“Of course I wanted to fucking know, but whenever I bring up the divorce, you shut down.”
“It scared me to think,” I said quietly, “that no matter how I explained that night, you might’ve taken her side anyway.”
He turned away, rubbing the inside corners of his eyes.
My heart sank as moments passed without his response. “What?” I asked.
“She didn’t mean to hurt you, Livs. It was an accident.”
My lips parted. My mom and Bill had their own separate relationship, but considering how Bill dodged the subject, I never would’ve guessed they’d talked about that night. “You knew?”
“Your mom told me once,” he said, still avoiding my eyes. “She and your father had an argument. You jumped in the middle and she stabbed you by accident. And that’s what prompted the divorce. She was trying to explain her side of the story.” He turned his head, meeting my gaze again. “You can’t blame her for assuming that you, my wife, had already told me about the most traumatic night of your life.”
And still, he hadn’t brought it up to me. “I don’t even know what to say.”
“And I don’t get how this relates to sleeping with another man. Are you trying to tell me that—” He glanced down at my side, staring daggers at the scar just underneath my t-shirt. “That he asked? And you told him?”
“He wouldn’t take no for an answer,” I said. “He knew it was painful, but he wanted to take some of that pain away.”
“Well, this just keeps getting better. Are you . . . this guy, David, do you have . . . ?”
My breath caught as I waited for his question. I didn’t know how I would tell him the truth, but if he asked, I would do it. I would find the strength to tell him that what David and I had went beyond the physical.
But instead he shook his head and turned forward again. “Never mind.”
“Never mind?” I asked.
“It hurts that you’d share something like that with him, but you didn’t with me.”
“I know,” I said. I had known, while it was happening, that it was wrong. But I’d done it anyway. So, there was nothing else I could say except, “And I am so, so sorry.”
“You say there were problems between us, but I didn’t see anything beyond normal marital stuff,” he said. “I thought, like a fool, that we were happy.”
“We are happy. But it doesn’t change the fact that everything is moving too fast for me, and I want to slow down.”
He snorted. “Well, this is certainly one way to slow things down.”
I tried to hide the relief in my sigh. “So can we? At least until we sort all of this out?”
He was quiet for a long time. “It’s like you’ve put this . . . void in my chest. As if something’s gone missing, something that’s supposed to go right here.” His hand clapped over his heart. My breath caught audibly, and he turned his head to me. “Emptiness. Nothingness. That’s how this feels.”
“I’m empty inside, David, and I did that to myself. You don’t understand. There’s nothing left to give.”
Tears burned my eyes, but I blinked them back. “I understand,” I whispered.
“How could you understand?” he asked simply.
Because I, too, had lost something. And sometimes I thought my hollow chest might collapse from the weight of my grief.
Bill looked away again. “None of this is fair. I don’t know what I did wrong, that you’re saying and doing these things to me.”
* * *
Our conversations continued that way throughout the weekend. I thought I might suffocate from the apartment’s stale air, but consistent rain kept us indoors. Hours passed as I stared out the gray window, waiting for the next stream of questions. We were in Bill’s courtroom now, and I was on the stand.
He wanted to know how David and I had ended up in a hotel room the second time. And whether or not I’d spent the night afterward. Reliving the details cheapened the experience. It made everything seem so dirty, when it had actually been its own kind of beautiful.
Bill continued to remind me that it wasn’t fair, that he didn’t deserve it, that he hadn’t done anything wrong. All things I accepted with an apology. He threatened to go see David.
It was easy for us to forget during working hours; we had no choice. But as soon as Bill picked me up, our masks came off. After the first couple nights, I didn’t think things could get worse, but as his shock wore off, he became more upset. I did my best to make things right by answering his every question and playing the role of an honest and transparent wife.
He invited me back to bed on Tuesday. It was what I’d wanted until he said the words aloud.
“Come to bed.”
I wasn’t ready to sleep by his side, so I told him so.
“How are you not ready?” he’d asked.
As weeks went by, his questions became more creative, more intrusive. But I felt that I owed him the truth, no matter how hard it was for both of us. I wasn’t sure what I feared more: that he might ask how deeply my feelings for David ran, or that he might not. The question never came. I didn’t know if it was because it never occurred to him—or because he was afraid of the answer.
23
One soggy, wintry morning in November, Bill came to the couch not long after sunrise. Deep sleep had eluded me lately, so I woke easily when the cushion dipped under his weight. He looked as puffy and tired as I felt, but his eyes narrowed on me. He stuck his hand between my legs.
I flinched and began to protest. His unnerving gaze fastened on me as he tugged gently on my underwear. “I want to come inside you. Last time we did it, you made me pull out. Was it because of him?”
At a loss for words, I shook my head. It ran deeper than that. I’d known that, while having an affair, there would be no worse moment to get pregnant. Or, so I’d thought. This was worse. “He didn’t . . . I didn’t let him, either.”
