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  “Oh, no, that’s okay; we couldn’t possibly intrude like that,” Samuel said.

  “Oh, I don’t mind. It’s difficult to cook for just one person anyway. And I stocked enough food for way more than just one person.”

  Samuel got a silent approval from Mason, and they made their way to the kitchen table to talk to me while I cooked. I settled on something easy. Spaghetti. Everyone likes spaghetti, right? Before I started, I confirmed with Samuel that Mason liked spaghetti and he gave a nod of approval. Okay, now where the hell is my colander?

  Cooking came back to me pretty quickly. I hadn’t made a meal that large in over a year, so I was a bit nervous, but they both seemed to enjoy it. Mason ate and Samuel and I made small talk about basic things, school, hobbies, and movies. I was still getting a feel for what kind of person he was.

  “Thank you so much for dinner,” he said.

  “Oh, it’s no problem. Happy to have the company,” I said.

  “Maybe we can do it again sometime?” he asked.

  Oh, man. “Oh, um, yeah. I’m going to be busy for a while, but maybe sometime later. I mean, like when we’re both not busy, and like I said I’ll be busy for a while so I don’t know.” I said that so quickly I’m not sure I even understood myself, let alone if he understood me. God, I was just rambling.

  He chuckled a bit. “Well, all right,” he said. “Thank you again.” And he and Mason walked out the door toward the road.

  I shut the door behind them and walked back to the kitchen to clean up. Why on earth had I invited them in for dinner? What is wrong with me? Who even does that? With my head reeling, I stepped back from the counter satisfied with my progress and decided the rest could wait until morning. I thought about going to sleep, but I couldn’t. Not with everything in my head. I needed to get it out. I needed to write. You seem to do a lot of that after you see him, Delilah. Shut up. Just shut up.

  Chapter Six

  One week after I miscarried, I sat on the edge of an exam table in my OB/GYN’s office for a check-up. The next several months were mapped out full of doctors’ appointments, various specialists, and pregnancy gurus. My doctor stood in front of me using medical jargon, explaining what had happened. It sounded like a bunch of big words that basically meant they didn’t know what the fuck happened.

  “These things are sometimes unexplainable,” he said.

  Jeff sat next to me, holding my hand. He asked the doctor what sort of affect this miscarriage would have on future attempts. I didn’t recognize Jeff these days. He was distant, his movements mechanical. He’d calloused over.

  The doctor seemed startled by his question and recommended waiting a few months. “I would wait for Delilah to heal completely, both physically and emotionally. These things can take some time,” he said.

  “Well, what’s the minimum we need to wait? We don’t really want to wait any longer than that. We want a family,” Jeff said. His voice was stern, adamant.

  The doctor hesitated for a moment and looked at me. I don’t know exactly what my face told him, but it must have been pleading for help.

  “I would wait at least twelve weeks,” he said with authority.

  On the way home, Jeff was silent. He didn’t say much of anything these days, and I’m not sure I could say anything to make it better. He wanted a baby. I got it. So did I. I just wasn’t sure I was in line with this new perspective he seemed to have.

  He’d spent the past three days pacing around the house, talking out loud to no one in particular. Or maybe it was directed toward me. I wasn’t sure.

  “We’ll just try again. We’ll try again, and we’ll see the best doctors and have the best specialists look at you and we will try again. We will have our family. We will,” he insisted.

  I wasn’t sure if he was trying to convince me or himself, but with each passing conversation he had out loud with himself while I remained silent, I grew more fearful of getting pregnant again. I never wanted to experience that loss again. I had an immense amount of guilt when I thought about that. As a wife, I should give my husband what he wants, right? He just wants a family with me. How could I deny him that? The more I thought about it, the more confused I became.

  I kept quiet until we got home and then went straight up to our bedroom where I’d spent the majority of the last week. I peeled out of my clothes, took a shower, and came back into the bedroom with a towel wrapped around me. I was startled to see Jeff sitting on the end of the bed. He’d slept in his study for the last week. I let him. We both needed some space.

