Read Regrets Only for Free Online Page B

so I could get them back to you?” He sounded mildly
embarrassed. Whether it was because of the undergarments or his transparent
attempt to see her again, she couldn’t tell.
    “Oh,
Rick, I’d love to but—it’s just I am so busy. The gala is a few days away, and—”
    “Of
course. I understand. I’ll—”
    “Could
you mail them?” she asked quickly. Asking him to throw them out left too much
room for creepy doubts. Besides, they were her favorite pair of thirty-dollar underwear.
    “…hang
on to them until—” he was saying simultaneously. Then, “Oh, right, mail them.
Of course. I’ll be happy to.”
    “Thanks,
Rick. My office address is on my business card. Do you still have it?”
    “Er…no.”
    “Well,
it’s on my website. I’ll have my assistant send you a check for the postage,
okay?”
    His
voice switched from seemingly embarrassed to firm. “Suzanne, please don’t
insult me. I’ll pay the postage. Take care of yourself.”
    Before
she could respond, the line had gone dead.
    #
    The
next evening, she and Chad sat on the floor of her apartment, sticking
customized labels on five hundred auction programs and folding in a sheet with
last-minute additions to the auction. A half-bottle of wine and a bowl of
popcorn sat on a tray between them, and My Fair Lady was on the
television.
    “I
love this song,” Chad said, as Rex Harrison’s “I’m an Ordinary Man” resounded
from the TV. “Pretty much sums up my whole philosophy. At least about women.”
     Suzanne
snorted. “Just you wait, Chad Gwynn. Just you wait.”
    He
laughed and took a gulp of wine. “I will say that if I were ever going to be
with a woman, Audrey Hepburn would make the cut.”
    “Other
than being dead, you mean?”
    “Hey,
it’s not like we’re talking reality here anyway.”
    “True,”
she said. “I don’t know, though. She seems like she’d be high maintenance.”
    “Well,
that wouldn’t change my life much,” Chad sneered.
    His
partner, David, who was—Suzanne had learned over time—actually a very sweet
man, was a bit prone to dramatics. More than once Chad had slept on Suzanne’s
couch or at the office after they had an argument, after which David would
invariably whisk Chad away somewhere for a few days to make it up to him.
    For
a while, when he first started working for her, Suzanne had worried Chad might
be in an abusive relationship, but then when she spent time with them together,
she decided it was just how they worked. She was pretty sure they’d been
together since early college, which was nearly ten years. That was about a
hundred and twenty times as long as Suzanne’s average relationship, so who was
she to judge?
    “I’m
going to open another bottle,” he said, getting up to go to the kitchen. “Need
anything?”
    Suzanne
shook her head. She took the opportunity to stretch her back, though. She and
Chad often hung out at her apartment to do last-minute drudgery before a big
event. It was more comfortable than the office, and if Suzanne provided the
wine, Marci could typically be persuaded to lend a hand. But tonight Marci was
too tired to join them. Jake had called at 7:30 to report that she’d fallen
asleep on the couch after dinner and he couldn’t even convince her to move
upstairs to the bedroom.
    Suzanne
supposed it was just the beginning. With pregnancy now and children next,
Marci’s time would no longer be her own—or Suzanne’s, for that matter—for a
while to come. She remembered how long it had taken Beth to rejoin them socially
after she and Ray had kids; when she did rejoin them, it still seemed to be on
a limited basis.
    She
and Marci had often joked about it, and sworn that they would have children at
the exact same time of life, so neither of them would feel left out. Of course,
that was before Marci had moved to Austin, and certainly long before Jake had
cashed in their college promise to get married at thirty. Even now that they
were having a baby and she saw