know that’s what I do, right?” I said. “I’m a stylist. I style.”
Sebastian said nothing.
“I don’t know why I’m surprised,” I said. “It’s not like you ever took my job seriously.”
“Jesus, Jess, that’s not true. Why do you say that?”
“I’m a stylist. You’re a journalist. You’re the legit one.”
“You’re saying that. Not me. I never said that.” Sebastian scoffed and shook his head.
Here we were again—in the ruts of a much-treaded argument.
He pointed at the bag. “That stuff is not what you do with your styling business anyway. You dress people.”
“Do you even know what that means?”
Why did I do this? What made me want to bug him, to try and draw him into this crap?
Because it’s all you have left.
That was the thought that answered me, and it rang like a bell, a few loud chimes. Then the sound died into the distance, drifting away, just like we had done.
The strong muscles of Sebastian’s jaw tensed, clenched. He ran a hand over his curly brown hair that was cut extra short for the summer. “Of course I know what that means. To an extent.”
In total, Sebastian and I had known each other for seven years—five of them married, the last of them divorced—and yet we still didn’t have a handle on what the other did for a living. Sebastian deliberately withheld, and so I guess I did it, too, in retribution.
“Look, Jess—” Sebastian fake smiled “—we’re talking about the collar, right?”
I looked in the bag. “The collar and the leash.” I picked them up and jangled them together for effect.
“First of all, look at those.” Another shake of his head. “Baxter is a boy. Hell, he’s three years old. Bax is a man now.”
At the sound of his name, Baxter tore into the kitchen and dropped a white rubber ball at our feet, his tail thumping. Throw it for me, I could hear him thinking. C’mon, throw it for me.
Like a true child of divorce, Baxter always seemed to know when to deflect the situation.
I picked up the ball and threw it down the hall. He scampered after it, sliding a little on the hardwood floors.
“He’s a man who likes this collar and leash,” I said, lifting the bag a little.
“How do you know he likes it?”
“He prances around.”
“Baxy does not prance,” Sebastian said.
“You know he does.”
I both hated and loved the familiar feel of the conversation, the verbal poking at one another.
“He’s a fifteen-pound prancing machine,” I added, another jab.
“He only prances,” Sebastian pointed out, “when he’s really happy.”
“Exactly. And he prances when he’s wearing that collar. Point made.”
Sebastian just looked at me.
“Anyway...” I said, then let my words die.
“Anyway,” he repeated.
A beat went by. Baxter ran into the kitchen again, dropped the ball. He was a mini goldendoodle—a mix of golden retriever and poodle—and the golden part must have had strong genes because the dog would retrieve all day if we let him.
Sebastian lifted the ball, tossed it again.
“Baxter brought something else back,” he said, pointing at the bag.
I looked inside again. A white plastic bag was folded over and lay at the bottom. I picked it up and lifted a cellophane bag from inside. “Rawhide,” I read from the package. “Huh.” I looked at it—half-eaten. I looked back up at Sebastian. “Did you feed him this while he was with you?”
Sebastian raised his eyebrows, gave a slight smile.
That mouth, with its fuller bottom lip. It still got me sometimes. There was the rest of Sebastian, too—the strong body, wide shoulders and long arms that felt so good wrapped around me. But it was that lip most of all that used to get me. I ignored it, looked instead somewhere in the area of his forehead.
“You know that’s like giving your kid a bowl of taffy?” I said. “It’s completely unhealthy.”
“He’s got to eat more than raw chicken and raw eggs,” Sebastian said.
“That was one week that I did that!” I said. “One week.”
I’d been led by our dog trainer to give Baxter a raw diet, lured by the promises of a glossy coat and exceptional health. But when you have your dog every other week, raw foods are hard to keep around all the time. (And kind of unpleasant to serve.)
Sebastian sighed a little and searched my eyes with his. But then he opened his mouth. “I’m on my way to the airport.”
Wounds, no longer old, felt jabbed, hurt again. Sebastian was a war correspondent, one of the most well respected. His job had long been our sticking point—his need to go overseas, and his agreeing to not tell anyone, including his spouse, where he was headed. I knew military spouses had to deal with that, but I hadn’t married military, and I hadn’t realized the extent of his investigative writing—the embedding with the troops, the being in the middle of the action.
So he was off once more. I knew better than to ask where he was going.
But apparently he felt some kind of duty to try and make nice. “It’s a small conflict.”
A “small conflict” could mean a bloody, ruthless battle in a small Middle Eastern territory. But “small conflict” did not mean small casualties. Sebastian himself had returned from a “small conflict” with a gash across his collarbone that looked a lot like someone had tried to cut his throat. He still hadn’t told me what had happened. I still didn’t know where he’d been because the newspaper never published his piece for whatever reason.
Baxter ran back into the foyer, a blue earthworm toy hanging from his mouth.
“C’mere, Dogger,” Sebastian said. His own nickname for Baxter. He picked him up. “I suppose you’re going to the dog park now?” he asked me. I thought I heard another small sigh.
“You know that you can still go to the dog park, right? I didn’t get that in the divorce.” I paused, made my voice kinder. “I don’t know why you don’t go when he’s with you.”
Sebastian shrugged, petted Baxter. “I thought I would find a park by my neighborhood. But they’re not the same. He doesn’t have his buddies.”
I
