She and Will had been running a gauntlet from their first moment together. At first they’d been driven by teenage emotion and hormones. Then it had been fear.
Then it had been that need to keep together the life they had created.
If they were going to get back together, it would have to be something else. They would have to be doing it because they wanted it, because they were choosing each other, just to be with each other. Not for their kids or their community. The answer she didn’t have right now was if she wanted him enough to choose just him. She hadneededhim enough when they’d had kids at home, when they’d had all that labor of running a household.
But she could see clearly now that this was the transition that broke so many people. Because it took marriage fromneedtowant.
When Will had suggested an open marriage, she had still been mired inneed.
Because divorce would mean that people in town would think certain things about them. Divorce would be admitting a loss. Divorce, she had felt at that moment, would undermine everything that she had done to be acceptable by marrying him in the first place. In an open marriage, especially when the people in town might be aware of… She couldn’t even fathom that. All the labor that she had done to be seen as morally acceptable would be erased by that.
She had stillneededit.
But here she was, a woman with a tattoo wandering the streets of Boston, and she just wasn’t sure if she needed it anymore. With that out of the way, she was left looking for thewantto. God help her, she wasn’t sure it was there. She cared about Will. But what surprised her the most was how little she was thinking of him these days. How little the inclination to text him hit her, and how much she enjoyed talking to Logan about her revelations and problems and fears.
How she hadn’t been able to talk to Will about them. How nothing about their relationship had been a place where she could identify those needs and seize them.
It was quite simply the strangest thing.
But it didn’t scare her. Not anymore. It was just something she was considering. Just something she was opening herself up to.
She regretted that she hadn’t been able to do it that first day they had gotten on the road.
Really embrace this moment for what it was. She had been so lost in her stubbornness. In being right for the sake of it.
Proving to him that he was wrong and she was right.
Her own stubbornness was often her very worst enemy. Something that hilariously would not surprise Will at all.
By the time she got back to the hotel, she was exhausted. She was also laden with shopping bags, and ready to collapse.
She got up to her room on the sixth floor and dropped all her bags onto the ground, then laid herself flat on the smooth white bedspread in the minimalist room. It was a stark contrast to the roadside motels. But she kind of loved it. Her phone buzzed, and she looked at it. It was Logan.
Dinner?
Sure. But you might have to carry me there.
Not a problem.
Her heart thumped a little harder than was necessary.
Just let me change.
She was sweaty from all the walking, and she put on something comfortable, and also a bit stretchy, so that when they ate she wasn’t conscious of the waistband biting into her stomach.
She had enough uncomfortable thoughts today. She didn’t need to be physically uncomfortable on top of it. They met down in the lobby, and she paused to really look at him. His dark blond hair pushed back off of his forehead, that black leather jacket that called to teenage dreams she hadn’t even had back then, because bad boys had been a shade too scary for her.
Hell, bad boys were a shade too scary for her now. So obsessed she was with being a good girl.
Here she was, at a hotel in Boston with a man she wasn’t married to, looking at his broad shoulders, his muscular thighs. His butt. It seemed fair for her to ponder his ass, since he had commented on hers a few days ago.
“Let’s go get pizza. You’ll like it.”
“Of course I like it,” she said. “It’s pizza.”
“No. When I say you’ll like it, I mean it’s special.”
They walked across the street and into the North End, all red brick and glorious buildings. The charm of it made her ache. For lives she hadn’t lived, and never would. For the vastness of life. It was a feeling she was getting used to. A feeling she was coming to love. Because as much as it was uncomfortable, it reminded her that she was alive. It reminded her that there was more.