  “I don’t think that doctor knows what he’s talking about,” he said.

  “What do you mean, Jeff?” I asked. I was more than confused and his tone was beginning to frighten me.

  “I mean, I don’t think we need to wait,” he said. He shot me a look I didn’t recognize.

  “Yes, we do,” I fired back.

  “No, we don’t!” he said. He was up off the bed, across the floor, and ripping my towel from my hands quicker than I could respond. The towel flopped to the floor before I could even reach for it. I stood frozen as he wrapped himself around me and kissed roughly at my neck. He ran his hands up and down the side of my body and I tried pushing them away.

  “No, Jeff. Not yet. This isn’t the time,” I said, trying to pull away.

  “Yes, it is. We can do this. Right now,” he said, pulling me back in despite my resistance. He was stronger than me by a lot, so it wasn’t hard for him.

  “Please don’t,” I pleaded.

  Jeff didn’t hear me or didn’t want to hear me. Or worst of all, heard me and didn’t care. I begged and pleaded with each movement. He pushed me back to the edge of the bed and my knees buckled. I fell back onto it and tried to get up. Jeff pushed me back down with one hand bearing down hard on my chest. I felt his knee pushing against the center of my closed legs until he parted them. I let out a yelp.

  “Shh, it’s okay. Everything is going to be fine. We’re going to have a family. Everything is going to be fine,” he whispered against the side of my face.

  I turned my face and started to cry as I felt him unbuttoning his pants. I stopped pushing against him. I stopped fighting back. There was no use. He was too big and too heavy and I was powerless. He forced himself into me. I could hear him breathing heavy against me. I kept my eyes closed tightly. It will be over soon. It will be over soon.

  The terrible thing about being married and being raped is that it’s very difficult to prove. It was almost impossible, according to Google. I cried for three days. Jeff kept his distance, going from work to his study and back most days.

  On the fourth day, he raped me again. He came up behind me while I was doing laundry and forced me facedown onto the dryer. I screamed and tried to fight back until I didn’t. When he finished, he pulled his pants up, grabbed his keys, and left the house. I sat on the cold tile floor, bleeding. I got up on wobbly legs, changed my clothes, walked upstairs to the bedroom, and locked myself in. I pulled out my laptop and started writing about a woman who had a miscarriage.

  I heard Jeff come home and start walking up the stairs. He shoved his shoulder into the door a couple of times and it busted in. I clutched my laptop in my lap. He walked over to the bed and emptied the contents of a paper sack he’d been holding onto the blanket. There must have been ten boxes of pregnancy tests. It was the most frightening sight.

  “Everything’s going to be fine,” he said. “We’re going to have our family. We’ll have our family and everything will be fine.” This was all he ever said to me anymore. These two phrases rearranged over and over again.

  He’d quickly grown mad. And I’d quickly grown afraid.

  Chapter Seven

  I sat up on the edge of the bed after a particularly dreadful attempt at sleeping. My back cracked in more than one place and I twisted my head side to side to stretch my neck. I sure felt a lot older than the barely thirty years I had under my belt. Two months ago, on my birthday, I’d done nothing to celebrate. I
didn’t see anyone, return anyone’s calls, or even leave the house. I couldn’t tell you the last birthday I actually celebrated. Birthdays were never that important to me. Of course, with three younger siblings, perhaps I was forced out of them early. They were all off doing crazy things all around the world. We kept in touch but we weren’t particularly close.

  I reached for my phone to check the time. I actually managed to sleep in. Well, it was 9:30 a.m. So I mean, more than usual. I checked my email. Oh, yay, notes on the first draft are in. At least it was something to keep me occupied with for a while. I’ll start on those later today. I checked my text messages.

  Emma: Come see the studio today? <3

  I supposed I should do that. I hadn’t been there yet, and I’d kept myself hulled up in my house for the last week. I couldn’t make excuses to her forever. I thought maybe I was avoiding another random run-in with Samuel. I had no idea what got into me when I invited them in for dinner. I didn’t do that sort of thing. I spent the entire night after they left fussing at myself.

