My lawyer told me I’m abso-fucking-lutely not allowed, though. Her words. She swears if Ashley smells money in the water, she’ll latch on and suck me dry.
The cut of her shirt tells me I probably should have listened to the lawyer. Ashley isn’t here to let me go; she’s here to try to draw me back in.
“It’s so good seeing you, Griff. You look so good,” Ashley tells me, reaching across the table and patting my arm. I draw my arm away as soon as her hand makes contact. Her mouth forms a little pout. “Don’t be like that. Please? I want us to have a nice lunch. I’ve missed you.”
I shoot her a look to let her know I’m not impressed. “Don’t do that.”
“What?” she asks, innocently. “Tell the truth? I really do, Griff. I miss you so much.”
“Please stop.” I look around for the waiter, partly because I’m embarrassed, partly because I want him to come take our order so we can get out of here faster.
“You have no idea how happy I was when you agreed to meet me.”
I stop looking for the waiter and turn my gaze on Ashley, meeting hers so she can see I’m serious when I tell her, “That is not why we’re here. This is not a reunion. I agreed to meet you because I wanted to tell you, face to face, to stop your bullshit.”
Her eyes dim and she sits back in her chair. She has the fucking nerve to look wounded. “My bullshit?”
“You’re stalling. You’re using every trick in the book to try to drag this shit out. It’s a waste of time and money, not to mention energy. You and I don’t have kids or intertwined family; there’s nothing to untangle. There’s no reason for this to be a whole thing. We had a relationship that didn’t work out. That’s it. Keep your rings, keep your clothes, keep all your fucking shoes and purses—just sign the goddamn papers and let me out of this godforsaken marriage.”
Ashley shakes her head, looking at me like my words disgust her. “You think this is about stuff? Fuck you, Griff. Fuck you for saying that.”
“Fine, fuck me. I don’t care anymore. Just sign the papers.”
“Stop saying that,” she snaps. “This isn’t a relationship that didn’t work out, it’s our marriage. We got married. We made promises to each other.”
I sit back, laughing a little at her gall. “Wow. Really? You want to talk to me about promises? You weren’t too worried about those promises when some other asshole was balls deep inside you in my fucking club, now, were you?”
Her eyes well up with practiced tears. “I made a mistake, Griff. A horrible, stupid, selfish mistake. I was feeling… I was just feeling so neglected. You hadn’t even touched me in weeks; you didn’t look at me like you wanted me. Then suddenly this stranger did, and it was stupid, I know that. It was cruel and the wrong thing to do. I should have resisted. I should have gone home and tried talking to you about how I was feeling.”
If she thinks that little speech is going to gain her sympathy, she’s sadly mistaken. “You always blame me, don’t you? You did the same shit after Seb’s wedding.”
Her eyes flash with anger. “That was your fault. You were mooning over Moira the whole fucking time. You watched him dance with her and then—” She holds a hand up, as if to stop herself. “This isn’t productive. This isn’t what I want. It’s not about blame. It doesn’t matter who was at fault. We don’t have to dredge up the past. It doesn’t have to matter, that’s what I’m saying. We’ve both made mistakes. Let’s start fresh.”
“You’ve made mistakes,” I state. “You. Not me. I never fucked anyone else. That was only you. Even when I was miserable, I kept my fucking dick in my pants.”
“But you didn’t tell me you were miserable! I didn’t know.”
My eyebrows shoot up. “You couldn’t tell?”
Ashley sighs. “I’m not a mind reader, Griff. Sometimes marriages get hard.”
I shake my head. “That is not what happened between us. That’s not what it was. We were not two people in a good marriage who went through a rough patch. I wanted to believe that too, but it wasn’t true. It was bullshit, Ashley, just like our relationship. I never should have married you in the first place and I think you know that. We moved too fast, we made a mistake. That doesn’t mean we should be miserable for the rest of our lives.”
“I think it’s a little much to say I made you miserable,” she informs me.
“Yeah, well, you weren’t in the room when my best friend with his fucking fantasy marriage had to tell me he saw my wife fucking someone else. Maybe then you’d have a different persp
ective.”
Ashley points at me, like I just proved her point. “That right there is the problem, Griff. You always compared our marriage to theirs. Always.”
I stare at the glass of water in front of me, at the condensation on the outside of the glass. We haven’t even touched our water. The waiter hasn’t even approached yet and I’m already so fucking annoyed that I want to crawl out of my skin.
“You know what? Their marriage isn’t as perfect as you think it is. They’re full of shit, Griff, that’s what they are. No one is that happy all the time. No couple still looks at each other like that after being married for years.”
“You’re wrong,” I state. “Just because we didn’t doesn’t mean no one does. They take care of their marriage. They go out of their way to make one another happy. They’re happier than we were because they’re good together, because they care enough to take care of their relationship. We never did. That should tell us something.”
“That we didn’t try hard enough,” she states, following the same logic, but coming up with a much different result.