He stripped and climbed on top of me, somehow not touching me. “I need this. I think. I’m revolted, but I also want you. Bad.” He dropped his head into my shoulder. “I want you,” he repeated, kissing my neck.
This was wrong, and I sensed he knew that. Emotionally, neither of us was in the right place to be intimate, but I feared rejecting him now would only greaten our divide. “We’re not ready for this.”
He dropped his weight on me, and I thought I felt his shoulders heave. “Let me come inside you,” he said.
“Not this way,” I said. “What if I was to get pregnant?”
He drew back and looked at me with red eyes. “And that would be so bad, wouldn’t it?” he whispered.
“I don’t want to bring a child into the world like this. I know you don’t, either.”
“Please,” he said, kissing my cheek and putting his hand back between my legs.
I grabbed it. “I’m not ready.”
I could see him thinking, fighting whatever it was he thought he needed in that moment. He sat back on his calves, still hard, and pushed the heels of his hands into his eyes. “Am I crazy to want you? I fantasize about it, but I don’t want to want you.”
“It’s normal to feel confused,” I said. “I am, too. I’m sorry.”
“Sorry that you cheated, or sorry that you told me?”
I looked away, seeing no way that answering the question would help anything.
“It’s lucky you didn’t catch something,” he continued. “That filthy piece of shit has been all over town.”
Bill had made me go to the gynecologist and get tested. But deep down I knew that David wouldn’t put himself or me in that position. It had never occurred to me that he might, because I trusted him.
“Is this because of him?” Bill was asking. “Is that why you won’t have sex with me?”
“No,” I said, taken aback.
“But you’re still there. What do you need to get over him?”
“Nothing,” I said emphatically. “It’s over.”
“I just don’t think I believe that.
”
My nostrils flared. “I’ve been completely open with you. I let you read my e-mails, my text messages. I tell you where I am all the time. This will never work if you don’t even try to trust me.”
“It’s going to be a long time before we get back there.” He went to the bedroom and shut the door. I knew he wasn’t coming back, so I turned on my side and closed my eyes until it was time to get up for work.
* * *
The trill of my office phone cut through my mid-day haze. I blinked. How long had it been ringing? Bill was the only person Jenny would patch through right now without notification. I wasn’t surprised. Bill called frequently these days. Checking in. Keeping tabs. Still, I braced myself. He had only dropped me at work an hour earlier.
“It’s me,” he said before I even spoke. The two somber words were enough to remind me that I was the source of his constant pain. “They’re sending me to take depositions in St. Louis for the rest of the week. I leave in a few hours.”
“No.” As miserable as things had been around the house, at least we were slowly uncovering new truths about each other. We were fighting, finally, and I had hope that one day, we’d look back and know it had been necessary to get us to a better place. “I don’t want you to go.”
“Well, you don’t really get a say in what I do right now.”
“I’m serious. I’m putting my foot down.”
If I spent my nights alone in our apartment, my mind would go where it shouldn’t. With Bill around, thoughts of David were easy to avoid until late at night. Any time Bill looked at me, I imagined he could read my mind. So I tried never to think of David. But without Bill or work to keep me honest . . .
“You can tell your bosses that I won’t let you,” I continued. “We need to spend this time together.”
“It’s been over a month, and you won’t even sleep next to me.”
“But I’m still here, and so are you. That means something. We can’t be apart right now.”
“What, are you worried I’ll revenge fuck someone else?” he asked.
The receiver slipped from my hand, but I caught it before it hit the ground. My mouth, however, hung open through the silence that followed. It had never crossed my mind.
“I’m sorry,” he said after a minute. “I didn’t mean that. I would never . . .”
“I don’t deserve that, Bill.”
“I know.”
“I just think you should stay,” I said. Nothing was good or comfortable between us, but we needed that to finally become the couple we should’ve been all along. “You have to stay.”
He hesitated. “Honestly, Liv, I could use some time alone.”
“Then I’ll go to Gretchen’s for a few nights. You can have the place to yourself.”
“I can’t say no to work, you know that.” There was a hesitation on the line. “But if you go see him while I’m gone, then we’re finished for good. I won’t be made a fool in front of my friends—or my family for that matter. Nobody else needs to know about what you did, end of story. Do not go and see him.”
It hurt that Bill thought I would—but if he truly believed I might, and he was still leaving, then what did that say about him and his dedication to us?
“I have to go,” he said. “I’ll call you from the airport.”
I was still staring at the phone long after Bill hung up. I’d told the truth—I hadn’t spoken to David since I’d walked out of his office a month ago. But Bill was right not to trust me. Late nights were my time with David. As I fell asleep and as I dreamed, he was there. I swam in his brown eyes, pressed my cheek against his stubble, or touched his hair. His hair—I could not forget the way his hair felt in my hands, so shiny and smooth like the obsidian rock it resembled. The pain was still acute, like a knife wound, but at night it was soothed by the memories.
* * *
The empty apartment I came home to wasn’t much different than it had been the past month. There had been an emptiness there since the morning of my confession.
