Page 4 of Engineering a Love Story

My stomach heaves, thinking of this now, how everyone must have seen me trailing after Walter all week. My still-new colleagues. My boss Howard. Maybe even Gilroy clients.

“By the final night, I was beside myself,” I say. “I didn’t want The Symp to end, didn’t want to come home.” I’m quiet a moment, letting this land, and Bethany makes a gratifying oof sound. “We were all in the same dark pub where we’d spent the previous evenings, Walter and I in a corner booth, and he was telling me about a book he’d read on the plane. The Sportswriter. ‘It’s wild how this guy torpedoes his life,’ he said. Then he mentioned the book was in his room. If I wanted to borrow it.”

I can barely admit how little I hesitated. After five days in Orlando, my period had ended, and in that heady moment, I could see no other impediment to going with Walter. We drained our drinks and stood, my gaze steady on the pub door, ignoring the knowing glances from the Gilroy people still littering the bar. I was too intoxicated in every way to care that Howard was there, at a table with other Gilroy execs. I passed right by his group, and Walter and I were almost to the door when Travis Platt, who occupies the cube next to mine in Gilroy’s Cambridge office, stood in my path. “A bunch of us are heading to the pool,” he said. “Join us?”

I looked past him toward the exit. “I can’t. Early flight.”

Travis eyed Walter, who hovered behind me. “You sure?”

I tell Bethany how I brushed by Travis, my closest friend at Gilroy, and left the pub with Walter.

“It just felt so good to feel something. To want something. But then we were in his room, kissing and my top was gone—it was this terrible polo I’d been wearing all week. The smallest one they had and still down to my knees. But maybe the weight of it had felt protective or something. After he took it off me, I was freezing and topless, my pants undone, and we were in his bed and he said, ‘I’m not able to be any sort of crowbar in this situation.’”

“What situation? What does that mean?”

“He was talking about my marriage. And his own, I guess. Because I had told him, earlier. That I regret marrying Ash.”

I’d never said this out loud to anyone before I told Walter. Now I’ve said it twice.

I hear Bethany’s quick intake of breath. “Oh, shit.”

“And he just laid there, looking at me, like he was in no hurry and wouldn’t move forward unless we were in agreement on terms. Like, if things didn’t work out with me, he’d be onto another city, another conference soon enough.”

“Eww.”

“Yeah. But more than that, it was like he called me on what I was doing. My father has a crowbar in his pile of tools in his shed. The crowbar’s the one you use to break things apart when you’re too weak to do it yourself.” Bethany hums. “And then I was so angry that Walter thought he’d seen some truth about my life. But maybe he had! So then I just ran away. Left him there and flew home, vibrating the whole way, suddenly sure that white knuckling it through the rest of my life isn’t going to work.”

“White knuckling? Is that how you feel?”

“Sometimes.”

I don’t tell Bethany it’s been worse lately. This past year at Gilroy has been filled with a new excitement, all my travel, the internet supposedly changing the world, these unexpected flashes of professional success—it’s like I wandered into the pages of a pop-up book. Where before life was flat—though perfectly serviceable—now it’s three dimensional and full of sharp corners.

Though I had issues before Gilroy too—Walter wasn’t even my first close-call. There was the wedding I attended with the Kelseys a few years back, where I overindulged and flirted too much with the cocky guy in the seersucker suit sitting next to me, waking the next day with a prayer no one had noticed. A visit home to see my father a year ago when I sat on the patio of a friend’s house, talking deep into the night with her brainy older brother, who’d never been appealing until he suddenly was.

“You’ve never said,” Bethany says.

I hadn’t told Bethany—or anyone—of my restlessness because what’s the point of discussing something if you don’t intend to do anything about it?

“But I blindsided him, Beth. In the garage. And maybe myself, I don’t know.”

I hear snaps snapping. Bethany murmurs, then her voice comes back on the line. “Did you really not know? That this was coming?”

I try to think. I didn’t plan to leave Ash. Not this week, not this year … maybe not ever. At times I’ve lazily dreamed of some sort of calamity striking, something serious enough to free me, but not tragic enough to actually hurt anyone. But I couldn’t ever figure out how such a scenario might unfold exactly, and simply ending it never felt like an option, not after all Ash and the Kelseys have given me. You can’t divorce family.

When I met Ash in college, he was simply so much … better than anyone I ever expected to meet. Cleaner and warmer and kinder. He was riding a mountain bike across campus the first time I saw him. A friend introduced us on the steps of the student union, and I liked his soft name more than anything at first, though he seemed the perfect package entirely: easy smile, blond hair, nice legs on the bike. After he rode away, the friend said Ash was the sweetest guy.

And he is sweet. A good person—everyone’s always said so. And I mean, Ashton Woodrow Kelsey IV? Who did I think I was? We dated for two years, moved in together after college. It seemed likely we’d get married eventually. When he asked, I thought we might as well get it over with.

Get it over with? Had I really thought that?

“I mean, I can’t say I’m all that surprised,” Bethany says. “Not really. You told me once, not long after you got married, that you weren’t that into sex. And I was like, excuse me?” Her laugh is light.

I don’t recall this admission, but I flush with the truth of it. In the beginning, we were okay. Kind and gentle. But over the years, the act began to feel almost unnatural, like neither of us could move easily from one type of intimacy to another. This has also been getting worse, despite Ash’s desire for a family. I’ve repeatedly told myself sex isn’t the most important thing. You almost forget about it after a while.

I try to laugh too, but the sound catches in my throat. “Maybe that’s all it was,” I say. “Some pent-up thing.”

“You’re twenty-nine. Maybe you shouldn’t be pent-up?”