Think Twice

“I know.” She smiled. “It wouldn’t be cheating, you know.”

“Yeah, it would.”

“It would just be something between you and me.”

“I’m not sure Terese would see it that way.”

“She might. We have something. Apart from her. You know this.”

“No, I don’t.”

“I hurt you.”

“A long time ago.”

“I loved you. I don’t think I ever loved anyone as much as you.”

“We were in college. It was a long time ago.”

“Does it feel that long ago to you?”

Myron said nothing.

“That’s the funny thing, isn’t it? I read a line once: ‘You are always seventeen waiting for your life to begin.’ It’s true, don’t you think?”

“In some ways.”

“You were just...” Emily looked up, blinked away the wetness in her eyes. “Back then, you were so sure of what you wanted. Like you had it all figured out. I was your first real girlfriend. We’d get married. We’d buy a house in the suburbs and have two-point-six kids and a barbecue in the yard and a basketball hoop in the driveway. Just like your family. You had it all planned out, but to me, it felt...”

“Claustrophobic,” Myron said, knowing there was truth in her words. “Suffocating.”

“In part, I suppose. But it was more like I’d won the audition to play this part in your life.”

Myron shook his head.

“You don’t agree,” she said.

“I loved you, Em. I may have been young. I may have been romantically immature. But I loved you.”

She swallowed, looked off. “Do you remember the last time we had sex?”

The night before her wedding. The night they conceived Jeremy. “It would be hard to forget.”

“It changed everything, didn’t it? Do you feel shame?”

“I feel a lot of things.”

“I often wonder what my life would have been like if I had said yes when you proposed. I would have been too much drama for you, but you’d never have left me. That’s not how you’re built. Do you want to hear something?”

“Can I say no?”

She smiled and lay down on the bed next to Myron. Her back was to him so he couldn’t see her face. She curled her knees up.

“If I could go back in time to the moment you asked me, I’d still say no.”

Myron stayed on his back, staring at the ceiling. He could feel the heat coming from her body.

“Because if I had said yes, we wouldn’t have slept together the night before my wedding. And we wouldn’t have had Jeremy. Oh, I’m sure we would have great kids. Wonderful adults now. We’d be proud as all hell of them. But there’d be no Jeremy. Think about that.”

Myron closed his eyes. Emily rolled over and put her hand on his chest. Myron didn’t move. She leaned toward him and kissed his cheek. Then she rolled away so that her back was to him again.

“Is it okay if I just stay here and sleep? I won’t—”

“Yeah,” Myron said, his voice thick. “You can stay.”

Chapter Eighteen

Early the next morning Myron and Jeremy headed back to New York City in Emily’s car. Myron drove.

“So,” Jeremy said. “About last night...”

Myron’s grip on the wheel tightened.

“Mom probably thought she was being quiet when she tiptoed back from the guest wing. She forgets I’m military.”

“Nothing happened.”

“Uh-huh.”

“She just fell asleep.”

“If you think I’m upset by it—”

“Doesn’t matter what I think. She slept next to me. That’s all.”

“Okay.”

“We will always be connected,” Myron said.

“Let me guess. Because of me?”

“It’s a good reason to be connected.”

“The best. But she needs someone.”

“That someone won’t be me.”

“Don’t you have any friends who’d be good for her?”

Myron thought about it. “Not one. I know a lot of terrific single women your mother’s age. I don’t know one single guy my age worthy of them.”

“Sad but true,” Jeremy said. “So about my dad.”

My dad, Myron repeated in his head. “What about him?”

“Visiting hours start at eleven a.m.”

“We’ll be in the city by nine.”

“Where’s your office again?”

“Park and 47th Street.”

“I have an army pal who works in the MetLife Building next door. Okay if I visit him before we head over?”

“Sure.”

Jeremy took out a set of AirPods and put them in his ears. “I’m still adjusting to the time change. Do you mind if I close my eyes?”

“No,” Myron said, his heart sinking. “Of course not.”

Myron parked in the garage below Win’s building. When they got on Park Avenue, Jeremy headed left toward MetLife. Myron watched him walk away before heading into the Lock-Horne Building. He hopped on the elevator and took it to the top floor.

Big Cyndi greeted him in a spandex Batgirl suit, custom-made from the design used for the “original” Batgirl costume — the “real” Batgirl — from the old 1960s Batman TV series. Years ago, when Big Cyndi was professionally wrestling as Big Chief Mama, she befriended the iconic actress Yvonne Craig, who played that original Batgirl/Barbara Gordon role as well as Marta the green Orion girl in Star Trek. Yvonne had loaned Big Cyndi the Batgirl costume she still owned so that Big Cyndi could design her own. When Yvonne Craig died in 2015, Big Cyndi had made another one, entirely in black, and wore it every day for three months in mourning.

As the kids would say, Big Cyndi always goes hard.