Chapter 4: The Interrogation He Sat Through

“Once I got past the shock of the couch,” Amber said, “I sat him down and did the thing you keep packing into overnight bags and then leaving at the house. I confronted him while I was sober with questions. The way you were supposed to.”

I put my head in my hands. The scolding landed exactly where she meant it to.

I felt stupid, late, and like I was always one speech behind what I had already done. “Do not do the statue pose,” she said. “Look at me. I was not gentle. I told him I think he is using you. I told him he is messing with your head and your body on a schedule that looks a lot like a hobby. I told him he is ruining what you have with Mike, which, even if Mike never finds out, is still a ruin you’ll have to live with inside. I told him he is also going to smash his own friendship with Mike, which is older than some marriages and has survived stupider men than him. I asked him what he is doing, what he wants, and what the plan is. I followed that with why you, why now, and why the pictures and the jewelry and the permission slips for a grown woman’s nervous system.”

“Fuck Amber.”

“Well, you asked.” She turned her mug in a slow circle. “I expected him to puff up. Most men puff up when a blonde bimbo with big tits calls them a problem at 6:30 in the morning after they have slept on a sad couch. So I expected him to either get defensive or to try to lay on the charm, maybe a joke to bleed the air out of it, or the door. He did not take offense, at least not visibly, at my accusations. He sat there with his coffee like I had asked him about traffic.”

That did not sound like the Tyler I had spent three years disliking. It also did not sound unlike the man who had answered my drunk tests last night without taking the bait.

“So, don’t let me die in suspense, what did he say?”

“He agreed with me,” Amber said. “That is the part that knocked me off the speech I had been writing and refining for almost the last two months. He said if he were me, he would be asking the same things. He said the situation is stupid and selfish and cruel on paper. He did not argue the paper. He just would not concede the person in it.”

I lifted my head.

“Ok, specifics, what did he actually say?”

Amber looked at me for a long second, like she was deciding how much of his voice to give me and how much to keep as her own summary. Then she gave me both.

“He said the attraction was real and old,” she said. “Years. He kept it in check because of Mike. He said the first night wasn’t planned. He called it an accident, which is a generous word for what happened in that bathroom, but I let him use it because he wasn’t using it to duck. After that night, he said he wanted to end it there. He said he was trying to figure out how to cut it off without making a bigger mess for you, for Mike, and for himself. Then you went to his house and, I am quoting loosely here because I am not repeating his exact words at breakfast, you left little room for a clean ending. He said once that happened he lost the argument with himself about stopping whatever this is.”