Husband Sit (Husband #1)

by Louise Cusack

  I could have let it go at that, but I knew Missy Lou needed moral support, and Angel would too, whenever she decided what to do about her marriage. So I said, “Donny will want to go. You know he loves hobnobbing with Marcus, talking about business.”

  She glanced at me over her coffee and frowned.

  “And Doug thinks you’re sexy. It will do Donny good to see other men slobbering over you.” Not that Doug was the slobbering type. But in the past, he and I had discussed the fact that Ange was stunning, and wasted on a twit like Donny. So I knew he found her attractive.

  She seemed to consider that. “I could never get Danny to the club.”

  “Exactly. He needs to see that you’re desirable to other men. It will make him crazy.” I had no idea whether that was true, but I could certainly ask Doug to give her compliments. In the few conversations I’d had with Doug since I’d left, he’d been civil, and I hadn’t been anything more than civil in return. Friendly might encourage him to think I wanted him back, so apart from sorting out joint possessions, I’d avoided him completely. He had no reason to be cranky with me, however, so maybe it wouldn’t be as terrible as I imagined.

  “So,” Ange said, “Doug mustn’t have a girlfriend yet.”

  “Or maybe he’s leaving her behind.”

  “To spend a weekend with you? What woman would allow that?”

  “True.” And no way would Doug lie about it. That just wasn’t in his nature. Unlike Finn. “Yeah, I guess he’s single. But I’ll make it clear that I’m there under duress.”

  “No need to be rude.”

  “I don’t want him to think there’s any way we’ll get back together.”

  Her frown deepened. “Doug is a very nice man. He’s not some desperado, hanging around waiting to see if you’ll take him back.” I could see she wanted to say Don’t put tickets on yourself, he’s probably thinking he’s well rid of you but she managed to hold that in, and only added, “He’s probably, quite sensibly, taking his time.”

  Oh yes, boring old Doug was nothing if not sensible. But instead of admitting that, I childishly chanted, “Angie loves Doug. Angie loves Doug,” letting some of my why aren’t you on my side peevishness into my voice.

  I was astonished to see her blush bright red and glance away.

  “Shut up,” she snapped, but it was too late.

  I pointed at her and shook my head. “Oh my God. You’ve got a crush on Doug.”

  “Do not.”

  “Do so.”

  She slapped at my hand. “You’re making a spectacle.”

  “Angela Marina Lata. How long has this been going on?”

  “Nothing is going on.”

  “Ladies.” Our waiter arrived and deposited my coffee and biscotti with a snap, then added Ange’s glazed chocolate ice cream ball with a flourish. “Chocolate tartufo.” He smiled into her eyes at close range. “Enjoy.”

  Her face was still flushed from our argument, and her dark eyes glittered, but she controlled herself enough to say, “Thank you. That looks delicious.”

  “Angel…” he whispered, then gave her such an obvious come-hither glance, I couldn’t help rolling my eyes.

  He straightened and left us to our dessert, and Angie ploughed into hers, as if it would save her from speaking.

  “So, now that I know you like Doug,” I went on, “Why don’t you make babies with him? It would teach Donny a lesson.”

  Ange stilled with the spoon almost at her lips, and stared at me with a mixture of astonishment and what looked like thoughtful consideration.

  I decided to jump into the gap. “Donny’s gone behind your back,” I reminded her.

  She swallowed her mouthful and said, “Doug would never sleep with a married woman.”

  True. I had a second of thinking unlike Finn before I remembered that donating sperm wasn’t the same as having sex. Then there was my own adulterous career—people in glass houses, blah, blah.

  “Nor,” she went on, “would I consider it. If I’m going to sleep with another man, I’m ending my marriage first.”

  We stared at each other over the table. It was the first time I’d ever heard her discuss the possibility of divorce, and I had only one response to that, “I’m here for you, A. Whatever you want.”

  She frowned. “Do you mean that?”

  I grabbed both her hands. “Honey, you could sleep with that slobbering waiter and I’d have your back. As far as you and Fritha and Missy Lou are concerned, I might complain about how you guys treat me when I’m in a shitty mood, but I’d never judge you for your choices.”

