THE WRONG MRS BANDINI

My phone buzzed while I was standing pantsless in Xavier Bandini's kitchen, eating twenty-dollar strawberries out of a crystal bowl that probably cost more than my first laptop. If there was a more accurate representation of my life over the past three years, I hadn't found it yet. I was wearing one of Xavier's white shirts, which fell to mid-thigh, my hair still damp from the shower, while Boston glittered beyond the floor-to-ceiling windows of his sky-high penthouse. It had been three days since MIT graduation, and I hadn't done a single productive thing except sleep until noon, drink Xavier's wine, and tell people I was considering several job offers when, in reality, I was considering whether I could live forever on croissants and bad decisions. My phone lit up. June Whitmore. I stared at the name for a few seconds. June was Xavier's first ex-girlfriend. The kind of ex from back when Xavier was nineteen, had too much money, too little fear, and, according to campus rumors, once brought two different women to the same gala because he'd forgotten he'd already invited the first one. Her message was just one sentence. [You should probably see what your boyfriend does when you’re not around.] There was a video underneath. I let out a short laugh. "Cute." Seriously. How original. I pressed play. The video was a little dark, filmed from the corner of a hotel room. There was a large bed, warm yellow wall lamps, and rumpled white sheets. Rebecca Sinclair sat on the edge of the bed. I knew her. Everyone knew her. The Sinclair heiress, perfect blonde hair, legs for days, and a smile that always made her look like she'd just won something. Then a man walked into the frame. I recognized his shoulders. The way he walked. The way his left hand ran through his hair when he was tired. But the camera caught his face, too. Clearly.... ....Oh, God. It was Xavier. No graininess. No shadows I could use as an excuse. No blur I could hate and blame on manipulation. Xavier Bandini was standing shirtless in Rebecca Sinclair's hotel room. Rebecca said something I couldn't hear. Xavier laughed. I froze. That laugh. The same laugh I'd heard just hours ago when he'd whispered in my ear as we stood on this balcony, telling me I shouldn't take the job in San Francisco because he already had much more interesting plans for us. The video kept playing. Rebecca stood up. Her hand touched Xavier's chest. Xavier didn't pull away. He kissed her. I hit pause. My hand stayed suspended in the air. There was nothing but silence in my head. The kind of silence so complete I could hear the refrigerator humming behind me. Just hours earlier, Xavier had tied my hair back with his own hair tie because it kept falling into my food while we were having lunch. Then he'd kissed the back of my neck and said, in that ridiculously casual tone he always used when talking about our future as if every decision had already been made without a shareholder meeting, "We're getting a new penthouse next month." I'd turned around. "We?" "Yeah." "I don't remember agreeing to live with you." "You never agreed to take over half my closet either, but somehow here we are." I'd thrown my napkin at him. He'd laughed, caught my wrist, pulled me onto his lap, and told me he wanted an architecture studio near Back Bay someday. I could work from anywhere. We'd have a place with big windows. Maybe a dog. I'd told him I hated dogs. Then he'd kissed me. And... now I’m standing in his kitchen, holding a video of him kissing another woman. I played the rest. There wasn't much. Enough. More than enough. When the screen went black, I took a bottle of wine out of the fridge, poured myself a glass, then stared at it before dumping it down the sink. Xavier came home at 11:16 p.m. He walked in talking on the phone, his black suit jacket in one hand, his tie already off, the top two buttons of his shirt undone. His dark hair was slightly messy, his jaw shadowed with stubble, and of course, he looked ridiculously handsome. "Tell him Monday," he said into the phone, then stopped when he saw me sitting on the couch. His eyes flicked to the suitcase standing by the door, and something in his expression changed. "Call you back." He hung up. I stayed where I was. "Iris." "X." He looked at the suitcase again. "Why are your things packed?" "Because I'm trying out this revolutionary concept called leaving." One eyebrow lifted slightly. "Where?" I smiled. "Funny." "What?" "You actually think that's the important question." He set his jacket on a chair and walked toward me. I held up my phone. "Don't." Xavier went suddenly quiet, and something in his expression shifted the moment I said it. The change was barely noticeable, but I'd known him long enough to recognize when he was hiding something. What made me sick was how quickly I understood what it meant. He knew. Fuck. I hadn't even shown him the video yet, and his reaction had already given me the answer I'd been desperately hoping I wouldn't get. I kept staring at him, still giving him a chance to tell me I was wrong, that there was some other explanation for all of this. But the longer