The Woman Before You by Carrie Blake

Author:Carrie Blake [Blake, Carrie]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780008279462
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2018-02-05T00:00:00+00:00

Matthew

You may think you know who you are. You may imagine that you know what you think and what you’ll do and not do—and why. But as it turns out, you don’t. If I were being tortured, with a cattle prod pointed at my head or my genitals, and my torturer said, ‘Why did you say you wanted to go home to Iowa with Isabel for Christmas? She doesn’t even really want you,’ I couldn’t have explained it. I didn’t understand it myself.

Maybe it was the scotch—scotches—I’d had before Isabel got to the bar where I’d asked her to meet me. I didn’t even know exactly why I’d asked her to meet me in the bar. Maybe it was something about Val, something new and weird and hard to pinpoint or explain about how he’d changed, how he’d started talking to me, dealing with me. He’d begun to seem … guarded, as if he didn’t quite trust me, or as if he was secretly thinking of moving on, hiring another guy he found more interesting, more fun. Maybe he’d found out that Heidi had come to see me and flashed me with Isabel’s underwear.

Or maybe I said yes to Isabel just because I was bored and lonely. I had nothing to do, nothing planned for the holidays. My friends had moved steadily further into their own lives, further away from mine. The group bromance was almost over. They had girlfriends to spend Christmas Eve with, families to party with, to open presents, and drink eggnog, and feel sick from all the heavy cream and rum and eggs, and fall into bed with. What was I going to do? Order out for Chinese food? Go running in the cold empty park? Buy myself something special and get it wrapped so I could open it all by myself Christmas morning? Bring out the violins, I know, but still…

Anything seemed better.

Even Iowa, with Isabel.

I was getting … attached to her. I’d mostly put that whole incident—her hallucinating that Val was watching us in his bedroom—out of my mind. Or almost out of my mind.

I was almost always glad to see her. She was brave, in her crazy way. Always up for anything. And she was in love with me, also in her own crazy way. If she was crazy, a couple of days with her mom in her childhood home might help me understand just how insane she was. Or why. Or not.

I’d never been to the Midwest. Isabel said that her mom was an excellent cook. It would be a strange low-key, low-level adventure. Very low key. Low level. Not St. Bart’s. But something different, nonetheless.

I came up with dozens of explanations, and still I couldn’t explain why I’d said I wanted to go, why I’d actually bought my ticket. I’d arrive two days after Isabel to give her time to hang with her mom.

I bought her a silver wire bracelet from Tiffany’s. Snobbish, maybe, but I knew the little blue box from Tiffany’s would impress the folks in Iowa.

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