“Stay there,” I murmur. Unnecessarily, too, because he has no intention of moving. He tucks his face between his front paws and closes his eyes.
I walk to the intercom by my front door and click down the receiver button. “Hello?”
“Soph?” a voice says. “Is that you?”
My anticipation turns to annoyance. “What the hell are you doing here?”
“Soph, please,” my ex-husband says. “I just want to talk to you. Ihaveto talk to you.”
“No, you don’t.”
“Yes. Please come down,” he says, voice too loud in my quiet apartment. “Meet me in the lobby.”
“Go away, Percy.”
“I won’t!” he says. “I’ll stay here until morning, until youhaveto leave for work.”
Shit. I press down the receiver again. “Fine, but you’re not coming in, and you’re leaving the second you’ve said whatever stupid thing you’ve come here for.”
“Good, Soph. That sounds good.” His words are fuzzy around the edges.
I march into my bedroom and pull on a pair of sweatpants. Then I stick my feet in a pair of worn-out loafers and throw over a coat, hiding most of the mismatched outfit. Irritation burns like a flame in my chest.
He’s never once come to my new place.
Sure, he must know the address, seeing as the moving company packed up all my stuff from our shared apartment and drove it straight here. But that was almost a year ago now. And while he called, and texted, and emailed nonstop in the beginning, he never came here.
I go downstairs. Percy’s standing by the front door of my building. His suit jacket is unbuttoned, and so are the first three buttons of his shirt. His hair looks mussed.
“Soph!” he says.
I open the front door. “What the hell do you think you’re doing?”
His smile turns into a frown. “I’m sorry, so sorry. I know you don’t… I just needed to see you.”
“Well, here I am,” I say.
“You look great,” he says. “I was out with the boys tonight, but I… I just couldn’t stop thinking. I had to know, so I had to come here. Why, Soph?”
“Why what?”
“Why did you have to divorce me?” He puts a hand to his chest, like he’s injured. “Why did you throw it away, all of it? You, me, our home… our future.”
“You can’t be serious.”
“Soph, I’m always serious.”
“You’re never serious,” I say. “If that was the single, stupid reason you showed up here drunk, then I want you to leave.”
“Please, please, just… tell me. Explain it to me. I can’t understand it. I’veneverbeen able to understand it.”
“You,” I say, enunciating every syllable, “had an affair. For months. With a woman we both knew.”
He shakes his head. “I know, and that was my mistake. And I was sorry for it. I told you that, over and over and over again. Why couldn’t you just have forgiven me? Please, Soph… I’m not happy.”
“That’s not my problem anymore.”
He sighs, like he didn’t hear my words. Or maybe he’s just ignoring them. He was often good at that. “I’m not happy with Scarlett. She wants and wants and wants, all the damn time. Wants me to take her to places and wants us to get married. I’m not happy… But Soph, I was happy with you. You’re so smart, and you’re so good at teasing me, and you… God, you’re pretty, too. So damn pretty.”