  I meant that one hundred percent.

  Her eyes softened. “Then why don’t you feel the same about Finn and his choices.”

  I stared back at her and my armor wobbled. It took me a second to get it back under control. “I mustn’t love him,” I ended up saying. “It must be only lust.”

  “I don’t believe that.” She squeezed my hands. “It’s because he’s a man and your father broke you when he left. But Finn might be the right man to mend—”

  “No.” I shook my head, and couldn’t help pulling my hands back. “If anyone was going to fix that it would have been Doug. He never put a foot wrong. I trusted him completely.”

  “Then why didn’t you marry him when he asked you to?”

  “I didn’t love him either.”

  “You love Finn.” She sounded so sure, I had a flicker of wondering what she knew that I didn’t. “I know you, Jinx. I’ve never seen you like this about a man. I remember that phone call before you slept with him. You were crazy about him, in every possible way.”

  Something inside me shifted and I had to say, “Alright, I was.” There was no denying my gush of relief when I’d decided to have sex with him. I’d been thrilled, not just at the idea of orgasms, but because I wanted him to be happy, and I knew that sleeping with him would make him happy. “But now that feeling is gone.”

  “It’s just buried.”

  “Beneath a whole swamp of slime that I don’t want uncovered.” My armor was wobbling again, but I shored that up with a memory of Louella and her ‘high functioning’ alcoholism. It didn’t matter what I felt about Finn. It wasn’t going to work between us. If I tried, I’d just be miserable, even if I never met this Lizzie—slut—or her baby. “Can’t we just let Finn fade into memory and concentrate on everyone else’s problems?”

  “Who else has problems?” She put down her spoon and I realized I’d just put my foot in it. Clearly, neither Fritha nor Missy Lou had confided in her. And damn Fritha, she’d told me she was going to share that wookie story and laugh about it. Another reason to be cranky with her, on top of all the sharing with Finn.

  “You,” I said quickly. “You’re everyone else.” I dunked a slice of biscotti and glanced around, winking at a random guy at a nearby table. “He’s cute. I wonder if he’s got a girlfriend.”

  Her phone rang then, and I was saved from further interrogation as she rolled her eyes and settled into what I knew would be a long conversation with her mother. She mouthed Sorry but I waved that away and stood to pay the bill. When that was sorted and we’d escaped the restaurant—before her doe-eyed waiter reappeared—I drove us back to her place along Parramatta Road, while her mother filled her in on every detail of what the neighbors had been doing in Dakaroo.

  It was funny to hear Ange’s responses, and to realize that our schoolmates were living the same lives as their parents, working in the same shops and farms, their children going to the same schools as we all had, and seemingly happily. For some reason the four of us had been determined to escape the small country town we’d grown up in, as if we’d been born into a pond that was too small to hold us. But now that none of us were actually living in bliss, I wondered who was better off. In the past, we’d scoffed at our schoolmates’ insular lives, but did they have a satisfaction I hadn’t been able to see?

  Unfortunately, there was no going back, so I did my best to go forward. That night I was p
olite to Danny—not Donny—when he arrived home from work, and begged off after-dinner television by feigning tiredness. A quick shower later, I retreated to Ange’s sari-draped guest room with its elephant head Ganesha shrine. First I rang Brittany and caught her message bank again, so I left a Goddamn well phone me! message, then I rang the hotel she was staying in and left a message to be passed on to her.

  Maybe her phone was broken or lost. I doubted it. When she didn’t want to be lectured, she simply refused to answer calls, but considering I was currently paying her bills, I thought I deserved the courtesy of a Hello, I’m fine response. Anyway, there wasn’t much more I could do. So I pulled out my laptop and downloaded emails, looking for future work. It was a fortnight until the weekend at Missy Lou’s and I needed to get something to fill that slot in Sydney, so I didn’t have to travel far.