  I would be keeping a distance from Samuel the extremely attractive professor-neighbor-single dad. It spelled drama and I wanted no part of it. I had given it a lot of thought and dating wasn’t in the cards. Not any time soon. I couldn’t fathom it. I was going to keep my nose in my writing for the foreseeable future.

  I arrived at Emma’s studio around eleven. It was an adorable store-front shop. Emma made it light and inviting. Everything was white accented in teal. So clean and comfortable. The front lobby area featured white washed antique furniture, teal and black accents, and dark wood flooring. No wonder she put together my house with ease. She had a knack for this, that much was certain.

  “Delilah!” she called out as I walked toward the front desk area.

  “Hi, Emma.” I gave a smile. I couldn’t help it.

  She checked her watch and suggested we get lunch before her next appointment. Considering the fact that I skipped breakfast, that sounded amazing. We walked next door to the little café where she was obviously known. This was probably her regular spot. Everyone greeted her by her first name and countless smiles were exchanged. She made her way to a corner booth, introducing me to everyone along the way. There was a certain kind of hospitality present in the South you just couldn’t find anywhere else.

  “So how are the revisions on your first draft coming?” she asked as we took our seats.

  “I just got the notes back this morning so I haven’t started yet. They should be good though. My editor and I are pretty synced up on most things,” I said.

  “Oh, I’m so excited! I can’t wait to read it,” she said.

  “Yeah, me either.” I feigned excitement.

  “Do you have anything new you’re working on?” she asked.

  I think she thought I was a book machine sometimes. I wonder if she even knew how long it took to write a novel in its entirety. My guess was she didn’t, but she was just making chit-chat. No need to explain. “Umm, no, not yet. It will probably be a few months. I’m always jotting down thoughts and ideas, but right now I have nothing concrete.”

  The waitress came and took our orders, and then we ate mostly in silence. I was never much of a “talk while eating” kind of person and Emma knew that. We finished up, and I paid for lunch. Emma always hated when I did that but always joked, “Well, you are rich, so I might as well let you.” No, I wasn’t really rich, given that when I think of rich, I think of royalty and oil tycoons. Although, my success in writing had granted me the ability to live more than comfortably. I wasn’t raised to spend money like crazy, and for most of my marriage up until I began to write, Jeff and I were working middle class. We had what we needed, a little of what we wanted, and a little in savings. In comparison to most in my position, I lived modestly. I splurged modestly, only when I really wanted something, but not on typical things someone would think of. I had amassed quite a library and aside from that, an occasional trip to the tattoo shop. That was me in a nutshell. Paper and ink.

  We walked back over to her studio, where her next appointment was already waiting. It was a young couple, who appeared to be newly engaged. They spent the entire time completely enthralled with each other. I watched Emma shoot them in several poses. She was so professional and yet completely inviting with them. People just instantly felt comfortable with her. As I watched, I started to wonder if I was ever as enthralled with Jeff. We started dating in college, and truth be told, marriage just seemed like the next step after graduation. We both took middle management jobs in our respective fields, moved to the suburbs, and settled in. We took vacations the first couple of years, then Jeff expressed his interest in a family and that’s when everything changed.

  Emma finished up her appointment while I was lost in thought and said goodbye to them at the front counter. Then she gave me a tour of her studio. I think my favorite thing was the bookshelf in the corner she used to display all her cameras. Some were very old. Emma’s interest in photography was evident as far back as I could remember.

  I walked over and touched a small digital camera on the shelf. Everything was so nice and neat in its own place.

  “Do you still take photos just for fun, too?” I asked.

  “You mean when I’m not shooting appointments here in the studio? Of course. I’ll go out some days and take snapshots of whatever stands out to me. It’s just not as often as I used to.”

  “That sounds fun.”

  “You should come with me sometime! I bet you’d like it,” she said.

