“My sister wears hoops,” I cut in. “Gold hoops. You know that. She has since high school.” The bigger the hoops the better the whore, was her favorite motto for her earrings. I tilt the sparkling stud so it catches the light. It’s delicate and fancy. “This was under the couch. Near the nice red smudge on the cushion. The same shade that was on your shirt.”
We stand there in the middle of our living room, the silence thick between us.
His jaw works. He looks at the earring, at me, back at the earring. I watch the shift in his eyes as deny everything slams into she’s not buying it. His mind working overtime to fix this, fix me.
He drops his gaze, exhales through his nose. “Holley…”
My stomach drops. That one word is enough. The way he says it: weary, guilty, like I’m something fragile he’s sorry to break but not sorry enough not to have done the breaking.
“How long?” I manage.
He rubs a hand over his face. “It’s not— I mean, it’s not what you think.”
I laugh, short and incredulous. “Well, please tell me what I think. Better yet, what is it, exactly? Neighborhood earring fairy? Traveling jewelry salesman? Spontaneous ear accessory manifestation?”
He bristles. “Jesus, you don’t have to be a bitch about it.”
The world tilts. There it is. I almost expected an apology. Groveling. Tears. How stupid am I to think he wouldn’t turn this on me somehow. Everything is always my fault somehow.
“Answer the question,” I order, and I hear ice in my own voice. “How long?”
His eyes flash with that defensive anger I’ve been seeing more lately, the kind that looks for reasons to stay in the fight. “What difference does it make?” he challenges.
“It makes a lot of difference to me,” I snap. “Was it a one-time thing? Is she someone you work with? Is she?—”
“It’s not serious,” he blurts. “Okay? It’s not… it’s not like that.”
A cold, clean fury slides into place where the shock used to be. “So you cheated on me and I’m supposed to feel better because you don’t have feelings about it?”
He scoffs. “Like you even care anymore. Maybe if you paid more attention to me, I wouldn’t seek it somewhere else.”
The words land like a slap. My hand tightens around the earring until it digs into my skin. “What is that supposed to mean?”
“You’re never here,” he fires back, unleashing on me. “You’re always working late, always tired, always stressed. You don’t want to go out, you don’t want to have sex, you don’t want to talk about anything except bills. Do you know how depressing that is?”
I throw my hands up in frustration. “So I drove you to cheat? Is that really what you’re saying?”
“I’m not saying that,” he says, which of course means he is. “I’m just… we haven’t been happy for a long time, Holley. You aren’t happy so how can I be?”
I stare at him. At the man I thought I would grow old with. At the man I’ve been breaking myself in half to support while he figured things out. This was his mid-life crisis I told myself.
“And instead of talking to me,” I mutter slowly, “you brought another woman into our home. Into our bed.”
“Look, it just happened, okay?” he remarks, frustration bubbling. “I didn’t plan it. I didn’t, like, go out looking?—”
“Stop.” I hold up my hand. My chest is tight, my eyes burn, but I’m not crying. Not yet. “Just stop. I don’t care about the details. I don’t want to know her name. I don’t want to know what you told her about me.” My voice trembles on that, and I swallow it down. “I’ve heard enough.”
He shifts, suddenly uneasy. “Holls, can we just talk like adults? I’m here, we can go to counseling, we can?—”
No, there is no more we can anything. “You need to leave.”
The words hang in the air between us.
He frowns like he misheard me. “What?”
“You need to leave,” I repeat. “Now.”
He barks a laugh. “Come on.”