  Having said that, I’d been receiving emails from the Surfers Paradise, and I liked the idea of going back there, now that Finn didn’t live there anymore. Not that I’d bump into him here. Sydney was huge. But I knew from past experience that physical distance helped me gain emotional distance.

  Part of me had expected an email from Finn, or a text or a call. But there was nothing from him. I told myself to be relieved about that. I was surprised, however, to find an email from Sieu in my inbox. When I opened it, I discovered a very businesslike letter that began with:

  Thank you for your direction at our meeting of 24th. Our principal, Phineas Walters has assigned me to manage your project, and if you can raise a capital investment of $100,000 and approve the outlined action plan, we can create a contract and begin the process…

  So Finn was wiping his hands of me. But he wasn’t wiping his hands of Fritha’s dream. Which should make me happy, only I wasn’t sure if he was allowing his company to continue with it for Fritha’s sake, or for mine. Maybe the two of them would get together, and if that was the case, I mustn’t be jealous.

  Between the four of us, we’d never fought over a man, and I wasn’t about to start. My friendships were way more important than sexual relationships—way more likely to last. So I told myself that if Fritha and Finn became an item, that was okay. I’d passed on him. It was fine for someone else to pick him up.

  Dandy.

  The fact that my fingernails were biting into my palms at the idea, couldn’t convince me otherwise, so I set about forgetting him by reviewing who I’d fuck next.

  After all, the best way to get over one man…

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN: Not This Again

  The best choice was one I’d passed on because it sounded boring, but meticulous Virgo that I am, I hadn’t deleted it. It was filed under Blah in the Fuck Work folder of my email program. Sasha and Renee were French, and Sasha—the guy—was at his happiest with regular sex, so his wife was happy for someone to step in while she was away on a ten day meditation retreat. As she’d said in her email, she wouldn’t want to do without her morning yoga, so why should he do without his nightcap sex?

  It was a bread-and-butter job, missionary position, usually lasting five to ten minutes. I just had to be in bed, clean and ready around ten pm at night for him to fuck, and the rest of the day was mine. I left Ange after two days at her house, with a promise to answer the phone anytime she needed me, except for around ten pm as the dog I was house sitting needed to be walked for his evening shit at that time.

  I was surprised to discover I was becoming a very good liar.

  Luckily for me, she was so involved in her own situation, she hadn’t asked a lot of questions. Fritha, however, was a whole other nightmare. I’d rung to tell her about the tea house and to shout at her about Finn. At first her excitement about running her own shop had overridden her desire to tell me I was a moron for letting him go, but the conversation had deteriorated into us both agreeing we were seriously pissed off with each other.

  We’d always be friends, so our Fuck you and Fuck you back goodbye hadn’t left me with any long-term concerns. I responded in the affirmative to Sieu, telling her I’d have the funds to her within six months. I knew I could weather the discomfort of more husband sitting to get Fritha’s dream job up and running. I even imagined we’d laugh about all this at some point in the future.

  But I wasn’t there yet. I was in the middle of I don’t like this and I just needed to keep going. What had started as a scary adventure, now felt like work. The good news was that my moral issues had faded into the background. My concern about Brittany falling off the radar and my angst about Finn overshadowed everything else. So I was just putting one foot in front of the other and hoping time would heal.

  When Sasha arrived home at the end of my first day in his unit, I was relaxing on the beautiful garden terrace that overlooked the Sydney Opera House. I put down the celebrity magazine Ange had given me, relieved to stop reading about the rich and botoxed.

  He stepped into the room and smiled. “You are here. Good.”

  Accents normally turned me on, but I was still feeling numb and I blamed that on Finn.

  I offered him a practiced smile. “Did you have a good day?” and leant back on my antique wicker armchair to fill the empty space with inane conversation. The evening passed superficially, and by nine-forty, I was in bed, lying naked in a room that could have featured in Ange’s celebrity magazine. It was all mirror furniture, white carpets and plush linen.

  At exactly ten pm he knocked on my door and I said, “Come in.”

