Suddenly she realized her hands had stilled, and he hadn’t said anything. Maggie felt a flush of crimson creep up through her neck onto her face, embarrassed that she had remembered such a detail, and concentrated again on her work.
“Yeah, I did,” he said finally. “But I had to turn it down.”
She wasn’t going to speak any more, or else she’d humiliate herself.
“It’s actually all related,” he went on after a moment’s pause. “You probably don’t remember this, but when we started seeing each other I had just gotten out of a long thing with a girl named Courtney.”
Oh, she remembered Courtney, all right.
“That night, when I took that phone call outside the pub, it was Courtney calling.”
That inexplicable, painful, confusing night. There had been snow on the ground, glowing in the moonlight. She had sensed something was wrong by his body language as he paced outside on the sidewalk, his breath pluming in large bursts of fog as he shouted. Eventually his pacing had stopped, and he had stayed outside for a long time. When he came back in, he could barely look her in the eye. And it was over within minutes. The most intense five months of her life, gone in an instant. For him to tell her now that it was his ex who claimed him back, that was just cruel.
“She said she was seven months pregnant,” he laughed, remembering the unbelievable story. “With my baby,” he went on, as if that wasn’t clear already. “I freaked the fuck out. I made her do a paternity test with our blood and I’ll be damned. It was mine. I tried to do right by her, you know. I married her at the courthouse a couple weeks before Aspen was born.”
Maggie processed this slowly, feeling the initial flare of her rancor fade rather quickly. She glanced at his left hand, outstretched flat on the table. There was a thin band of pale skin on his finger where a ring habitually lay. Had he taken it off for the massage?
Still her heart thundered. She didn’t want these confessions. She had put him out of her mind, hadn’t thought of him in years. Well, if she was honest with herself, that wasn’t entirely true. Images of him had come to her over the years, of the sounds he made in bed, of the weight of his hand on her body, squeezing her. The delicious cracking sound as he slapped her ass. Those images had been more prevalent of late, really, as she searched back in her mind for material when she touched herself on the long, endless nights alone.
“I’ve never forgiven myself for how I left things with you, Maggie. It ate me up. I should have called you, I was such an ass. But Courtney was so jealous, so angry that I’d been seeing someone since we broke up. As if I’d cheated on her, which I hadn’t.”
“It’s okay, JT,” Maggie said, mildly surprised she’d been enough to make anyone jealous. As if she could’ve compared to tan, perky Courtney with her white chiclet teeth.
“No, it’s really not,” he rejoined, his voice sounding angry at her lack of bitterness. “I was a dick, and I probably made you feel like we had nothing. But we really did have something, Maggie.”