by Gabi Moore
I got to my feet and began clearing away the dishes, already over the evening I had planned for us. I smirked to myself at the thought that there was once a time when I was proud that I had been the only man to ever make Nora come. How stupid that all looked, in hindsight. Fine. I was a man of my word, and I took my commitments seriously. If Nora needed to be difficult and distant, then she could do it. I was a big boy, I could handle a tantrum or two.
I rolled up my shirt sleeves, piled the dishes into the dishwasher, and head upstairs to our bedroom. I couldn’t hear Matilda crying anymore, so I assumed she had been put to bed for now. I took the stairs two at a time, and tried to think. I’m good at thinking. Good at problem solving. By the time I reached our bedroom I caught her standing completely naked, right in the middle of taking her clothing off to shower. She stopped, lowered her arms and stood before me like that, as if to say, “so?”
She was beautiful.
I couldn’t find a way to look at her and not see that she was beautiful. I knew she was self-conscious about the silvery scars that encased her belly like fingers, and that she was unhappy about her breasts, and that she thought her skin was different now. I had never been able to show her what I saw when I looked at her like this …which wasn’t often anymore.
“You’re right, Nora.”
She lifted her eyebrow at me.
“It doesn’t suit you, this whole motherhood spiel.”
She looked surprised. Good. I was glad she was listening to me at least. I sat down on the bed, not taking my eyes off her beautiful, bare body.
“I think I just expected that you’d take everything in your stride. I mean, you take on all these roles so easily, I just took for granted that you could do this one, too. But I think I underestimated how big a change this would be for us. For you.”
She said nothing. But the lines on her face softened.
“You’re bigger than that, Nora. I’ve been wanting to …protect you. To make you happy. But you’re right to push. You’re not meant to be an ordinary housewife, I know that.”
I rolled around the idea of whether to tell her that I knew about her little performance the last time we made love, that I didn’t care, that I just wanted her to never do that again. But I didn’t want to embarrass her.
She sat down on the bed beside me.
“Can I be honest with you?” she said quietly. I loved the soft, wide fold that appeared between her thigh and torso as she sat. “Sometimes I think that this isn’t where we’re supposed to be, Dean. That this isn’t what we were meant to be doing. This is not the endpoint for us, you know?”
I didn’t know.
“Well, what do you want, then? What’s missing?”
She gave me a long, slow, strange look.
“I’m not sure yet, but something has to change, and soon.”
I stared at her naked thighs. I wanted to touch her more than anything. To just grab her and sink into that beautiful body of hers, and never fight again.
“I don’t care if you get another job, Nora. And the domming thing, fuck, I don’t know. If you really want to, then do it, I guess…”
“I’m thinking something bigger.”
“Bigger?”
“Yeah. We deserve a more exciting story, don’t you think?”
I wasn’t sure what she meant. I was familiar with that naughty sparkle in her eyes. I had seen it before, many times. But I also had no idea what she was getting at. We had a three-month-old baby now. What possible excitement was she imagining?
“Just forget I said anything,” she said quickly. “I’m working on it. Something special is supposed to happen here, I know it, I’m just not sure what it is yet.”
I kissed her head and gave her a crooked smile. She wasn’t making much sense, but I just was glad we weren’t yelling anymore. She turned to me and kissed me in return, and instantly I wanted her. There were little buttons, all along my tongue, that only the touch of her tongue could press, and when pressed the rest of me just kicked right into gear, just woke up ready for her.
“I love you, Nora.”
“I love you too…”
“Why don’t you put on that pretty lacy thing I bought you…?”
Chapter 3 - Nora
Kids are such little sadists.
Let me tell you, I’ve dealt with enough psychopaths in my time to know one when I see one, and kids from around two to four years old are little demons, no question. It’s not their fault, of course. They’re still developing the little nubs in their brain, responsible for decent human behavior. For patience and empathy and self-control. I know that. But damn. The kids at school scare me sometimes, and I dread that Matilda will one day get to that age and start back talking, running away when spoken to, and hitting her playmates when she’s frustrated. The thought alone tires me out some days.
I changed the music in the classroom to a peaceful Chopin playlist and waited for the children to settle down. They love this part, the part where we press googly eyes onto our clay hedgehogs. It’s just a lump of clay till it gets the googly eyes. Bless them, they really get excited when the googly eyes come out. People say I’m good with kids. And I am. I understand them. I would never put the real reason on my resume, though. “I’m good with kids because I spent years dealing with the whims and tantrums of the biggest babies ever – men.” But it was probably true.
I brought out the packet of googly eyes and all the kids squealed at once. I loved that. They all sat round me in a circle and I explained how to glue the eyes on carefully, showing them how the hedgehog looked different depending on how you arranged the eyes. They all listened intently, the little lambs, keenly waiting instruction. I love them really, you know that, right? I can tell you that they’re psychopaths and all that because I know you’ll understand. It’s just letting off steam. It’s just me being honest. I would never let any harm come to them, ever. Them or Matilda.
I chatted and helped the kids on autopilot, one part of me easily able to supervise them and guide the day’s art activity, the bigger part somewhere else, far away. I had narrowed the sorry condition of my life down to a few possibilities.
