“Anyway,” I said quickly, clearing my throat and screwing the polish top back on. “What you doing tonight since you’re kid-free?”
He laughed, noticing my attempt to pivot the conversation.
“I honestly don’t know. My son’s with my parents for the weekend,” he said. “They've been planning it all week. My mom already told me not to call unless it’s an emergency.”
I laughed. “She wants her baby to herself. My parents were the same way before mine became a sassy teen. Enjoy it because all she wants now is for them to take her shopping and back home to bother me.”
“Exactly,” he said. “So I might just relax. Watch a game. Probably take myself for a night ride since I haven’t in a while.”
There was another comfortable silence. And I realized I didn’t have anything else to say but I also didn’t want to hang up.
I loved that I didn’t need anything from him. No advice, fixing, and compromising. We just… liked talking. Which scared me more than anything else because our friendship felt like more, and it wasn’t supposed to feel like this.
I looked down at my finished toes, wiggling them slightly as they dried.
“Stacks?”
“Yeah?”
“…You ever realize you can miss a feeling you never actually had?”
He was quiet for a second before answering.
“All the time.”
I didn’t realize that I was in my head until he said my name again.
“Khloe.”
“Hmm?”
“You’re thinking too loud.”
I smiled faintly, staring at my products on my bathroom counter. “I think I’ve been doing that my whole life.”
“Yeah… you carry conversations in your head that no one else ever hears.”
“I just…” I hesitated, then sighed. “You ever imagine your life one way for so long that when it turns out different you don’t even know if you’re allowed to grieve it.”
“I love my life,” I continued quickly and defensively. “I do. I love my husband. I love my daughter. We’re stable. We’re safe. We’re… good.” I paused. “And that’s why nobody understands when I say I still feel lonely sometimes.”
“I hear people say all the time ‘at least he’s not cheating’… ‘at least he provides’… ‘at least you don’t struggle.’ And I agree,” I said. “I do appreciate a man that works hard. I do. But nobody talks about what it feels like being married to ambition.”
I swallowed, feeling my shoulders relax from the tension exiting my body.
“It’s like living with a man the world gets the best version of… and you get whatever energy is left.”
The words surprised even me once they came out.
“I spent my teens and twenties pregnant, breastfeeding, being a wife, studying, trying to be strong. Then I blinked and I’m in my thirties, wondering when I actually got to be a woman… not just a mother, wife, or someone full of responsibility.”
“I made my choices. I’ll never regret my child or my marriage. But… women change after kids. Our bodies change. Our minds change. Our wants change. And men… they just keep becoming who they were always going to be.”
I laughed weakly. “Sometimes I feel like I aged emotionally ten years while everyone else stayed twenty-two.”
He was so quiet on the other line that I almost thought the call dropped.
“You didn’t lose your youth,” he said. “You invested it.”
