by Tanya Chris
“Another one of his friends,” Arabelle said, catching my eye in the mirror. “Irene and I own this place together. We’ve all known each other a long time.”
My eyes returned to Nate and Irene. I’d seen that expression on him before, one that reflected the satisfaction of intimate knowledge and the anticipation of more to come. I knew without question that I wasn’t watching flirtation, or even a revisiting of shared history.
In all this time, although I’d known the possibility existed that Nate could, if he chose, sleep with another woman, I’d been making the blind assumption that he hadn’t—hadn’t been choosing it, hadn’t been doing it. Between rehearsals and me—not to mention an extensive masturbation schedule—where would he even find the time? I could see now that he’d been finding it.
I was still watching Nate, and Arabelle was still watching me.
“You can never have too many friends,” I said. When Nate said he loved me, this was what he meant—he loved me like he loved Irene, like I loved Derek, like I loved him. Not like I loved Alex.
Arabelle finished rifling through my hair. She put a smock on me and picked up her scissors. “Any particular commands?”
“I’ll leave it up to you.” It was clear she thought I’d better.
“You have good color. Natural?”
“A lot of sun this summer.” And my Pebbles hairdo offering my hair up to it.
“Nice. People pay good money for that effect—the light tips.” She moved around me efficiently, her fingers flying. I was relieved to see that not too much was coming off the front. I was willing to live with whatever she gave me as long as the bangs didn’t return.
Nate joined us. He sat in the chair next to mine and started spinning it.
“How old are you?” Arabelle asked him.
“About this old.”
“Brat.” She gave him a look of exasperation mixed with fondness. “How’s life with Desdemona?”
Nate made a face at her. “Desi’s OK. It’s the three monster children.”
“They aren’t monsters. They’re just children.”
“You try sharing a room with one of them.”
“Poor Nate, having to share a room. You know, all three of us had to share a room growing up so Prince Nathaniel could have one to himself. It’s about time it was your turn.”
“Nathaniel?” I asked. He used Nate in the theater programs. I’d assumed it was Nathan if anything. “So Gwen is ...”
“Guinevere,” Arabelle confirmed.
What a family, I thought. I wondered if they were all this good looking.
“I may have to move out,” Nate said.
“Good idea. Time to grow up.”
Everyone was in flux. Just last week Derek had been complaining that he needed to find a new roommate, and in a few weeks Alex and I would have our mediation session and then our court date would be set. I had to think about moving too.
At least Alex was settled. He’d even been by to pick up the furniture he was taking as part of our settlement. Now there were big empty spaces around the house that mocked me every time I walked past them. He hadn’t taken anything from our bedroom, calling it “painful,” so I still slept on our old mattress and threw used condoms on top of his nightstand, but the other rooms looked like we were already half gone. Which I supposed we were.
I hadn’t even started looking for a new place yet. It wasn’t that I was attached to the house. It wasn’t that.
“Derek needs a roommate,” I joked to Nate, pulling myself back to the present.
“Oh yeah?”
“Who’s Derek?” Arabelle asked.
“A friend.” I met her eyes in the mirror, daring her to make something of it.
“That has potential,” Nate said.
“Your brother is a weird man,” I told Arabelle.
“Tell me about it. Flip forward.” She pushed my head down to blow me dry from underneath.
I retreated into the white noise. I built a fantasy world where Nate and Derek and I all lived together and I was the constant center of male attention.
I imagined Derek cooking me dinner and running my bath. I tried to imagine Nate doing something useful but couldn’t pull it off, so I just imagined him doing what he was best at. Then, because his sister had her hands very close to my throat, I stopped imagining that and instead imagined the three of us sitting down to the dinner Derek had cooked, Nate telling us how rehearsals were going and Derek planning our next climbing trip, me toying with a glass of wine between them. Could happily ever after look like that?
Arabelle flipped off the dryer and picked up the scissors again, tweaking here and there. I could already tell I loved it.
“First one’s free for Nate’s friends,” she said, pulling the smock off, “but make an appointment for six weeks. You have to keep it up.”
Chapter 25
I was on my hands and knees mopping the floor with every old towel and rag I’d been able to find when Alex knocked. I yelled at him to come in and kept mopping. Something had gone wrong with the dishwasher, resulting in the lake I was trying to absorb.
Alex surveyed the mess. “Did you get the water turned off?”
“Yeah.”
That had been Nate’s contribution. When I’d called in hysterics because there was water pumping across my kitchen floor, he’d talked me through shutting off the water main and then advised me to call a plumber. Derek had been even less helpful, merely admitting that he didn’t know anything about home maintenance and also advising a plumber.
It was nine o’clock at night and turning off the water main meant there was no water anywhere in the house. So, gritting my teeth as I did it, I’d called Alex. It was his house too, after all.
Alex got down on the ground and stuck his head under the sink. “It’s just a bad hose,” he said when he emerged. “Not a big deal to fix. I can bring a new hose tomorrow night.”
“Do I have to live without running water until then?”
“No, I can turn it off here.” He stuck his head back under the sink and then popped it out again. “Where did you turn it off?”
