My husband, sitting on the toilet.
My husband, with his dick in his right hand.
My husband, with his phone in his other hand.
My stomach drops when I see what’s on his screen.
Anothergirlon his phone.
I can’t even call her a woman. She looks early twenties, at the most. Definitely no crow’s feet like I’m getting. She’s tiny, like I used to be. Perky tits, like I used to have.
She looks like she knows how hot she is.
She definitely doesn’t look like she’s long past her best years, or like she’s brought four of his children into this world.
He is furiously jerking the hand gripping his cock, making soft noises as he obviously tries to remain quiet, staring intently at the photo in his hand before he closes his eyes and continues his ministrations to his own shaft, moving faster with each stroke, completely unaware of his wife watching on in horror as her entire world shatters with each pump of his fist.
I can’t make a noise. I’m not sure my body is even functioning. My stomach is still in the region of my knees.
My creaky, thirty-three-year-old knees.
Far below my thirty-three-year-old ass and hips that will never be as small as they were before I got pregnant with Bradshaw, our firstborn.
Never as small as the ass on the chick he is currently pleasuring himself to the sight of.
I slowly back away from the bathroom, not making a sound. I can’t even form a coherent thought other thanmy husband doesn’t want me. My husband wants that tight little thing, not the woman he brought four new lives into the world with.
I guess for better or worse didn’t mean when life gets too busy for regular sex?
Or when your wife gains some baby weight?
I can’t help the callous thoughts flooding my mind right now, but I wish I could. My usual pessimism is back with a bite I haven’t heard in so damn long.If I wasn’t what you wanted, Chance, maybe you shouldn’t have knocked me up four times in six years.
I’m not proud of what I’m thinking right now, but I’ve never claimed to be perfect. I’m salty and quick to defend myself and my family on the best of days, and I wouldnotcall this the best of my days.
As I head back to bed, crawling up to my pillow and underneath the covers again—my back toward his side of the bed, pretending I never saw anything—one thought won’t leave my mind above all the others. It’s on repeat, like a fucked-up chant, a morbid mantra to the demise of my marriage.
My husband wants someone else.
My husband doesn’t want me.
That’s my only thought as I somehow, eventually, drift off to sleep, long after Chance came back to bed, oblivious to his wife silently crying into her pillow with her back to him, no more than ten inches and a world apart.
TWO
CHRISSY
My alarm goes off the next morning at five fifty, as per usual, and I go through the motions of the daily routine on autopilot. A shell of a mom, whose heart may have been ripped out, who got almost no sleep, but who still has to put her kids first and get through the day without letting them know anything is wrong. So that’s what I do. I shower, throw my dark, wet hair up into what society politely labels a “messy bun,” though it’s really more of a rat’s nest situation, and quickly dress in yoga pants, a stretchy tee, and flip flops, which is practically the uniform of a millennial Floridian.
I have two modes: full glam or full mom. Today is definitely the latter. I don’t even bother spending more than ten seconds looking in the mirror. Moisturizer will have to be enough for today.
There’sneveran excuse to skip moisturizer.
My mixed heritage—generations-ago-Irish on my mother’s side, and much more recently Mexican on my father’s—has blessed me with an almost caramel skin tone that contrasts harshly with the blue-green of these massive bags I’m carrying around under my dark hazel eyes today, so that’s nice.Just the confidence boost I could use right about now.My face is still round, my full, youthful cheeks and defined jawline my key features (Chipmunk Cheeks, the kids used to call me in school, and while cruel, it was fairly accurate, but I’ve learned to embrace it with time—they’ll be jealous when their jowls are sagging with age and I’ve still got that youthful plumpness in my corner).
I don’t even care enough today to use my carefully developed skills to give myself some sort of shape and definition in the cheeks; a little bit of contour to highlight my best features and minimize my less complementary ones. Nope. Just plain old Christina.That’s what you’re getting today, Chance.
If I had a client appointment today, I would make the extra effort. After all, as a makeup artist, you are your own business card. But I don’t plan on seeing anyone who would want to hire me today. This is going to be a purely functional day. Get the kids ready, off to school and daycare, and then get back to the house where I can put off all of the errands I had planned and instead mope and re-evaluate my life choices over midday mojitos. Or do eighteen loads of laundry. Probably not both. I don’t mix laundry and booze after the Delicates Incident of ’19, as Chance calls it. Don’t ask.
