“Yes.”
“Was it Tony?”
“Yes.”
Robert takes a slow sip of his whiskey. The ice clinks against the glass in the quiet of the kitchen. “I called you.”
What? My knees go liquid. He called while I was busy getting destroyed on the casino rooftop. I didn’t even think to look at my phone in the car.
I open my mouth, and he raises his hand before I can speak. “Don’t. I can’t do this tonight.”
He pushes back from the table and walks past me. Close enough that I catch his cologne. My hand almost reaches for him. Almost.
He stops halfway up the stairs, hand on the banister, and I think he’s going to turn around.
“I called you twice, Shannon.”
He doesn’t turn around.
The spare room door closes. I stare at the kitchen table for a long time. His whiskey glass is sweating condensation, the ice shrinking into nothing.
I did it. I wrecked the only thing that mattered.
Three days of Robert performing husband. He comes home at six and eats dinner at the table and loads the dishwasher and doesn’t say a word to me that isn’t necessary. The disconnect is killing me. It sits in my chest like a bruise I keep pressing to see if it still hurts. It always does.
He’s moved to the spare room permanently. Two nights ago, I tried the vibrator, not because I was turned on but because I needed to know my body still worked. I lay there in our empty bed with it buzzing between my legs and couldn’t even get aflutter. I tried the app with the escalating patterns, the one that usually gets me there in four minutes flat. Nothing.
My pussy is telling me I really fucked up.
On the fourth day, I come home from the neighborhood committee meeting to a dark kitchen. The leftovers I plated for Robert are still wrapped in the fridge. The living room light is on. He’s on the couch with the TV off, and he looks like shit. Whatever’s been happening inside his head for the last four days has finally caught up.
He glances up when I come in, and I stop in the doorway because Robert’s eyes are wrong. He hasn’t met my gaze directly in days and only talked to the side of my face, or found the window behind me very interesting. Now he’s staring right at me, and I almost wish he’d go back to the window.
“Sit down,” he says.
I sit on the far end of the couch from him. There’s one cushion between us and about fifteen years of marriage I’ve spent the last three weeks setting on fire.
“I knew what I signed up for.” He stops and clears his throat. “Tony, Adrian, all of it. I wanted you to have that.” His voice has a crack in it I’ve never heard before. “But you lied to me, Shannon. You fed me the version of you that works at cocktailparties, and I ate it. And I can’t—“ He swallows. “I don’t know who you are right now. That’s what I can’t handle.”
My whole chest goes tight.
I slide across the cushion and put my hand over his fist where it’s pressing into his own thigh. His knuckles are warm. He doesn’t pull away.
I’ll take it.
“Can we talk?” I barely get it out. “Really talk. The way we did when you first brought up the arrangement.”
Robert holds my eyes long enough that I can hear the refrigerator humming in the kitchen. Then he nods once.
“Okay.”
He has the facts. What I never told him was why.
“I went back Sunday because the silence in the house was too loud.” My voice is shaking, but I don’t try to steady it. “I couldn’t stand it.”
He’s quiet. I keep going because if I stop, I’ll never start again.
“And that was wrong and I knew it was wrong and it made me wet anyway.” My thighs press together, and I hate that my body is doing this right now, in the middle of the worst conversationof my marriage. “I was wet before I walked through the door. That’s the part I can’t forgive myself for.”
