“Is he always that confrontational with you?” Ryker watches as I dry my tears. He let me cry for a good half-hour, leading me over to the couch after a few minutes and letting me cry all over his clothes.
“No,” I shake my head, “but I’ve never caught him cheating or left him before. Thanks for not punching him,” I snicker, staring at my skirt, “I don’t mean to imply that you wanted to, but—”
“Oh, I wanted to,” he chuckles as he stretches his arms across the back of the couch, “I wanted to tear his goddamn throat out, to be honest. But, that wouldn’t have really helped either one of us, now would it?” He smiles that sexy, confident smile that lured me to him on the Amherst common twelve years ago.
I can’t believe I don’t feel like cutting right now. I know I’m going to want to, probably as soon as he leaves, but I don’t want to right now. Maybe that’s why I’m not ready for him to go just yet; I don’t want to want to cut. I just know that it’s going to be there, waiting like a rusted-out truck sitting at the end of someone’s driveway.
“It was an accident,” I start without his prompting. “My last year of grad school and I get fucking pregnant . . .”
Ryker gets up and walks to the fridge, grabs two beers, and sits back down, handing me one.
“Thanks,” I laugh. “Anyway, yeah . . . just imagine for a moment, if you will, the look on my mother’s face.” He laughs a little, and so do I. “I wanted an abortion. Immediately.”
Ryker picks at his beer label then looks at me. “You did?”
“I did. It wasn’t really even a thought to do anything else. Eric lost his shit, though. Not in the way you witnessed this evening . . . just . . .” I swallow hard.
“It’s okay, Nat.”
“Max and Oliver are their names. They’ll be five next month and are starting kindergarten in the fall.” After a few seconds of silence, I move on. “I was going to leave him, before the affair . . . Tosha has told me forever that I could stay here.”
Ryker sets his beer on the coffee table. “She doesn’t like him?”
“No. Never really has. Thinks he’s pretentious.” That makes Ryker laugh.
I spend the next few minutes telling Ryker about Eric’s borderline insistence that we get married before the babies were born, and my concession for everyone’s sake but my own. He looks extra uncomfortable during the discussion about me leaving my Ph.D. program, because he’s a human being and knows how hard it was for me to do that.
“I honestly could probably move on from the affair, if that was all it was. That’s a lie,” I admit in the next breath. “Anyway, my resentment and pure contempt for him and everything he represents runs so deep, there’s just no recovering. The affair just . . .”
“Compounds it,” Ryker finishes, looking down at the table.
“Yeah. And with Ollie going deaf, I—”
“What?”
“Oh,” I sigh, “I didn’t get there yet, I guess. He has a degenerative nerve thing that’s going to make him deaf, slowly. We found out about that like two weeks ago.”
“Shit, Nat . . . I’m so sorry.” Ryker holds out his hand and I tuck mine into his. After a quick squeeze, we separate them.
I explain to Ryker all I know about Oliver’s condition and our plans for him to go to the Clarke School.
“Anyway, to actually answer your question from a few hours ago, I started cutting again a few weeks ago. I was just in this pressure cooker. I thought about the first time I’d cut, then started thinking about you for the first time in a long time . . . and everything with Eric . . .” Needing to change the subject, I shift and look at him in the eyes. “So, why’d you stay in Wyoming for so long?”
Ryker lets out a huge breath, puffing out both his cheeks. “Well, I did well for a while. I made it through probation and through seeing you at your graduation without any major fuck-ups.” He squirms a little and moves to put his elbows on his thighs. “Then, I slipped back into painkillers.” My heart hurts as I watch his face pinch at the memory. “The alcohol hadn’t really ever stopped, I just got good at controlling it when I needed to. I’d been working