I showed him the knob I’d used down in the basement and he had me watch the sink while he turned the water back on.
“You won’t have water in the sink here,” he told me, as he walked back into the kitchen, “but everywhere else.”
Not sure of protocol, I offered him a drink. He glanced over his shoulder at his wet and dirty backside. Apparently I needed to clean under the sink.
“Most of your winter clothes are still upstairs,” I suggested. “You should probably take them anyway. You’ll need them soon enough.”
“Depressing thought,” he said, but he followed me upstairs.
Fortunately, his nightstand wasn’t doubling as a condom repository at the moment. I really needed to get that waste basket, though perhaps a waste basket filled with used condoms was no better a visual.
Alex took some clothes into the bathroom to change, and I found a garbage bag in the utility closet and began stuffing sweaters into it.
“You don’t have to do that.” He stood in the doorway in a long sleeve t-shirt and a pair of flannel pajama bottoms.
“We have to do all of it. I mean, it’s not much longer, is it?”
“I filed the final papers today. I should hear about the court date on Monday.”
“When will it be?”
“They seem to be running two to three weeks these days.”
“And then it’s done.” I’d crammed all of Alex’s sweaters into a single bag, making a giant black snowball so big I couldn’t get my arms around it. I stopped trying to pick it up and rolled it over to him. When I straightened up, I found myself face to face with him, the width of a garbage bag between us. He was shorter than Nate, taller than Derek. The angle of my neck adjusted to a familiar tilt.
“I like the haircut.”
He’d gotten his own hair cut too. Either he’d remembered or someone had reminded him.
He brushed my hair off my shoulder, opening my face up to him. His hand came up to my chin.
“I’ve missed you.” He applied light pressure with his fingertips, persuading me towards him.
I blinked and stepped back. “Alex.”
“Sorry.”
“No, it’s not that. I’ve missed you, too.” I twined my fingers together and took a deep breath. “Alex, I’m sorry. I said something to you that wasn’t true, about it being because of you that I was sexually ... unresponsive. I apologized for saying it, but what I didn’t tell you—what I didn’t understand, but I do now—is that what I said wasn’t just mean. It was wrong. My being ... uninterested, uninteresting ... it wasn’t your fault.”
“Melissa.” He stepped over the trash bag to take my hand.
“No, let me say it.” I sat down on the edge of the bed and tugged him down next to me, keeping my hand in his for the strength it gave me. “I was never honest with you. I never told you what I liked or needed, so how could you have known? I stopped being interested in sex because it wasn’t good for me.”
I stole a quick glance at his face which betrayed no emotion.
“Maybe that’s worse for you to hear, I don’t know, but it’s not because you were a bad lover. Someone told me that you get the sex you deserve, and that’s me. I never told you what I wanted, so I never got what I wanted, and I blamed you. I’m sorry.”
Alex took his hand from mine and put it on his forehead, bending forward like he felt sick. “It’s not like I didn’t know it on some level. In the beginning, I thought it was OK, that you were enjoying it. But as time went on, well, I guess it was easier to pretend.”
“It was OK in the beginning. I mean, it was hopeful. It’s not like you weren’t trying or like I wasn’t turned on by you. I was. I hope you know that. I figured it would keep getting better. Somehow. Like magic. So I never said anything.”
“And I never asked.”
“And it didn’t get better. It just got routine.”
Until I became uninterested, and the sex became uninteresting, until Alex was put in the position of choosing between sex and love.
“I think you cheated on me because you loved me, because it was the only way you could think of to stay married to me, and I want you to know that I understand that now.”
Alex dragged me into his arms, crushing me to him.
“Oh God, Melissa. I’m sorry. I’m so, so sorry.” He sobbed into my neck, great choking gasps of sorrow and relief.
“Shh, it’s OK. I forgive you. And you’ll forgive me?”
He nodded against me.
“And we won’t be mad anymore, OK?” I held him against me, rocking him in my arms until he stopped crying and lifted his face to mine. He kissed me softly once and then threw himself into me. It felt like our early kisses, like raw newness and endless possibility, and it felt like every kiss we’d ever shared—past and future intertwined to form the present. Alex murmured my name against my lips as his hands ran up and down my body.
“Alex.” This was a monumentally bad idea, wasn’t it?
“Show me,” he said. “Please, this one time. Show me.”
I let him pull my shirt over my head in a haze. Then, deciding, I knelt up on the bed and took his face into my hands and began kissing him. Kissing him—putting my passion and patience into it.
He struggled momentarily to right the balance, to assert his lead, and then he softened beneath my hands and began to follow me, relaxing into the kiss, letting me show him. Together we rolled onto the bed, pulling at each other’s clothes.
When he had me naked, I ran a hand down my body and dipped it into my pussy so that my fingers were wet and slippery. I brought them to his mouth. With astonished eyes he licked at them, then pulled my hand towards him, devouring it with rough, eager slurps, his eyes on mine.
“There’s more where that came from.”
“Really?”
“If you want to.”
He was between my legs so fast I giggled.
