by Amy Hatvany
“They’re cute,” Jake said. “I bet you have your hands full.”
I nodded, and put my phone away. “It can be hard,” I said, “but I love them to death.” I teared up a little as I spoke—my pride in being a mother far surpassed any pleasure I took from my career. The way their eyes lit up when they saw me—the way they threw their bodies at me, knowing I would always be there to catch them—made every minute of stress and hard work since the divorce worth it.
“I’d like to meet them,” Jake said.
I gave sort of a half-shrug, feeling protective of my babies, worried that maybe I’d shared too much. Since the divorce, I hadn’t dated anyone long enough or seriously enough to introduce them to the kids. It was one thing if I got hurt while dating, but there was no way I’d expose Ella and Tucker to someone if I wasn’t certain that the relationship would last.
My hesitation must have shown on my face because Jake reached over and put his hand on top of mine. “No rush,” he said. “I get it. We just met. But you should know I do like kids. I’ve always wanted to be a dad.” He rubbed his thumb on the side of my hand, and I shivered. He continued, his eyes riveted on mine. “A lot of women I’ve dated say they want to get serious with someone—get married, have a family—which is definitely what I want.” I imagined with the less-than-stable upbringing he’d endured, having a family, and creating a life for his children that he himself didn’t get to have, would be a priority. But it also pressed a panic button inside me, since Peter had claimed to want the same things. What if Jake ended up being just another man who wanted to control me?
“They say it, but don’t mean it?” I asked, cautiously.
“Exactly. A lot of them are looking for a man with a bank account to take them out and buy them expensive shit.” He shook his head. “That’s not my thing. I’m looking for something real. Someone real. A person I can root for and she can do the same for me. A true and equal partner.”
I nodded, pressing my lips together, feeling a little overwhelmed by how deep this conversation was getting. But I needed to know how any man I dated felt about possibly becoming a step-father, so I decided it was a good thing Jake and I talked about it sooner rather than later.
We shut the small bar in the restaurant down that night, and when he kissed me at my car, my entire body felt electrified. Everything in me wanted to take him home—to find out if our conversational chemistry carried over to the bedroom. But I forced myself to resist that urge, sensing that I’d found something precious, and rare.
We spent six months dating before he met the kids. The first time we slept together was, quite literally, an eye-opening experience. Jake was a slow, considerate lover, seemingly more focused on my pleasure than his. After I’d had my first orgasm, he got on top of me, elbows bent, bracing himself on his forearms. His face was only inches from mine. “Look at me,” he said, hoarsely. The tip of his cock teased between my legs, and I bucked my hips, trying, unsuccessfully, to get him to enter me. But then, I did as he asked, and he finally slid inside. My eyes closed again, reflexively, my head turning to one side, basking in the pleasure I felt, and he immediately stopped moving.
“Please,” he said. “Look at me, Jess.”
A little reluctantly, I fixed my gaze on his, and he began to move inside me again. I felt more naked than I ever had before as I looked into his deep blue eyes; a wall inside me crumbled, seeing the passion and love he felt for me. I trembled, exposed in a way I was not accustomed, and while it unnerved me, it also made me realize that I’d never let a man that close to me, before—I’d never let my guard down—even when he was inside me. This knowledge—this moment of pure and total connection—solidified my decision that Jake was the right man for me.
Three months after I introduced him to Ella and Tuck, he proposed. They took to him immediately; Tuck, especially, when Jake showed up at our small house with a Spiderman puzzle that he promptly opened, and then sat down on the floor with my son so they could work on it together. Later that day, he accepted an invite to Ella’s impromptu princess tea party, happily donning the sparkly crown and pink feather boa she insisted he wore. Seeing Jake with my children only made me fall in love with him more.
We invited his mother and sister to our wedding, even offering to pay their airfare and accommodations, but they both declined, citing “health issues.”
