He apologizes again

I stopped in my tracks, held up my hands in surrender, and simply told her, "You deserve someone better than me."

She looked down questioningly at Claire, who mouthed the words, "Talk to him."

Tami nodded, grabbed her towel, and grudgingly jogged over to me—throwing an inadvertent bounce into her steps.

"Tami, I just want to say I'm sorry for—"

"The pool's kind of a public place to have this conversation, don't you think? Mind if we go somewhere else?"

That little voice in the back of my head warned me that going someplace alone with this girl might, once again, not be the brightest idea. But we needed to mend things and I figured the odds of anything EVER happening between us was about as likely as me ever getting into a real life swordfight.

I opened the door to my apartment and led her inside.

"Geez, you settled in fast," she said. "The last time I moved, I took like four months to get everything unpacked."

"Yeah, well, I've had a lot on my mind the past few days and it's helped me think."

She sat down at my breakfast table, now wrapped in a fluffy beach towel that did nothing to disguise the shape of her chest... Focus, Michael! I distracted myself by pouring my guest a glass of orange juice. I spoke quietly:

"Look, what happened the other night—I handled that in pretty much the worst way possible. I swear I never meant to lead you on, it's just—I wasn't expecting you to look the way you did when you walked out in those 'pajamas.' Sorry, I'm making excuses again."

Tami looked down at her glass of juice, thinking.

"How long have you and Sonya been together?" she said at last.

"Three years, almost."

"Tom and I were together for four. I thought he was the one, you know? We were each others' first."

She looked up at me, her lip twitching down into a frown. "It wasn't all your fault, what happened the other night. You told me you had a girlfriend. You dropped it into the conversation a propos of nothing. That should have clued me in right there that you weren't interested, but I just—I just needed—"

"You don't have to explain," I said.

"Have you ever been dumped?"

"No."

"It fucks with your head! Things between me and Tom weren't even BAD. They were going well. Too well, it turns out. It started to feel inevitable that we were going to wind up together. Get married, kids, happily ever after. And all of a sudden he started freaking out that he'd only ever had sex with one girl. Like he was entitled to some macho right of passage, fucking all kinds of women before he was **** to settle down."

"This guy dumped you because he liked you too much?"

"I know! What kind of sense does that make? And ever since then I've been going crazy trying to figure out what the hell is going on with me. I'm not even acting like myself! I mean, look at you—I was throwing myself at you, even after you said you were in a relationship. What kind of trampy bitch does that? I've never done that ever in my life."

"Hey, I wasn't exactly complaining."

Fifteen minutes later, we'd finished making our amends and were back at the pool with Claire, cooling down in the chlorinated water. Claire had forgiven me, Sonya had forgiven me, and now Tami had forgiven me. Everything was finally right in the world.

Well, everything except the fact that I couldn't take my eyes off those two girls as they splashed around in their itty-bitty bikinis...