Tessa's Story

by Zahra Barnes

Grant had something to tell me? My stomach continued to react as though I were on the type of roller coaster that took you high above everything, then just let you drop into a free fall. I’d always hated those with a passion. I told myself to calm down, but my physical reaction was undermining my command and urging me to panic.

“What is it?” I clutched the knot in my towel so tightly my nails dug into my palm. “Is everything okay?”

Grant kept pulling at his tufts of hair. “Should you maybe sit down?” Sure, I thought. Should you maybe give me a heart attack?

I walked around the couch and sank down across from where he sat. I instinctively tensed all my muscles as a form of bracing myself. Well, I tried to. My staunch avoidance of the gym came back to haunt me and my muscles just quivered tentatively, unused to the strain.

“My job wants to send me to Abu Dhabi for a bit.”

Just like that, the alarm drained out of my body. It’s not Sophie, I realized. He didn’t cheat again. I was so relieved I started cackling like I’d lost my last lonely marble.

“Wait, that’s it? Abu Dhabi? I mean, that’s amazing!” I gulped some air. “So amazing. But I thought it was going to be something terrible, Jesus. When are you going?”

“A week from today.”

“Wow, that’s so soon! Okay, but it gives us some time to do a few fun things before you leave, at least. When do you come back?”

“That’s the thing. It’s not exactly terrible, but it’s sort of up in the air. They’ve decided to open an arm of the company over there. They need some of us to scout things out for about three weeks.”

“Grant!” My wave of relief collided with a fierce sense of pride. I launched myself across the space separating us and threw myself onto him. Well, first I snatched off that ridiculous shower cap. Then I pounced. Three weeks was totally doable, plus this news meant potentially huge things for his career. I was ecstatic.

As I wrapped my arms around him and squeezed, I realized something was off. He cradled me stiffly, like I was his great-aunt who smelled like cough medicine and old crackers. It was a totally perfunctory hug, and the end result was about as comforting as nuzzling a gargoyle.

I pulled back. “What’s wrong?”

“It’s three weeks—“

“I know, that isn’t bad at all!”

“—to start out,” he finished.

“Oh. What does that mean, three weeks to start out?”

“Like I said, everything’s up in the air. If things go well, and it looks like they might, they may want to keep me there longer. There are a few long-term positions over there, but no one knows how it’s going to shake out.”

“How long-term?” Getting answers from him is starting to feel like pulling teeth, I thought. My brain, taking its cue to ratchet up the freakout once again, ran with the tooth thing and conjured up a Saw-esque image involving pliers and an impromptu dental extraction. I shuddered. I’d never been one for torture porn.Your brain is officially short-circuiting, I worried.

“Are you okay?”

“I’m fine, I’m fine. Just tell me what you know.”

“I really don’t know much. My bosses are being as transparent as possible, which is a plus. But it all depends on what happens when we actually land and get things going.”

“So that’s what you’re going over there to figure out?”

“Exactly.”

“Who’s going with you?”

“Sophie isn’t going.” He rattled off a list of coworkers who were traveling with him in addition to a few high-ranking people who were already on the ground. I hadn’t wanted to out-and-out ask about Sophie, but he’d known what I’d meant. That’s what I hated about the new us. Everything was laced with subtext.

“Why Abu Dhabi? Why not, I don’t know, Paris or Shanghai?”

“Abu Dhabi has so much money from oil and gas, and the Emirates is trying to break free from their petro-state identity. A lot of companies want to funnel some money into sprucing up their images, and graphic design is booming out there. That’s where we would come in.” His voice got more animated as he continued, dipping and rising with excitement.

“Well, bottom line, this is unreal! Right? You just got that promotion and you’re already on your way up!” I didn’t want to be so short-sighted about whatever would happen to us that I didn’t make it a point to congratulate him, like a few months before when I’d totally forgotten about the presentation that had landed him the promotion.

Finally, a small smile played on his lips. “It’s pretty incredible. But I was just nervous that the second you heard, that would really change us. Or whatever this is.”

So here it was, The State of Our Union. It’s not like we could go on pretending everything was normal when he was about to ship out halfway across the world.

“Well, what do you think it means?” I tried not to be too obvious about holding my breath, but I’ll be honest, my lung capacity got a workout. I was confusing the hell out of myself. The possibility of us breaking up because of long-distance was much less heart-wrenching than the alternative: because we just couldn’t make it work after all we’d been through. At the same time, would it feel like we were giving up? Wasn’t the point of love that you’d fight for it, no matter what? We’d been having so much trouble that part of me just wanted to throw in the towel, and I wouldn’t have blamed him if he’d felt the same. But had we really done all this work to get broken up by distance?

A thought wormed its way through the tangle. “Wait. When did you find out about this? I wasn’t trying to eavesdrop, but it sounded like you’ve known for a bit?”

He did his best to stop himself from wincing. “My boss told me a few days ago.”

“How many days?”

“Four.”

My foot started jiggling madly, seemingly of its own volition. We weren’t even officially back together, so I knew I didn’t actually have a right to be upset that he hadn’t told me immediately. Then again, since when do emotions care what logic has to say about anything?

“I didn’t even know if I was going to go at first,” he followed up.

“Why?”

“Because of us.” He motioned back and forth between our chests. “I wanted to wait to tell you until I was sure.”

My annoyance receded. “Grant, you can’t think like that! You have to do this, and more of these kinds of things. You’d just end up resenting me otherwise. You love your job so much.”

“Yeah, but I love you, too.”

“I know. And you know I love you.”

“Okay, but where does that leave us?”