“More likely they can’t get sober long enough to get through security,” Jake said, embittered. His sister had taken both to the bottle and her mother’s lifestyle, relying on a constantly revolving roster of boyfriends to support her. Jake’s honesty about his emotions—his gift of self-awareness, and his ability to articulate how he felt was refreshing after the few years I spent with Peter, whose only clearly expressed emotions seemed to be hungry or horny. Initially, I’d mistaken my ex-husband’s sometimes cocky, strong-but-silent-type personality as strength. In fact, I was attracted to that part of him, thinking it meant he would nurture and protect me and whatever children we had. But as our time together went on and he flat-out refused to communicate about anything that had to do with our relationship, accusing me—as my parents often had—of being overdramatic when I felt upset, I began to shut down, as well. Ultimately, this dynamic led to our undoing, and even as I fell in love with Jake several years later, I was apprehensive about opening up—afraid to have another marriage that might fail. But there was something about him that made me feel safe. Still, the revelations I made to him were more like the intermittent drip of a leaky faucet; I worried if I let loose, if I told him everything about me at once, I’d scare him away.
“They’re starting,” Charlotte said, now, jerking me back to the present. She nodded toward the other side of the field, where Jake was calling out the roster for the first half of the game.
“You got this, girls!” I yelled, pulling my hands out of my pockets to clap.
At the sound of my voice, Jake looked over, giving me a knowing smile that sparked an instant blaze of excitement. When had that stopped happening? I wondered. When did I stop getting turned on by just looking at my husband? About the same time he stopped getting turned on every time he saw me naked, I decided. During our first few years together, I couldn’t get undressed in front of him without him feeling me up, which typically led to something more. I thought back to the night before, how I’d felt when Will had asked me to dance and Jake whispered in my ear—I want to watch—and how I felt my spine straighten, overwhelmed by a sensation I couldn’t quite name. Knowing that this other man thought I was sexy, and that my husband—the man I loved, the person I’d committed my life to—was excited by watching me be touched by someone else was a foreign, intoxicating thing.
“Hey,” Charlotte said, jostling me with her elbow. “Stop ogling Jake. Ella just made the first goal!”
“Shit,” I said, as the small crowd of parents cheered around us. “Way to go, honey!” I called out, even though the team had already moved on to the next play.
“You must have had some kind of night,” Charlotte observed, raising a single, perfectly plucked eyebrow.
I gave her a small smile and then shrugged, turning my attention back to the game. It had been quite a night. And one thing I knew for sure, Jake and I were going to talk about what it meant when we got home.
Three
“My team sucks,” Ella said, as I walked with her toward the parking lot, where Kari was supposed to pick her up. Jake was still on the field, gathering soccer balls and taking down the portable team benches, and then would meet me at our car.
“It doesn’t suck, honey,” I said, reflexively. I put my arm around her shoulder and hugged her to me, but she jerked away.
“Yeah, it does! Sarah was supposed to be passing and clearly she didn’t because duh, she hogged the ball the whole game and that’s why we lost!”
“Well, that’s something you can talk with Jake about, and he and the other coaches can bring it up at practice, right? Something to work on?”
“I guess,” Ella said, kicking the asphalt with the tip of her black and bright pink cleats.
“Don’t do that to your shoes, please. They’re expensive.” I tried not to sigh. She may have gone from looking like a little girl to a young woman, but there were moments I spent with her when she still acted like an unreasonable toddler, and I understood why parents used to marry girls off at thirteen. “Get this hormonal little psycho out of here!” they probably said to prospective suitors. “I’ll even throw in a few goats!”
“Okay! God!” She glanced around the parking lot for Kari’s red mini-van. Peter owned his own construction company, and since having Ruby, Kari had stopped working as a hair dresser at the high-end salon she’d been at since she graduated from cosmetology school—at Peter’s request, of course—so she was usually the one to chauffer the kids around. Now that they were a little older, we kept a pretty lax custody arrangement—the kids usually stayed with me and Jake during the week, and then three weekends a month, plus half of their school vacations with their dad. During the summer, we inverted this set up, and they stayed with Jake and me on the weekends, and their dad and Kari during the week. Dealing with Kari more than Peter could be a pain in the ass, but I told myself it could be much, much worse, considering some of the divorce/custody nightmares I heard about from my friends. The kids actually liked Kari, and most of the time, they loved having a little sister to play with. Seeing them dote on Ruby was the only time I felt a tiny twinge of regret that Jake and I hadn’t had a child of our own.
