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.”
I just stared at him. He missed the way I buttered his toast? My purpose in his life was to laugh at his jokes, scratch his back, and butter his toast? I was vaguely sick to my stomach, but mostly, really, really sad. That was my marriage? Not once had he said he was wrong or that he was sorry. He was just telling me what he wanted. Nothing had changed.
“I just need some hope that there might still be a chance for us.”
“Mike, there is no us,” I told him firmly. My voice lowered to a less harsh whisper when I said, “There is no you and me. That’s all over now.”
“It doesn’t have to be,” he insisted. “Everything can go back to where it was. We can have it all back.”
Wait a minute. This was all pretty proactive for a man who used to have me pre-peel his fruit for him. I narrowed my eyes at him. “So how did Beebee take it when you told her it was over?”
He gave me a sheepish look.
“So you’re going to do to her what you did to me?” I yelled and started toward the cabin. When I heard Mike’s footsteps behind me, I whirled around and stuck a finger in his chest. “You can’t even stay loyal to your mistress, Mike! What kind of degenerate does that make you? Why would I even consider being with someone who can’t stay faithful to the person he cheated on me with?”
The shift from kicked puppy to wounded martyr happened so quickly, it was like a ripple under the skin. Mike’s eyes narrowed, his lip curled, and he looked at me like I was something he scraped off of his shoe. “I’m trying to give you, us, another chance. You could at least give me that much credit.”
“You’re trying to get out of the mess your hormones made.”
“I can’t believe you’re talking to me like this!” he shouted, his face flushing red. “What’s wrong with you, Lacey?”
“I’m a wild woman. I skinny-dip. I have orgasms that don’t require heavy equipment.”
“I can’t believe you’re sleeping with someone else!” he cried.
“How exactly do you have the balls to get angry with me about that, Stinger?”
Mike looked like he might take a swipe at me when something he saw over my shoulder made his face melt back into a more “social” mode. I turned to see Monroe’s truck pulling into his driveway and felt both relief and annoyance. This was not an introduction I needed to make at the moment.
Monroe stepped out of his truck and looked from Mike to me and back. From the look on my face, he must have thought that Mike was a door-to-door evangelist or a census taker or something. “Everything okay, Lacey?”
“I’m fine, Monroe. This is Mike.” I huffed.
Mike’s back stiffened. He sucked in his stomach and glared at Monroe. “Who is this, Lacey?”
I sighed. “This is my neighbor, Monroe. He’s renting the McGee place.”
Monroe gave Mike an appraising once-over and offered his hand for a shake. Mike reluctantly accepted and I could see the tension in their hands as they each squeezed far harder than was socially necessary. The message could not have been clearer if there had been telegraph wires stretched between them. Monroe was letting Mike