“Why don’t we just see where it goes? I mean, you don’t even know how long you’ll be there beyond the three weeks.”

He nodded. “You’re right. So we stay…”

“Together-ish. Basically what we’ve been doing.”

“Just me and you in this, except a few thousand miles away from each other,” he said.

“Right. For the three weeks. And then we can revisit it. I mean, isn’t this basically why FaceTime was invented?”

A comforted look settled over his features before he kissed me. Rocked by the thought that he would be leaving me soon, I pushed him back onto the couch, suddenly hungry for him. He gripped my hips and pressed me into his lap, obviously quite ready for me, too. I leaned in and sucked his bottom lip, knowing exactly what it would do to him.

“Get this off,” he groaned and tugged at my towel.

I played dumb. “What? Oh, this?” I held one end to my chest and the other away from my body, exposing some skin while keeping all the goods under wraps.

“Yes, this.” He yanked it away roughly and threw it across the room, then went for my nipples like they happened to be dispensing his favorite kind of beer.

I worked my way into his pants and held him, pulsing, in my hand. I felt a heady rush of power at the quite literally rock-solid evidence of the effect I had on him.

He hoisted me up thanks to a surge of hormone-induced power, ready to whisk me away to my bedroom. I kissed his neck as we went, losing myself in him until he stopped in the middle of the living room.

“What?” I breathed.

He turned and looked into my eyes. “Debating going back for the shower cap. It was kind of sexy.”

I bit his neck in retribution for his teasing my silly, yet totally functional, bath wear. When we got to my room, he threw me onto the bed and made me forget Sophie, Abu Dhabi, and anything that didn’t involve the two of us taking each other in like he was leaving the very next day.

- - -

“Abu freaking Dhabi? Are you shitting me?” Marley gaped at me over her huge slice of pizza. As soon as Grant had left, I’d called her, telling her to get over to my place ASAP. She’d shown up at my doorstep bearing pizza and red wine, cementing her place on the good friends list for life.

“I swear. Abu freaking Dhabi.”

“Is he going to be safe over there?” Marley wasn’t overly fond of Grant at the moment, but her brow creased with worry all the same.

“Oh, totally. It’s one of the most stable places in the Middle East right now.” Of course I’d done some research while waiting for her to arrive. “I’m not worried about that.”

“Okay, but you’re definitely worried about something.”

“I mean, depending on how long he stays, this could be it for us. I hate even saying that.”

“But maybe it’s what’s right after everything that’s happened? Just because he’s your first love doesn’t mean he needs to be your forever love.”

“I guess. I know what’s happened lately hasn’t exactly been good, but it’s kind of like when you’ve been waiting for the subway for like twelve minutes and it doesn’t seem like one’s coming. You feel like you might as well keep waiting because you’ve already been there for so long, you know?”

“Tessa. You should never say ‘might as well’ when you’re talking about your relationship.”

I cringed, catching what I’d said after the fact.

“Any guy you’re with should make you feel the way you do when you’re sitting in a restaurant and you see your food coming,” she continued. “He should make you exactly that excited. You’d never say, ‘Well, I might as well eat this.’”

Where did she come up with this stuff?

“You’re crazy, but you’re also right. Ugh, and things are even weirder after I ran into that guy, Jack. Worst timing ever.”

“Oh my God, he was so delicious. I almost dropped my pants right there at the bar. It would have been better than dropping them later that night.” She rolled her eyes. After sending me her conquest’s driver’s license information, Marley had been more than willing to go home with him. “Height is deceptive,” she’d texted me after. Turns out that even though he was tall, he’d been working with about four inches down below. “But what do you mean things got weird?”

I filled her in on the heated conversation Grant and I had dealt with when I’d told him about Jack. When I was done, she put her crust down and dusted her hands off on her black velvet pants. I made a mental note to borrow them on our next outing.

“That was a dick move.”

“Well, sort of, but I can see where he’s coming from.”

She stared at me, obviously amused. “No, I mean what you did. That was a dick move. That guy was so hot, there’s no way you weren’t having a full-body orgasm when you told Grant about him. You’re no Jennifer Lawrence, you won’t be winning awards for your acting anytime soon.”

“What?! I wasn’t having an orgasm when I talked about him! I was totally normal.” Jack’s eyes flashed through my mind and I shoved them away, trying to tamp down the heat I felt rising on my face. “I admit that it wasn’t the most self-aware thing to do, but we used to be fine with stuff like that!”

“It doesn’t matter if you were fine with it before, Tessa! I read about a couple just like you two in Glamour. Cheating changes the foundation of a relationship and you can’t count on anything being the same in the aftermath. Like, if Abu Dhabi had come up before the whole cheating thing, what would you guys have done?”

I answered without a doubt. “We’d be staying together, no question.” We’d basically been on the forever track before, so even considerable distance wouldn’t have stopped us.

“And now you’re just going to wait and see. Everything’s different. Don’t forget that.”

I paused, reliving the the Jack blowup between me and Grant. How had I not guessed it would turn out the way it did? If only I could rewind time and shove that clueless anecdote back into my mouth before it reached his ears. “Why are you always right? It would be annoying if I didn’t love you so much.” I pushed my pizza away.

She shook her head and nudged it back. “Tessa, any pizza is a personal pizza if you try hard enough. You know this.”

I climbed onto the couch next to her and rested my head in her lap. Nibbling absentmindedly on another slice, I felt a bit reassured. No matter how up in the air things were, this would never change. I didn’t know what would happen when Grant left, or even the next day. But in that moment, Marley rubbing my shoulder and sitting with me in silence was enough.