Derek takes a deep breath.
We're standing face to face, still in the hallway, my back to the door. I hit the light switch and he flinches a little at the sudden brightness.
"You told me you developed feelings for her," I remind him, "she was the reason you wanted to cancel our wedding. So don't tell me it was nothing, okay?"
For what it's worth, Derek looks anguished, his eyes like bottomless pools of pain and guilt. He drags a hand across his face and presses his lips together. After a beat, he nods to the living room.
"Can we sit?"
My arms are folded across my chest; I'm in defense mode, braced for impact. His question catches me off guard and I relent. I guess we're going to do this.
"Okay, sure."
I follow him and he manspreads on the very sofa on which we made love the night before. I sit next to him, feeling awkward, a little like I'm next to a stranger in a waiting room of some kind. Our thighs touch briefly and I pull away. I smooth down my skirt and look at him. He's staring straight ahead, then down at his phone, still on the couch table in front of us, still dark. Some part of me expects it to light up with messages from Emily right now as if she is a demon I might have summoned simply by mentioning her name. But nothing like that happens.
Derek takes another deep breath before he starts talking. His hands are balled to fists; his entire body is radiating tension.
"So, well..."
He hasn't even started yet and he's already faltering. I resist the temptation to prompt him, to poke and prod. I want to hear this, but I also want him to speak from the heart, as dumb as that sounds. I want the truth and nothing but.
Derek releases his breath shakily, his gaze flicking over to me, then back to the phone.
"Joseph hired Emily four months ago. She's like his sister-in-law's niece or something."
*Nepotism, awesome,* I think, righteous indignation flashing through me. As if I needed another reason to hate Emily. I don't comment though.
"She was cute, funny..." Derek trails off again, his voice slow and leaden with guilt. He can't meet my eyes which might be for the best because I'm starting to feel the first sting of tears.
*No, I'm not gonna cry just because my fiancé called some other woman cute and funny, come on!*
"How far did it go, Derek?" I ask, surprising myself with how steady I sound, how matter-of-fact.
"It didn't go anywhere, I swear!" He says it quickly and forcefully as he grabs my hand, shooting me a beseeching look. "We flirted which was bad enough, I understand that. I broke your trust, I let myself be distracted by something meaningless because I was having cold feet, but when I look back at it now, I don't even get why I did that; it doesn't compute, it's like a different person did that."
"No." I shake my head, relieved, suspicious and disappointed at the same time. "Don't just tell me this 'it wasn't really me' crap. It obviously was you and it was serious enough for you to want to call off the wedding."
Derek looks down into his lap, chastised.
"That was nerves and I regret what I did. I can't even tell you how much I regret it. And now..." He turns his head and fixes me with a piercing glare; it's almost accusing in its intensity. "... now I know that there's never going to be anyone else for me. Only you. I think about you all the time, can't get my mind off you—"
"Nothing happened?" I interrupt him, not ready to give up on my quest for truth quite yet despite how much I enjoy hearing profess his love. "Not even a kiss?"
I study his face, registering the tiniest shifts in his expression, a slight surprised lift of the eyebrows, a twitch at the corner of his mouth. The answer becomes painfully obvious, legible in the set of his jaw, the way he casts down his eyes, turns his head away.
"We kissed once. I'm so—"
The words suckerpunch me despite how much I'd tried to brace myself for them.
"So you just lied to me when you told me nothing happened," I hear myself say, cutting him off mid-excuse. My voice is calm and colder than ice. My palms sting as my fingernails dig into them.
"It just happened. I don't even know—"
"Where?" The word bursts from my lips seemingly of its own accord. My brain is on autopilot while my heart pounds out its hollow, painful beats. He wouldn't have kissed her in the office, not even in the break room, right? No, Derek takes his job and his relationship to his colleagues seriously. Keeping things professional during work hours is important to him. Which means...
"Did you go on a date with her?"
"No. Skye, come on, that's not how it was!"
"Then how was it?"
"Drinks after work with everyone there," he replies. "It was innocent at first. But then I walked her to her car and... she kissed me." He shakes his head, looking up at me through his lashes. It feels awkward, sitting side by side like this, my insides churning.
"She kissed you?" I repeat his phrasing, emphasizing his convenient sentence structure wherein he was the mere object.
He nods.
"I swear, Skye. I didn't see it coming. Seriously, it just happened."
Like rainfall or an earthquake. I feel like laughing, imagining the girl from the website, this niece or whatever as weather or natural disaster.
"Did you push her away or did you kiss her back?"
Derek doesn't reply and my insides cramp. I study his profile. There he sits, the man I was going to marry, guilty as all hell. It makes me feel sick to my stomach to imagine that moment between him and this other girl and it makes me even sicker to realize that whatever he tells me now, he did want her to kiss him. It's clear as day.
"I was confused, Skye," he whispers, a pleading note to his voice. "Really... I don't understand myself right now."
"What's that even supposed to mean?" I hear my own impatience, a thin veneer masking my heartbreak.
Derek looks me in the eye for what feels like the first time since we sat down on the couch.
"It means that my head is all messed up; my feelings are all over the place and..." He draws a deep, frustrated breath. "I can't figure things out, not without you. When I imagine you leaving me, I feel like I might lose my mind. That's why I kept texting you, why I drove over to Kaylee's even though I knew —" He interrupts himself and shakes his head in disbelief. "I knew you wouldn't approve of me doing that and I know that if things were the other way around and you went looking for me when I was out with my friend's I'd—" Derek stops suddenly and blinks once in utter confusion. "I... I actually want that."
His voice is so small and bewildered that I'm sure I must have misheard.
"What?"
"I want you to want me like that; I... I need you to." Derek gets up suddenly, takes a step towards me and falls to his knees in front of me, all in the space of two seconds.
He stares up at me pleadingly, his handsome face tipped back, his eyes on mine as if I might hold his salvation.
"Skye, please, I'll do anything... I'll quit my job if that's what you want, anything to earn your forgiveness."