Her face crumpled like I’d slapped her. She walked to the dresser slowly, pulling out shorts and a T-shirt with shaking hands.
When she turned back around, her face was full of tears. “You really want me to leave our house?”
I looked at her and I knew she could see it. The hurt. The betrayal. The confusion.
“Ask yourself that,” I said. “And while you doing that… I’m gonna ask myself why I never just fucked all my clients who wanted to.”
She gasped and pure pain flashed across her face. I regretted it the second it left my mouth, but I couldn’t stop. I wanted her to hurt like I was hurting.
“God knows I could’ve,” I continued bitterly. “Probably would’ve had a great time too.”
I hated myself even as I said it, watching tears stream down her face.
“For years,” she shouted, “you neglected me!”
Her words echoed through the room. “You left me with breadcrumbs while everybody else got everything!”
She was shaking. “I spent days depressed about my life, Kairo! All I wanted was my person at the end of the day and my person was always too tired for me!”
Every word landed like a punch.
“You poured into everybody else,” she cried. “Clients. Work. Business. Everybody but me! I kept your house together! I raised our child! I made sure everything around you was perfect and at one hundred percent while I was sitting at fucking zero!”
I couldn’t even speak. I was hurt but I remembered every night she asked me to sit with her, every time she waited up, and every quiet disappointment I ignored because I thought providing was completely loving her.
“You made me feel so low when you said something about a hall pass. Like damn, you’re that exhausted with me that you’d rather I get intimacy from someone outside of our union.”
I closed my eyes.
“I fought it,” she continued. “I waited for you to see me. I waited for you to change. But you kept choosing work… and I was alone.”
Her tears fell harder. “So I talked to a friend.”
The word nearly killed me. “He made me feel good,” she admitted. “I didn’t have to beg for attention.”
“But he wasn’t you,” she said quickly. “He will never be you. Even through it all, I always wanted my husband.”
That sentence nearly broke me in half. “He kept calling my phone because I told him we could no longer be friends. My marriage is important to me and the one thing I didn’t want to lose.”
Relief and devastation collided inside my chest at the same time.
She grabbed her purse. “But I was wrong,” she said, wiping her tears. “So I’ll leave. I’ll go stay with Coffee and give you space.”
She paused at the door. “And thank you,” she added bitterly, “for letting me know that you really did want to fuck those clients.”
The door opened and closed. Suddenly the house felt empty. I sat there staring at the ceiling trying to understand how ourlove turned into that. How two people who worshipped each other ended up strangers fighting in the dark. Memories hit me all at once. Her begging me to sit down, her asking for dates, her waiting up, her falling asleep alone. My chest tightened painfully.
I covered my face with my hands. I let another man walk into the spaces I abandoned. A sob escaped before I could stop it.
“Fuck…”
I threw the pillow across the room. I regretted telling her to leave the second the words left my mouth.
It hurt me even more knowing that she never stopped loving me. She just got lonely enough to believe someone else saw her better.
25
Khloe
