Chapter Twenty-Eight
Krissa stood in the middle of the bright kitchen, frozen and empty. The smell of the garlic chicken she’d been grilling suddenly nauseated her.
Nate was gone?
She shook her head. How could this be? Her shaky legs weakened beneath her, and she stumbled over to a chair at the table and sank onto it. She couldn’t breathe, her lungs constricted, her abdomen tight.
How could he do that? How could he just walk away from what they had?
What did they have? That was a question she wasn’t sure she could answer. There were so many things she didn’t know. But one thing she did know was that she didn’t want to live without Nate. She didn’t know how to live with him, in this weird situation, but she knew she wanted him in her life. And he’d just walked out.
“Krissa.”
She blinked and looked up at Derek, standing there wan and troubled. She’d forgotten about him.
“Did something happen?” she asked him slowly. He looked almost as upset as she was.
“No.”
“I don’t get it.” Her voice trembled, her lips quivered. She wanted to break down into tears but was suddenly aware that this was her husband standing there. “Why would he leave like that?”
“I don’t know.” Derek’s voice sounded stretched thin. He put out his arms. “Come here.”
She looked at him. She couldn’t bear to accept comfort from him at that moment. And even though she knew it was wrong, she stood up and turned her back on him and went to their bedroom.
She closed the door and lay down on the bed. Every muscle in her body felt sapped of energy, weak and lifeless. She couldn’t move. Couldn’t think. Could only feel the agony cramping her tummy, throbbing in her heart.
Derek came to the door a while later. She wasn’t sure how long she’d been laying there.
“I know you’re disappointed,” he said. “I am too. And I’m kind of pissed off at Nate that he’d just take off like that.”
“He has a life of his own,” she said dully, not looking at Derek.
“We’d agreed that he would try…I tried to tell him that we could still go the donation route, if he didn’t want to stick around. He wouldn’t even talk about it.”
She just stared at the ceiling, eyes burning. For the first time in ages, having a baby wasn’t the most important thing in her life. At that moment, with Nate gone, she didn’t even care anymore. Nothing seemed important.
“It doesn’t matter.” She rolled onto her side, facing away from him.
“Krissa…”
“Please. Just leave me alone.”
She felt his presence, still and silent, then heard quiet footsteps cross the room and the snick of the door closing.
Many hours later, she finally roused herself enough to get out of bed. To her astonishment, it was dark. The house was hushed. Wandering into the kitchen for a glass of water, she realized Derek had gone out.
A twinge of guilt nudged her conscience. She’d been rude and hurtful earlier. He didn’t deserve that. It wasn’t his fault this had happened.
The cold water eased the ache in her throat. She found some painkillers and swallowed them, rubbed the thumping between her eyes. She looked at the chicken still sitting on the counter, cold and repellent. She opened the fridge with the vague idea that she should eat something. Nothing appealed to her. She looked in the freezer. Ice cream. Perfect.
But when she removed the lid, the container was empty.
Men. Which of those two macho idiots had put the empty container away? She was always bugging them—the empty milk carton appeared in the fridge, the empty peanut butter jar sat in the cupboard, and when she went to run the dishwasher she found an empty box of dishwasher detergent.
She sighed, tears prickling her eyes. She could go get ice cream. It didn’t seem worth the bother, but ice cream was all she wanted. She could drive up to the Dairy Delight on Coast Village Road and get her favorite mocha chocolate chip.
She didn’t care what she looked like, so she just grabbed her car keys and let herself out of the house.
Long line-ups waited patiently at the Dairy Delight, as was usual on a warm summer evening. The couple in front of her stood with their arms around each other, and the guy nuzzled the girl’s hair and whispered in her ear. Krissa watched them.
They looked like they had a normal life. Two people in love, out for ice cream. The ache inside her intensified and she almost walked out of the ice cream shop. But she forced herself to stand there and wait for ice cream she didn’t even want any more.
With her double scoop of mocha chocolate chip ice cream in a waffle cone in hand, she emerged onto the sidewalk. She stood there beneath the glow of a street lamp, ran her tongue over the creamy cold ice cream. Sweet.
She meandered down the street to where she’d parked her car at the curb. Across was a pub she and Derek used to go to with the best strawberry margaritas in the world. They hadn’t been there in a long time.
A man and a woman came out the door of the pub. Krissa stopped.
It was Derek.
Who was he with?
Krissa stepped behind a planter overflowing with red and purple petunias. She watched her husband put his arm around the woman’s waist and lead her down the steps to the sidewalk. Her blonde hair hung straight to her waist. A tight, low-cut top revealed generous cleavage and her high-heeled slides brought her almost to Derek’s height. Pretty, in a slutty way, Krissa observed numbly.
On the sidewalk, the woman laughed at something, turned to Derek and kissed him on the mouth. And he kissed her back, his hand sliding around to her ass in a snug pair of bright pink Capri pants.
The ice cream plopped from Krissa’s hand to the brick sidewalk. She ignored it, stared open-mouthed at her husband passionately kissing another woman.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
It would probably take her a year to sort out the confused thoughts and feelings eddying in her head. Maybe it would take forever. She only knew that the few hours between when she’d seen Derek outside The Jolly Frog pub and when he arrived home were not enough to sort out exactly how she felt and what she should do about it.
Maybe she should have confronted him then and there, with that woman, but her first instinct had been to retreat, to run away from the ugliness. Once before she had been in denial about Derek’s fidelity, had let it go, pretended it hadn’t happened, but…not this time.
When Derek came quietly into the house, she was sitting in the living room. She’d finished off a bottle of wine. Never mind ice cream. Wine sounded much better when she’d gotten home. When the thought that she could be pregnant crossed her mind, she pushed it away. After so long, it just wasn’t meant to happen. Wasn’t going to happen. She might as well accept that and move on with things.
Move on with what?
Derek spotted her sitting in the dark, wine glass in her hand, and stopped. “Hi.”
“Hi.” The first thing she wanted to say was, where were you? But she wasn’t going to act like a wronged wife. Because she was still worried that she wasn’t exactly in the right, her feelings for Nate troubling and confusing.
“You’re still up.”
“Yes.”
He walked over to the couch and sat beside her. She could smell alcohol, cigarettes and perfume…a scent she’d smelled before. A fist inside her squeezed tighter.
She lifted the glass to her mouth, tipped it and drained the last mouthful of Chardonnay.
“I saw you.”
He looked at her, blinked. His short blonde hair was imperfect, as if he’d tried to neaten it with his fingers. “You saw me?”