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“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.”