he stayed silent, the stupider I felt for still holding on to that hope. "Wow," I finally muttered, letting out a laugh that didn't even sound like my own. "Iris." "You know." He exhaled. And there it was. Three years. Three years of love, arguments, s*x in our college apartment, two a.m. coffee runs, final projects, birthdays, Thanksgivings, every ridiculous promise he'd ever made while half asleep. All of it reduced to one guilty exhale. I stood up. "Rebecca Sinclair?" He rubbed his jaw. "Let me explain." I laughed. "Please. I'm dying to hear this. Did you trip and fall into her p***y?" His jaw tightened. "Don't." "Why? Too graphic?" "It was a mistake." I stared at him. "A mistake is sending an email to the wrong person, Xavier. Adding salt twice. Sleeping with another woman usually involves several logistical steps." "It wasn't like that." "So you didn't sleep together?" Silence. I nodded slowly. "Right." "Iris, listen to me." "No." "I didn't even know that video existed." "I don't care." "It was the night after the Sinclair gala. I was drunk, we'd just had a fight, and Rebecca..." "STOP." He stopped and I could see anger starting to creep into his face. "We had a fight?" I asked. "That's your excuse?" "I said it wasn't an excuse." "But you still brought it up." "Iris." "I was angry that night, too." I stepped closer to him. "You know what I did?" He said nothing. "I went home. Alone." His gaze dropped briefly. "Yeah," I said quietly. "Turns out I won a morality contest I didn't even know we were having." He let out a harsh breath and reached for my hand. I stepped back before he could touch me. He stopped. Well, he was always touching me. A hand on my waist when he walked past. Fingers resting against the back of my neck when we went somewhere together. A kiss on my temple for no reason. As if his body never quite believed I was there unless he was touching me. Now I couldn't stand the thought of even one of his fingers brushing my skin. "I f****d up," he said. "Yeah." "I know." "Growth." "Can you stop doing that?" "Doing what?" "Making jokes." I stared at him, then smiled without humor. "If I stop making jokes, I might start throwing things. And you own way too much expensive shit." He stepped closer again. "I love you." Those three words hit harder than the video. "Don't." "I do." "Don't say that right now." "It's true." "If that's true, I don't even want to know how you treat people you don't love." His face changed. Finally, I saw something crack. "Iris, please." I walked toward my suitcase. He moved faster, grabbing the handle before I could pull it away. "No." I looked at his hand. "Let me go." "We're not ending three years like this." I burst out laughing. "HAHAHAHA. You must be out of your f*****g mind if you think there's still an 'us' after you put your d**k in another woman's pussy." "Iris." "You made a decision without me when you walked into that hotel room. Now it's my turn." I pulled on the suitcase. He didn't let go. "Stay, please." "Why?" "Because you're angry." "I'll still be angry tomorrow." "Then yell at me tomorrow." "I don't want to see you tomorrow." That finally made him let go. I grabbed my suitcase. Xavier stood in front of me, too tall, too handsome, too familiar, and for a few seconds, all I could see was the man I'd loved for three years. The man who waited outside my lab with food. Who designed a building with a workspace just for me as a joke, then secretly kept the blueprints. I hated him for making all of it real, because if our relationship had been terrible, leaving would've been easy. But we'd been happy... until he destroyed it. I opened the door. "Iris." I stopped without turning around. "I'll fix this." My tears finally spilled over, but thankfully, he couldn't see my face. "I know," I said. "That's your problem, Xavier. You always think everything can be bought, rebuilt, or fixed." I turned to look at him. "Not this." Then I left. +++ Three weeks later, I was sitting on the bathroom floor of my new apartment in Chicago, wearing an old MIT T-shirt and one sock. I had no idea where the other sock had gone because my life was really staying on theme. There were three pregnancy tests on the sink. Because one didn't feel scientific enough. Two felt paranoid. Three, according to my ridiculously expensive education, counted as peer review. I stared at the little stick in my hand. Two red lines. I picked up the second test. Two lines. The third. Two lines. "Okay." I looked up at the ceiling. "Okay." Not okay. Not even remotely okay. My hand drifted down to my still-flat stomach, and for a few seconds, I just sat there, surrounded by unpacked moving boxes and a new life I hadn't even had the chance to start.s Then, without my permission, the first face that popped into my head was Xavier's. His smile. His hands. That deep voice of his, always calling me baby whenever he wanted something. I closed my eyes. Three weeks ago, I'd walked out of his penthouse and made one thing perfectly clear to myself. I was never going to see Xavier Bandini again. I looked at those two red lines one more time. Apparently, the universe had objections.