“There she is,” I said, pointing to the entrance. Kari rolled down her window and waved as she drove toward us.
“Did Tucker win?” Ella asked. Both of my kids were highly competitive, so it was always a challenge when one of them lost a game and the other won.
“I don’t know,” I said, gently. I’d texted Peter a little while ago to ask how Tucker’s game was going, and he’d replied, as usual, with brevity: “Not over yet.” Baseball games took much longer than soccer; a bonus of Peter’s decision to coach Tucker’s team and Jake doing the same for Ella’s.
“Hey!” Kari said as she pulled into a parking spot, and then climbed out of her van. Ella ran over and popped the back open, throwing her gym bag in before scrambling over the back seat to greet Ruby, who I assumed was in her car seat.
“Love you, honey!” I called out. “Bye!”
“Bye!” Ella said, sitting down next to her half-sister.
“Sorry I’m late,” Kari said, pushing her long, perfectly straightened, light brown, honey-blond-highlighted hair away from her face. She once told me that her fashion icon was mid-1990’s Jennifer Aniston. She wore skinny jeans and a white crop top that showed off her flat stomach and belly button ring. “Ruby is refusing to put clothes on lately. I had to chase her around the house for like, twenty minutes.”
I smiled. “Ella did that when she was three, too.” As always, I tried not to look at Kari’s breast implants, which presented as two overinflated water balloons placed on top of her slender rib cage. When Peter first introduced her to us, Jake had said to me later, after they’d left with the kids, “Well, the good news is that she’ll be safe in the event of a water landing.”
“Really?” Kari asked, now setting her hands on her hips. “I asked Peter about that, but he said he couldn’t remember.”
I tried to picture how this conversation had gone between the two of them, with her chatty, “like”-peppered dialogue, and his more serious, laconic communication style, and cringed. They seemed happy enough—Kari had actually been thrilled that Peter wanted her to quit her job and be a stay-at-home mom—so honestly, what made their marriage work was none of my business.
“Mama!” Ruby squealed from the car. “I want to go home!”
“She peed her pants!” Ella called out, helpfully. “It’s all over her car seat!”
“Shit,” Kari said, frowning. “See you tomorrow night at seven?”
“Yes,” I said. “We’ll pick them up.”
I waited until they drove off to head to our car, where Jake was already waiting for me. “Hey,” I said. “Sorry you guys lost.”
“Eh.” He shrugged. “That little bitch Sarah wasn’t passing like she was supposed to.”
I laughed, and told him that Ella had basically said the same thing.
“Smart, that girl of ours,” he said. As always, my heart warmed when he referred to the kids as “ours.” In Jake’s mind, Ella and Tucker had four parents, and he was one of them. “I’m starving,” he said. “You ready to go?”
Twenty minutes later, I was in our kitchen throwing together turkey sandwiches while Jake took a shower in our bathroom upstairs. I had to show a young couple a few houses around Bellevue at two, but our day was free for the next few hours.
“That looks great,” Jake said when he came to stand next to me at the kitchen island. His hair was still wet, and he smelled like soap. He grabbed the sandwich I’d set on the plate for him, and I took a bite of my own before reaching into my small, going-out-for-dinner purse, which I’d tossed on the counter the night before. I pulled out the business card Will had given me, and very deliberately set it on the granite countertop, next to Jake’s plate, keeping my index finger on it for a minute.
“Yes?” Jake said, after swallowing the bite of food he had in his mouth.
“We should talk about this.”
“About what?” He took another bite, chewed it, swallowed again, and then grinned.
I smacked his arm, playfully. “You know what.”
“I do?”
“Jake....”