Possibility one: by being greedy and getting too much pleasure all at once, I had exhausted my personal ration of sex in this lifetime and was now destined for a boring, passionless existence to make up for it.
Possibility two: I had done ‘everything’ with Dean and now there was nothing left to do, and that was my fault, and now I was being punished for thinking I could just keep ramping up the intensity forever with no consequence.
Possibility three: I had programmed myself to only feel pleasure when it was paired with pain, and now that I was safe and happy and healthy, nothing turned me on anymore.
Of course, all these possibilities were variations on a theme. I had overstepped my boundaries and now the sexual gods were punishing my hubris and I was destined to be a shriveled housewife to atone for my sins. I was like Ralph now, except I was in my cage far more often, and had to share it with a dozen snot-nosed toddlers.
In a few minutes the moms would come to fetch their babies and Dean would come to fetch me, as he did sometimes when he didn’t have meetings that afternoon. This time, though, he brought along a familiar face with him.
“Charlie!” I said, as I recognized that round face and scruffy beard. I ran over to give him a warm hug, and he smiled and looked around the classroom.
“Damn, look at all this. Dean told me but I had to see it with my own eyes.”
I nodded and smiled at the lingering crowd of moms and kids as they gathered up their jackets and lunch boxes and backpacks.
“Well, believe it. Teaching kids is a piece of cake, actually,” I said cheerfully.
“Yeah, no doubt. And if the little shits misbehave, you can always…” here he cracked an invisible whip in the air and laughed, although he instantly regretted his joke.
“Charlie, shut the hell up, can you just behave for a second?” Dean said and lean
ed over to kiss me.
In the past I had felt quite blasé about Charlie’s obvious little crush on me, but these days it felt like much-needed fresh air into my little prison.
I kissed Dean and held his arm. Even though we were having tawdry bedroom troubles and had a less than enviable home life right now, we still looked damn good together, and that was the truth. I was proud of him. Proud to stand next to him. Proud of how I looked next to him. It’ll sound strange to you, but though I had trouble thinking of Dean sexually these days, it didn’t stop me from seeing how handsome he still appeared to others. I’d have to be blind to not notice how the other moms drooled after him. He was a gorgeous guy, no doubt about it.
“Are you ready to go? Charlie and I have some good news to share,” Dean said with a smile. I studied his face.
“Charlie’s finally found a girlfriend? Could it possibly be?” I said with a teasing wink in Charlie’s direction.
“We said good news, not miracles,” Charlie said and held the door open for us. I waved goodbye to the handful of remaining moms chatting in the hallway and we made our way out into the parking lot.
“It’s about you-know-who,” Dean said, although that much was obvious. Jeff Cane was like a distant planet in our universe, like a massive gravitational body that, even though invisible, had supreme power over what happened down here on earth to us mortals. Hearing about what antics Jeff was up to in prison these days sometimes felt like reading an astrological chart.
“You’ll be pleased to know he’s been denied parole,” Charlie said with some satisfaction. “Remember I was telling you about that special class he was going to try and appeal under? I explained to you about his lawyers trying another angle to get him out? Well, it’s been shut down pretty hard. Buddy’s not getting out. Not for a very long time.”
I felt both of them waiting for my response.
“That’s great news,” I said, not convincing anybody. Dean reached over from the driver’s seat and rested his hand on my thigh.
“You’re probably tired of all this, huh? Me too. I wish it would all just go away. Well, it well and truly is done now.”
“I’m relieved,” I said, and felt the exact opposite.
What’s the point of the supremely evil bad guy in a story if he’s locked away in prison where he can’t do anything to anyone?
We drove on and chatted, me with that part of my brain that could chat and laugh and joke taking care of everything, while that other part of me went off somewhere else to scheme, to think.
I’ll tell you what it did, as we drove in the sunshine back to my pretty house in my pretty neighborhood to see my pretty child. I thought, Dear god, I need something. Anything. A sign. I want something exciting to happen to me. I want the beginning of a new, sexy, breathtaking story. I want my life to start. I’m ready, and I’m not scared. I don’t care if it hurts a little, I want something bigger in life. I don’t know what it is yet, but I’m ready, and I’m asking for …it. For something…”
I don’t believe in god, dear reader, but my heart was praying more fervently than you can imagine. There was no shape or form to my desire; it was just desire, hungry for a container to pour into. I wanted an adventure. I wanted to go on that adventure with him, the man I loved. And oh, how much more I wanted to love him.
“Nora, you here with us?” Charlie said, and snapped me to attention.
“Oh, I’m here, I was just thinking of this afternoon. The moms are coming over, I was wondering whether I had enough drinks and things at home for them…” I said absentmindedly.
“Nice. Man, I wish I was a kept woman,” Charlie said with a goofy smile.
“Shut up, Charlie, Jesus,” Dean said, and shot him a look, but I was no longer paying attention to them.