  I was awkward then, especially when he strode in naked and fully erect with his cock already enclosed in a condom. He turned off my bedroom light without asking, then left the door open so the hallway light illuminated the windows across from me. Lying in the dark corner, I watched him walk up, pull the covers down to the bottom of the bed and say, “Are you ready?”

  Why wouldn’t I be?

  “Yes…?”

  I fidgeted with my hands, not sure where to put them, but I needn’t have worried about taking the initiative. Sasha got straight on top of me and poked his cock at my dry pussy.

  “Hey!” I flapped my hands against his chest. “Foreplay?”

  “You said you were ready.” Even in the semi-dark I could see his frown.

  “I thought you meant ready for sex. Not ready for penetration.”

  “I don’t do foreplay,” he said calmly. “I thought Renee would have made that clear.”

  “Ah, no. She didn’t.”

  He sighed, then rested himself on one elbow, spat onto his fingertips and wiped that on my twat.

  What the hell?

  Then he slotted his cock inside me and started to pump. It was the most perfunctory coupling I’d ever been part of. No kissing, no touching. I could have been a blow-up doll, and was still trying to work out if I was supposed to do anything other than lie there, when he started grunting.

  That was it. I took my hands off his chest and lay them at my sides, waiting for the inevitable.

  “Ren-ay, Ren-ay, Ren-ay, Rennnnnn,” he groaned at the end, arching his back and trembling for ten long seconds. Then he propped himself over me, catching his breath.

  My head was turned to the side. I couldn’t look at him, and honestly had no thoughts in my head. It was too bizarre for me to make any snap judgments about. So I just lay there as he got himself off, said, “Très bon. Well done.” And walked out without a backward glance.

  He shut my door and I lay in the dark, wondering what my life had become.

  Whatever level of numbness I had going, seemed to deepen, and when I searched my body for signs of arousal, I found none. Luckily, his on-the-spot lubricant had stopped me from chaffing, but that was the first time I could ever remember having sex with no foreplay whatsoever. I mean, even Doug had at least tried to warm me up with a few kisses.

  Doug.

  My thoughts drifted sluggishly into the realization that this was the first time I’d thought about Doug with fondness since we’d broken up. Not that I wanted to get back with him. No. No. But the distance of time had
clearly given me a different perspective on our relationship. Yes, it had been boring. No, I hadn’t actively desired him. But he hadn’t been a bad person. We just didn’t fit. Of course, that funneled my thoughts immediately toward Finn and how well we’d fit, right up until he’d told me he’d fathered a child behind Katinka’s back!

  But before I could get too outraged, I remembered Fritha’s take on it all, that Katinka was a manipulative bitch, she’d cheated on him first and she’d lied about being infertile. He’d had so many lies told to him. Maybe I should have told him about Brittany, and family loyalty be damned. At least then he’d have realized I had no choice about husband sitting. Only, I couldn’t do that to Brittany, and even if I could, there was no getting around Lizzie’s baby.

  The more I thought about him, the more I missed him, until I finally reached such a terrible state of longing, I snatched my phone off the bedside table and Googled him, hating myself but just wanting to see his face. Phineas Walters brought up his LinkedIn profile with a dreadlocks shot. It was Finn as I’d first met him, but the dreads made him look ten years younger. So I hit images on the search and found some recent photos—one of him in a suit looking so scrumptious I ached.

  I clicked on the webpage link and discovered it was a charity event a few days ago that his company had sponsored—something about clean water for African villages. There were shots of other people I didn’t know, but I couldn’t help scrolling through them to make sure he wasn’t on anyone’s arm. Suddenly Sieu appeared wearing a crisp black suit with her arm around a tiny blonde in a gold velvet sheath. The girl had to be in her late teens or very early twenties, with short cropped hair that fluffed about her freckled face in an adorable elfin way. They were both smiling widely, as if the world was a wonderful place, but all I could think was, Finn is having a baby with her?

  Jesus. If I was a lesbian, I’d want her too. She was golden and toned, and that made me wonder if she and Finn went to the beach or the gym together. God, what a perfect couple they would make. She was young and gorgeous, and looked like fun. She made me feel old and tired and…shabby.