevator, walking the ten flights to their apartment. Turning the key in the door, she was in a sweat.

Steven, alerted by the sound of the door, met her in the foyer. And then she had a horrific thought: What if he wasn’t alone?

“Leah! Why didn’t you tell me you were coming home?”

Maybe she should have. As much as she wanted to know the truth, she didn’t want to see it walking out of her bedroom.

He was dressed in khaki pants and a navy polo; he’d been so looking forward to not having to wear a suit every day. He’d worked for all these years at a job he didn’t particularly like to provide for their family, and now all he wanted was to retire and spend his days building a business with his wife, and she was denying him that. Oh, and she’d chosen to spend the summer apart. And never wanted to have sex. So—shocker—the man had turned elsewhere.

He walked over to hug