Libby desperately wanted to believe him, but how could she? He’d hidden an affair and a child from her, which meant he was hiding a lot more. “That’s not what Jess told me. She says you’ve always been friends with benefits.”
“Well, she’s lying,” he said quickly. “She does a lot of that, Libs. We just didn’t realize.”
We? One small word that used to represent love, marriage and teamwork now flayed her like a whip. “So you’re saying you never had sex with her before you dated me?”
“That’s right.”
The words felt like rods of cold steel sliding into every bone of her body. “So you’d stand up in a court of law and swear to that?”
He hesitated, guilt flashing white and bright in his eyes. “Mostly.”
“So, she didn’t lie. You’re lying. Again.”
“I’m not. This is semantics, Libby. I was eighteen and she gave me a BJ in the dunes behind the surf club.”
Which meant she and Jess had been fifteen. Back then Libby hadn’t even seen an adult penis but Jess had been running wild and Libby had soaked up every salacious story. “And?”
“And I was inexperienced. I shot my load in about a minute and a half.”
“And?”
Tiny beads of sweat broke out along Nick’s hairline. “Jesus, Libby. It was years ago. It’s not important.”
“Of course it’s important! You had sex with her before you met me, but you’ve never told me. She’s never told me. There’s a reason both of you hid it from me and now you have a child together! What else aren’t you telling me?”
Agitated, he swilled more champagne. It was surreal knowing Nick was upset and she didn’t want to do a single thing to ease his distress.
“It’s only going to upset you.”
She snorted. “That horse has well and truly bolted. Just tell me.”
He was quiet for a moment and then he sighed. “It happened a few other times.”
“How many?”
“I don’t know.”
“How. Many. Times?”
He shrugged. “Three or four, I dunno. Maybe five.”
His evasiveness only exacerbated her suspicions he was withholding information. “Where did these three, four, maybe ten times take place?”
“It wasn’t ten!”
“The fact you can’t remember isn’t doing anything to reassure me.”
“I’m doing my best.”
She snorted. “Not even close.”
His hand snagged in his curls. “Okay, fine. I can’t remember the exact number. But I promise you it only ever happened at parties when I was filthy drunk.”
Detecting another lie, she squinted at him. “You never drink until you’re drunk.”
“I did between sixteen and twenty-four.” He gave her a wry smile. “By the time I met you, I’d grown up.”
She ignored his pleading expression urging her to understand the foolishness of youth. Perhaps if that was all this had been, she’d have forgiven him. But Nick was too far removed from young and stupid for it to be an excuse. When she coupled that with the fact he’d never once hinted that he and that woman had a teenage sexual history, it drove her belief down deep that there was so much more to this situation than either of them were telling her.
Despite his answers hitting her like shot, she needed to know everything—even if it explained nothing. “Was it always a just blow job?”
He closed his eyes and sighed. “No.”
“When did that change?”
“Um … After the second time.”
“So you sought her out to have sex?”
“No!” It was the first time he’d sounded decisive. “It was nothing like that. She always initiated things.”
“And you never said no.”
“Like I said, I was young and stupid. Libs, it didn’t mean anything. Not like you …”
She gripped her arms and started pacing. “But you’d stopped with her before you met me?”
“Yes! Ages before I met you. I grew up and stopped writing myself off.” He opened his hands in supplication. “Please believe me. When I’m sober, I don’t have a problem resisting Jess.”
“Hah! If that’s true, then how the hell did you end up fucking her two years ago?”
Shame pinked his face. “Jess and I shared a bottle of Bundy.”
“You don’t even drink rum!”
He sighed again. “I did when I was eighteen. So did Jess. Every country kid did.”
“I didn’t!”
“Your childhood was a little more sheltered and cultured than most of the bay. I drank it to rebel against my parents’ homemade vino. Jess probably drank it because her mother always had bottles in the house.”
A memory shot into Libby’s mind of the week she started working as an intern. She was lifting a bottle of rum out of Jess’s hand and replacing it with a wine glass of chardonnay. “Sophisticated city women drink wine.”
“We’re sophisticated now, are we, Dr. Hunter?”
“Absolutely.”
Jess had laughed, or at least that’s how Libby had always remembered it. But in today’s memory, Jess’s pink bow mouth was pressed tight and the laugh more of a “humph.”
Libby shook away the irrelevant detour into the past, recognizing it as a delaying tactic. Her need to know exactly what had happened between her ex-best friend and her husband was matched by an equal desire not to know. Once she heard the story, she couldn’t unhear it. But she couldn’t go through life not knowing either.
“So, when you screwed her and knocked her up, where was I?”
He grimaced at her vernacular and she got a dart of pleasure at his discomfort. “You’d taken the girls to Melbourne to see Disney on Ice.”
His tone of voice took her straight back to that dark week and some of her volcanic anger momentarily cooled under the onslaught of misery. Instead of welcoming her baby boy, she’d kept herself frantically busy—anything to keep her grief from felling her.
Her anger reignited like lava erupting. “You went to Sydney?”
“Hell, no. Why would you think that?”
“I don’t know what to think anymore.”
“Jess flew down here to surprise you,” Nick said with an edge. “Remember?”
Libby gagged on the gratitude she always experienced whenever she thought about Jess’s generous gesture that weekend. Even though Libby had been out of town and had missed her, she’d always considered it
