Maybe Never by Nia Forrester

old girlfriend,” he said. “Emphasis on the old.”
    Riley’s eyes were cold. The explanation sounded sliver-thin, and it would to Tracy as well. She would need to hear more. He would have to tell her everything.
    An hour later, sitting in his car a block away from the townhouse, Brendan considered his options. There weren’t very many besides going in and talking to Tracy. Each day of the past week had drifted by with him in a haze of denial—denying that he was doing anything wrong by continuing to speak to Janice, denying that by leaving Tracy alone he was being the worse kind of coward, and denying that he missed her.
    Once she was gone, and he no longer came home to her scent lingering in the apartment, or the sounds of her up in the kitchen putting together something for him to eat. Once he no longer had to listen to her describe with excitement some tiny detail about the wedding she’d resolved that day. Once he didn’t have her next to him in bed, surreptitiously watching her caress her stomach in a habit that had sprung up practically overnight. Once he didn’t have these things, Brendan had to acknowledge that maybe he was the one too focused on the wedding. Maybe he was the one who was hung up on the event itself when the truth was, Tracy had wed herself to him a long time ago.
    Finally shutting off the engine, Brendan got out of the car and started toward the house. No matter where this conversation went, he knew where it was going to have to begin: with Janice. Bumping into Tracy like that, coming out of his office had been like one of those nightmare moments. Not because of where he and Janice had been, but because it was something he’d imagined in his head a dozen times, what Tracy would do, what she would say if she ever saw him with a woman he even appeared to be involved with. What she’d done, to his never-ending surprise—was nothing. She’d greeted Janice politely, if somewhat coolly and then she walked away.
    In the moment before she had, Brendan noticed something that people who did not know Tracy would not. She had closed herself off, wrapped herself in a shell as hard as steel, that no one —not even him—would penetrate. The shell was the same one he’d worked years ago to break into, and finally had. Opening her up, getting her to believe it was safe to do so, had been long and difficult.
    Damn, she had put him through it in those days.
    On a few mornings over the last couple of years, Brendan had awoken wondering whether it was worth it, whether he might not have finally met his match in this woman; this beautiful woman with an ugly past who even after they reconciled, tested and tested and tested, almost as though trying to force the issue of what she saw as his inevitable departure. The fights they had were epic and painful, every single one seemed destined to put an end to their relationship once and for all.
    That was the kind of fight he and Tracy had the evening that Brendan and Shawn learned that one of their employees at the lounge they co-owned who had been embezzling from them for months was probably going to jail. Almost thirty thousand dollars skimmed off their profits, by a twenty-four year old kid whom they both liked, and who might have had a good future ahead of him if he’d resisted the urge to do foolish things to support some hoped-for high-rolling NYC lifestyle.
    Brendan was torn up about it, and had to return to the lounge and break the news to the other employees; and to maintain group cohesion he decided to stay in the club until it closed in the early morning hours. He was exhausted from having worked a full day before getting there and from fighting with Tracy; and irritable and feeling like shit that he might play a role in derailing a kid’s future. When he called Tracy to let her know he wouldn’t be in until maybe seven a.m. the next morning, she’d said very little.
    But then later, sometime past midnight, one of the bartenders told him he was