Back at home Dean and Charlie eventually disappeared off upstairs and left me alone for my ‘girl’s night’ downstairs. There were some women from the neighborhood coming over, and some moms with kids a little older than Matilda. We all shared that kind of forced familiarity you find between fellow prison inmates or people who share a psych ward. We had nothing in common, but the fact that we didn’t really like one another didn’t seem that relevant. I knew that some of them understood that boredom, that malaise of mine better than anyone else, and that alone made them feel like family if not friends.
We sat around, all eight of us, and nibbled the snacks and drank oversized glasses of wine, the TV was on in the corner and everyone was talking at once, decompressing.
“So I keep telling him, you know, it’s something you have to work at. The grass is greener where you water it, you know? I just want him to actually turn up to our relationship, to actually put the effort in…”
“Yeah. He has to show up. To actually own his part.”
“Exactly. That’s’ exactly it. I don’t know why men don’t get that this shit doesn’t happen by accident, like I’m working on it, I’m making all this stuff happen, right?”
“I get it. I hear you. It’s like, it goes deeper than just taking things for granted. It’s like, I think Jake actually thinks the things I do really just happen by themselves, that he’s so used to having it all run smoothly that he’s forgotten the effort behind it all…”
I nodded and sipped my wine.
There are always two evergreen strains of conversation that start off our little girl’s night sessions: the first is how quickly children grow and how old it makes you feel, and the second is the unavoidable, eternal grief of dealing with men and their shit. Sometimes, they’d throw a few jabs at me but I was used to it now. Small communities need the cohesion brought by the black sheep. I was sometimes the black sheep.
“I told him, once a week is plenty. I think we all have this idea that sex is just happening all the time, but if people were honest I think they’d admit it’s much lower.”
Kayla was doing her standard humble-brag routine, playing that game she did, and the moms were smiling and nodding but I knew that they knew that once a week sex was crazy generous, and that Kayla was probably lying, and that all of us knew precisely how much sex all of us were having: zero.
I smiled and drank more wine.
“What I want to know is, why doesn’t anybody ever talk about the quality of sex, you know? As if quantity is all that matters. Like, can we have a rating scale, if we’re busy doing a big tally?”
“Precisely. You’re right. Like, one really good fuck is worth ten mediocre ones, am I right ladies?”
“Oh absolutely. In fact, I think it’s a good thing for the frequency to drop after a few years, it kind of shows that—”
“Oh my god.”
We all turned to follow Kayla’s gaze as her face went white and she stared at the TV.
Sam grabbed the remote and turned the volume up and we all gawped at the screen. I think a part of me knew what had caught their attention a few split seconds before I figured it out.
“Nora, are you seeing this? Nora, oh my god.”
We watched as the face of the man that haunted my dreams and my waking life paraded across the screen, again. It was the same set of images the news stations had used all during the trial. It took me a while to force my ears to make sense of the words filling the living room. I saw the word first before I heard it: ESCAPED. The letters rolled along the bottom of the screen as a young male voiceover explained breathlessly that the infamous millionaire and recently convicted murderer was at large.
I laughed. They all looked at me.
“Oh my god, Nora, are you OK? Do you need a drink?”
I tore my eyes from the screen to find a sea of concerned faces regarding me with horror. He had escaped. He had escaped. He had escaped. The first thought in my mind: I was getting exactly what I asked for.
Kayla’s hand went to mine and she pulled closer to her on the sofa, already well into soothing my non-existent shock. Carried away with this new drama, the women instantly began to talk all at once, but I wasn’t listening to them. All I could focu
s on was an image in my mind: Jeff Cane, a free man, moving at this very moment closer and closer to me…
“You must be so scared, Jesus, I can’t believe this is happening…” they chirped on and on. Must. There was that word again. I cleared my throat, flicked my hair to the side and grabbed the remote to turn the TV off.
“I don’t care, honestly,” I said. That was a lie. “They’ll probably catch him soon.” Also not entirely true. Who the hell escapes from prison, anyway? What kind of farce was this?
“Do you think he’ll…?” Amanda was talking now, she was the youngest, the other underdog of our group. They all shot her stern looks.
“Don’t scare her,” Kayla said.
“I’m not scared,” I said. Now that was true. In fact, I was… not flattered exactly. But a part of me was thrilled at the thought that Jeff Cane, the Jeff Cane, in his own twisted way, was still probably obsessed with me. That while I was out here living my life, he was in there pining for me. Pining for revenge on me, sure, but pining nonetheless. Murderous millionaires don’t pine after just anyone.
“Do you want us to stay? We understand if you need some time,” Kayla said. I lowered my gaze and tried to think.
“I need to speak to Dean,” I said, and looked up the staircase.
I had asked Dean and Charlie not to keep me too updated on the continuing drama unfolding in the state prison in Corcoran. Either he was in prison or he was out, and the rest I didn’t really care about. But now he was out. The girls were all nodding and standing up to make a hasty exit, abandoning their wine glasses but each taking turns to pat me on the shoulder and look at me pityingly. Of course they couldn’t understand the wild little thought that was suddenly hot in my mind. Of course they had no conception that my life and theirs were nothing alike. That having this pretty little world come crashing down around me might not in fact be the worst possible outcome.