  “Yeah, maybe I will.”

  I hugged Emma goodbye and thanked her for the invitation to come see her studio. “Bring David by this weekend and we’ll all have dinner, okay?” I said.

  Emma agreed and I walked to my car, realizing halfway there that I needed more wine. Luckily, there was a liquor store on my way home so I drove straight there.

  The doorbell chimed overhead as I walked in and made a beeline for the wine section. Their collection was pretty extensive and I ran my hand over the bottles as I read the labels.

  “Oh, hello again, Delilah,” a familiar voice rang out over the wine rack.

  I looked up to see Samuel looking at wines on the other side. Well, he was looking at me, not the wines. How had I missed him when I walked in?

  “Hi, Samuel.” I kept it short.

  “How are you? I haven’t seen you since…”

  “I’ve been pretty busy with draft revisions,” I lied.

  “I bet that does keep you pretty busy.”

  “It sure does.”

  “So what’s the occasion?” he asked. “For the wine, I mean.”

  “No occasion. Just a woman in need of a glass of wine.” I shrugged and smiled.

  “Fair enough. Looking for anything in particular?”

  “Well, you have wines here that we didn’t have down in Nashville, so I’m trying to find something local. I like buying local,” I said.

  “If I may,” he held a bottle of wine out to me over the rack, “this is from a vineyard just over in Peducah. It’s very good if you like dark, somewhat sweet wines.”

  I studied the bottle in his hand. Purple Toad Winery. The label had a cute watercolor frog on it and it was wearing Band-Aids. I giggled as I saw it was called “Black & Bruised”.

  “It’s a sweet red blend,” he said.

  “I’ll give it a try,” I said, offering a smile.

  “You know there’s a little wine bar and restaurant here in town. It’s a nice place. If you’re interested, I’d love to take you sometime,” he said with a genuine smile and comfortable eyes.

  This is it, I thought. I knew it was coming, which is why I had done my best to avoid him. But you invited him in for dinner! Ugh, that was so stupid. It was a mistake. I couldn’t possibly say yes. No way. I wasn’t ready for any of this. And as the air grew thick between us, I examined his face much closer than I had before. His deep brown eyes were the kind a girl could find herself gazing into for far too long. His th
ick brown hair begged for fingertips to play with. His perfect white smile was mesmerizing. And his voice. His voice reminded me of jazz music and cigar rings. Rough but silky. Good Lord, how long have I been staring at him in silence? Nope, no way.

  “Oh, I don’t know. I don’t think that’s a good idea,” I said with my eyes fixated on everything but his face.

  “Why not?” he asked.

  The question threw me off. I assumed he would just say okay and back off but he inquired. How do I tell him that I’m broken?

  “I just don’t think I should be doing things like that. I mean, I hardly know you and I mean, my divorce just finalized and…”

  “So you were married?” he interrupted.

  “Yes.”

  “And now you’re not?”

  “Correct.”

  “So you’re single.”

  It sounded more like a statement than a question. “Well, yes,” I said.

  “And you have the right to have wine and food with whomever you choose?”

  “I suppose.”

  “But not me?” he asked.

  “Well, technically we’ve already had dinner together,” I said.

  “So we wouldn’t be doing anything we haven’t already done. It’s settled then,” he said with a broad smile on his face.

  Wait, what?! How the hell did he do that? Fuck, what do I say? At this point he had a smug look on his face. He was quite pleased with himself, I could tell. Lacking no other answer, I let my shoulders fall.

  “Um, okay. But just friends. Just two friends eating,” I pushed.

  “It’s a start,” he said, nodding his head, smiling. “I’ll pick you up on Saturday at 6.” And with that he walked right down the aisle, paused at the check-out counter to make his purchases, and was out the door, all in one smooth motion.

  Shock. Yes. I was in shock. I stood in the wine aisle for a full five minutes after he left, holding the bottle he suggested. Just friends. It’s just as friends. I’ll remind him of that when he picks me up.