“What?”
“I’m being serious. What happened last night was...crazy.”
“Crazy good or crazy bad?”
“Well, the sex was good. Obviously.” I was a little sore, actually, but it was the rare, immensely pleasurable, I-got-laid-the-way-I-need-to kind of tenderness, so I had no complaints. Jake was generally a very gentle lover, focused on lots of foreplay—a “the woman always comes first” kind of guy—which was nice, but sometimes, I wanted him to bend me over and fuck me like he was paying for it, like he had last night.
“Just good?” His tone told me he was teasing and loving every minute of it.
“It was amazing, okay? Is that what your fragile male ego needed to hear?” I smiled, so he’d know I was teasing him, too. I walked around the island and entered the family room, where I sat down on the couch. I was a little nervous to talk about all of this with him. I worried that telling him how much I liked what happened last night would upset him—that it took the attention of another man to get me that turned on.
“You forgot your sandwich,” Jake said.
“I’m going to kill you.” Normally, I loved the way he injected humor into our conversations, but I wanted to have a serious discussion. “Come sit with me. Please.”
He took a minute to gauge the look on my face, nodded, and then walked over to join me, carrying his plate with him. “It was pretty amazing, wasn’t it?” he asked, sounding pleased with himself.
I nodded. “I don’t think I’ve ever felt anything like it.” I paused, and grabbed a pillow to hug against my chest. “But it felt weird, too. Letting him touch me like that. And seeing how much you liked it.” My stomach twisted, remembering.
“Weird, why?” Jake asked.
“Because I’m your wife. Because I’m not supposed to get turned on by anyone but you.” I’d never caught Jake checking out other women when we were together, but when he wasn’t around, I’d certainly noticed other, attractive men, especially over the last year, as our sexual life had quieted down. I can look at the menu as long as I eat at home, I reassured myself when another man caught my eye. I never wanted to cheat on my husband, but I couldn’t deny the pangs of physical attraction I sometimes felt. Now, I held my breath, seeing how he would respond.
“Says who?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “The marriage police? The people who made up the whole ‘til dea
th do you part thing? God?”
He laughed. “Honey, I get it. It felt strange to me, too. I didn’t know I’d get so turned on watching you dance with some other guy, but damn. When he asked, all I could think was how hot it would be.” He set his plate on the coffee table in front of us. “It was a total rush. He wanted you. And that made me want you even more.”
“I could tell,” I said, unable to keep the flush from my cheeks, recalling the way Jake had pushed me up against our car.
He reached over and took my hand. “Are you okay with it? You don’t feel bad, do you?”
“No.”
“Guilty?”
“No.” I looked at him. “Why did you ask if I got his number?”
“I don’t know.” He let go of my hand and then sighed. “Okay. That was a lie. I was thinking it might be fun to do it again. See you dance with him.”
“Just dance?” I put the words out there between us, hovering, watching my husband’s face, waiting for his response. After the sex we’d had last night, I’d pictured Will dancing with both of us, me in between them, their bodies pressing against mine. And then, the next image was of the three of us, together, in bed, naked. Me between them, again. If we did it together it wouldn’t be cheating.
“Would you want to do more than that?” Jake asked. His blue eyes darkened, pupils enlarged.
“I don’t know,” I said. “Would it be awful if I did?” I swallowed hard, thinking back to when I was twelve years old and found a stack of my brother’s Penthouse Letters magazines in a drawer in his room. I’d been looking for his fancy calculator so I could use it for my homework, and suddenly found myself reading about people doing things with their clothes off that I’d had no clue could happen. One story, in particular, stood out to me, of two men with one woman. One of the men was the woman’s husband. The descriptions of them both kissing her, their hands roaming her body and the pleasure she took from it, had stayed with me. In the years since, my fantasies had often led back to this scenario—being the center of two men’s attention, sometimes with both of them touching me, and others, with one watching while I had sex with the other. And now, since last night, I couldn’t get those images out of my head. I couldn’t stop picturing myself as that woman.