“Gentle,” I said, “but firm.”
I used my hand on the back of his head to bring us into better alignment.
“Tell me,” he kept popping up his head to say. “Tell me more.” Until finally I told him to hush and keep working and he did and it worked. It was a little orgasm, nothing like what Nate could do, but the first of mine we’d ever shared.
He raised himself up to me, grinning and wiping his chin, and I returned the favor for a while, showing off some of what I’d learned. I stopped short of making him come since Alex wasn’t twenty-five and we weren’t likely to get a second chance in ten minutes.
“Holy shit,” he said when I sat up to reach for the drawer where I kept the condoms. “Where have you been all my life, baby?”
I laughed and he laughed, but when I turned to him with the condom in my hand, his laughter died.
“We don’t need—”
“Under the circumstances, I think we do.”
“Melissa, I’m your husband.”
“We’ve both been with other partners, Alex. Multiple other partners.”
“Right. How could I forget that.” He sat up and swung his legs over the side of the bed.
“Where are you going?”
“This was a mistake.” He stood, his movements quick and jerky as he got dressed, his cock already soft before he tucked it into his boxers.
I stood before him, naked and confused. “You knew I’d been with other people.”
“Who’ve apparently taught you a few tricks.”
“Which you were enjoying.”
Alex was fully dressed, but I remained before him naked, refusing to hide anymore. He put his hands on his forehead in that characteristic gesture that foretold a headache.
“Thank you for the honesty. And the apology. And for this.” He waved his hand at the bed. “I’ll stop by tomorrow after work with the hose.” He walked around me without looking at me, heading out the door and down the hall to the stairway.
“I don’t get it,” I said from behind him.
He paused at the top of the stairs. “I can’t be one more of your guys, Melissa. I’m your husband. For another three weeks at least, I’m your husband.”
Chapter 26
“But it’s my night, right?” Derek stood next to his car rocking from heel to toe while we waited for Nate in the pullout across from the trailhead.
“You’re so rules-based,” I teased him.
“I’m an engineer. The universe is governed by rules.”
“Relationships are harder to govern than the universe.” My mind automatically went to Alex and what the hell I was supposed to do about that situation.
Nearly two weeks had passed since we’d last talked, although I’d received a terse text message with our court date. He’d come back, as promised, the night after our aborted attempt at sex with a new hose for the dishwasher. I’d found him waiting at the dining room table when I got home. I was thankful Derek and I had decided to use his roommate-free place for a quickie after the gym instead of spending the evening together at my place.
I sat down across from Alex, wondering why he’d waited up so late for me.
“I’m sorry,” he said when I looked at him expectantly. “Again. I can’t seem to be rational on the subject of you with other men. I don’t know how you’re handling it so well.”
“Practice.” I thought of the complicated life I’d been leading. “And a head start.” I threw that in to hurt him and saw that it did.
“If it makes you feel any better, I was kicking myself about fifteen minutes after I left here. I wish I had a do-over.” He bent his head and looked up at me through his lashes.
“It was probably just as well. What were we going to be, fuck-buddies?
“No.” He shook his head hard. “I’ve been thinking. Ever since that first day, I’ve been thinking. I’d like a do-over in general. Not just last night, but the whole thing. I made a mistake prioritizing sex over our marriage. I m
ade a mistake thinking it was worth walking away from you over. I love you and I miss you and I’d like to try again.” He reached across the table and took my hand. “Please.”
I gripped his hand like it might get away. Alex back, my home back, my life back.
“I didn’t appreciate what I had,” he went on. “We had a good life together. I didn’t need sexual gymnastics. Now that I see the cost, I’m not sure it’s worth it.”
I shook my head. There was a quiet buzz building in there. “What cost?”
“Those other guys. This life you’re leading now—out until eleven o’clock. Climbing, theater. You’re never home. I drive by sometimes. OK, that sounds like stalking.” He smiled at me, but I couldn’t smile back. “I want my life back,” he said. “Our life.”
The buzz expanded, a hot jumble of thoughts begging to be heard all at once. His life back. Our life back. My life back. I shook my head, not able to articulate it.
“Melissa?”
“No,” I said. No, I was not Melissa.
When Alex left that night, things between us were less certain than ever. There was an offer on the table that wouldn’t lie as flat as I’d like it to. It kept jumping up at moments like this, inserting itself like a question mark into every interaction I had. I could save my marriage if I was willing to lose Lissie.
“But it is my night,” Derek said, bringing my attention back to him. “I don’t mind Nate climbing with us, if he has to, but does he have to paw you? On my night?”
I turned my attention fully to him, to his warm brown eyes beseeching mine with sweet earnestness. His shoulders were broad beneath the t-shirt he wore despite the crisp coolness of an early fall day. He still wore sandals too—they suited the constant footwear changes climbing demanded—but he had on a pair of jeans, slung low enough to reveal a hint of boxers where the waistband gapped across his hip bones.
“Do you know you’re beautiful?” I snaked a hand behind his head and put the other low on his back, wishing the t-shirt wasn’t between us.