I flipped on all the lights, suddenly not wanting to be alone. I turned on the television. It was always tuned to ESPN, the only channel Bill watched, and the barking sounds of some sporting event comforted me.
I sat in front of it with a bowl of Cheerios, scooping them onto my spoon and then watching them slide off the tip, back into the milk. I checked my cell. From the last few weeks, I had several missed calls from Lucy, unreturned. One from my mother—confessing to her was a conversation so heinous to even think of that I hid my phone under the nearest pillow.
But even from under there, my mother judged me. I was my father now—worse, because I actually had cheated. Her insecurity had been something I could almost touch as a child. She was so convinced that my father was cheating on her that he might as well have been. It’d eaten away at her. If she ever found out what I’d done, she’d disown me.
So be it, I thought. I wouldn’t take back the affair for all the love she’d always denied me.
I took a bite of cereal and swallowed. I grabbed the remote and turned up the volume of the game to a deafening level. Our neighbors banged on the wall.
Was I disturbing them? Well, too fucking bad. I could not live inside my own head right now. My heart beat too loudly, angry, broken. Fuck my neighbors. And Bill, too, for leaving me alone tonight.
But most of all, fuck David for showing me a light and warmth I’d never forget.
For giving me hope.
For buying the house that could’ve changed everything and making me question my trust in him.
Fuck him for forcing me to face decisions I couldn’t take back anyway.
My jaw clenched. My nostrils flared. How dare he make me question my life? And wonder if I regretted it?
I launched the bowl of cereal across the room, finding comfort in the way it shattered against the wall, splattering it with milk. “Why, David?” I screamed into the apartment. Hot tears spilled over my cheeks. “Why’d you come into my life?”
But, God, how I fucking missed him.
I planted myself facedown on the couch and cried into a pillow. I didn’t even care about the Oak Park house or why he’d done it. I just wanted more. More anything. More of his touch, more of his eyes on me, more of his large, rough hands treating me as if I were unbreakable, more rides in his car, more fucking, more walks, more reflections.
I didn’t know how to go on without him. I compressed the pillow in my grip and cried harder. How much of this had been a game to him? Even through my anger, I knew the answer: none of it. There was no denying what we’d had. The force we’d given into was one thing. But he’d purposely driven a knife through my marriage by buying that house. That was a side of David I didn’t know. It was the same David from the masquerade ball. The type of man who slept with women for sport, stringing them along until he didn’t need them anymore.
“It’s too much,” I insisted, biting into the pillow. Bill had my love and respect, but he no longer had my heart. I’d left it in David’s office, at his feet, and I didn’t care if I ever saw it again. I didn’t deserve it. I deserved to cry, deserved to die right here in this black hole, on this horrible, shit-colored couch, because of what I’d done. And because I would do it again. I only felt hate for the woman I’d become—a weak, piddling mess.
“David,” I begged. “David, David.”
How could I have risked everything for you? How could I have ruined a life for you? And how can Bill and I ever be happy again in my black hole?
Clenched into a ball on the couch, I admitted that it was because I needed David. That there was something stronger than the two of us forcing us together. We’d made mistakes, we’d made decisions that could never be changed—but we belonged together. And now I would have to live the rest of my life knowing that I was separated from the person I was supposed to be with. And knowing that as much as he had pushed me away the night of the ball, I had pushed him back.
It wasn’t something that could be remedie
d—the damage was done. People didn’t just leave their husbands on a hunch that they’d met their soulmate. I realized that that had never been an option, no matter what David had thought. He and I were destined to be together, but destiny had torn us apart.
* * *
When my phone rang from under the now damp pillow, I almost sent it in the direction of the cereal bowl to shut it up. But instead, I extracted it and answered. “Now’s not a good time,” I told Gretchen, sniffling.
“Bill called me.”
“What? What did he say?”
“He asked me, in a very clipped tone, to keep an eye on you while he’s gone.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “He shouldn’t be involving you. You’re the only person who knows, though. What did you say?”
“I told him to fuck off.”
I smiled barely. “No, you didn’t.”
“No, I didn’t, but only because you need me around right now. He’s being paranoid, right? You’re not still talking to David?”
“Of course I’m not. You know it’s really over with David, but I can’t tell Bill that the house was the final straw for me. He’d flip if he found out David bought it.”
Her tone changed. “Maybe you should go see David and get some closure.”
I sighed. “No. I just can’t.”
“Are you all right, really? I can tell that you’re crying.”
“I’m—” I stopped before the word fine left my mouth. I wasn’t fine, not in the least. “No. I’m dying, Gretchen. It just keeps getting worse and worse. I’ve never felt anything like this in my life.” There was dead silence on the line, and eventually, I continued. “I’m so hurt and angry. At David, at myself. At Bill.”
“Bill?”
“I need him now, and he needs me. But he left. Without him here, all I can think about is David. I feel—” I paused when my voice cracked. “I feel like I’m slipping, and there’s nothing to grab onto.”
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