‘You saw all the evidence you need,’ she says through gritted teeth, her gaze slipping back to me and away again. If looks could kill... ‘We were both there.’
‘Maybe I doubt my own eyes,’ I say, in an echo of the words she used on me. ‘I’d had a lot to drink, and as I recall, you never once said you’d fucked the guy.’
‘Never said?’ she repeats warily, sliding her hands into the pockets of her pants. Loose navy pants, a tight tank, and flip-flops. Beach chic; her long dark hair pinned to her head in a messy knot, the curve of her neck exposed, delicate and fine-boned.
She looks like she belongs in a café on some beachfront—the kind of girl who wears Ugg boots and oversized sweaters that expose too much shoulder in the cold. What you see with Ivy isn’t at all what you get; Ugg boots are unethical, and meat is a sin unless we’re talking about what’s between my legs.Or at least, she used to be.Despite the cool and calm outward appearance, my wife is incendiary. You just have to know how to get her there. That fucking hair. I want to bury my nose in it. Pull out the pins or whatever the fuck’s keeping it in place. Run my fingers through it—grab it at the base of her skull and pull her head back until she’s staring at me.
Just. Fucking. Look. At. Me.
‘You never once said,Dylan, I fucked up. I went out and had a little too much to drink and brought a guy home to our bed.’She flinches. I smile. ‘Not once did you actually admit it; not then and not after.’ Not in the days following when I ranted and raved. Days I tortured myself and her. Evenings spent unwisely. Imprudently. Recklessly. Intermittently drunk then high before coming home to start the cycle again. Home. What a joke. And all the while I raged, she hedged. I can see that now.
‘I was wasted. We ended up in bed. I didn’t do it to hurt you, and I’m sorry.’
Those are, what I’d call, the bare facts. As in, they’re barely factual.
We had a party at the end of the shoot. She didn’t want to go, and we fought; she’d been in a strange mood the whole week—fuck knows why. But I needed her there, and she wanted to stay in the suite and sulk.
I told her she could please herself.My needs be damned.
I went. She followed. We got wrecked—separately. We were like planets orbiting that evening and destined for a collision in hindsight. I lost track of her, lost in the fugue of euphoria and a drunken vibe. Then later, my mood softened, sap that I am. I tried to put myself in her position. I went to look for her, but she hadn’t gone back to the suite. She also wasn’t answering her phone.
Short story, real late—or real early, depending on your take of things—I caught a limo home. And there she was, near naked and sprawled across our bed. She was alone, but she’d had a man there; he’d left his shirt hanging in the bathroom. Who leaves without their fucking shirt?
I’d always thought myself a natural brawler, but right then, I was nothing but a fucking cripple. And she was the cause.
‘So you’re sorry. You’re sorry? Yeah, well, so am I.’ My voice gets louder, and I shove my fists in my pockets to stop from putting them around her neck. ‘I’m so fucking sorry,’ I roar, ‘that you left me for a lie. You fucking left—threw it all away. And for what?’ She opens her mouth, but I’m not ready to hear her talk. ‘The asshole is fucking gay.’
So I’ve lived imprudently.
So I’ve fucked my way through half of L.A. since she left.
So I fought and got drunk and made lots of nasty new friends.
So I did all those things just to block her out.
I’m also a masochist because I made it my business to find out who she went home with—a grip from the movie I was working on. I wasn’t sure what to do with the information, short of beating him into non-existence. I thought about it plenty—how could I contrive to hurt him without anyone knowing how much I hurt. And then he appeared on my latest set. The guy didn’t know who the fuck I was, beyond being Dylan Duffy, and was equally perplexed when I got up in his face.
Did you enjoy fucking my wife? Sure, she’s hot, but maybe that she was mine was part of the draw?
Such a conceited asshole.
Short story? She lied. She let me believe she’d fucked some guy when a good Samaritan did nothing but take her home. He said he found her sobbing outside the hotel, almost incoherent with drink and clearly upset. He’d been at the party but didn’t know we were together. But how could he when she made our marriage a secret. She’d told him she’d fought with her husband and wanted to go home; that she just needed a cab. He ended up driving her there, helping her out of her vomit-splattered dress and then into bed. Turns out she’d vomited on him, too, so he’d stripped out of his puke-stained shirt. He’d left her tucked onto her side and left in his undershirt.
I’ve punished us both for her supposed infidelity, and every woman I’ve fucked had her face. So many women, so many times. And I’ve hated them all in her place.
Guess who’s the adulterous one now.
So much for getting her to rage. As she recoils, my anger boils. She doesn’t cry, and she doesn’t answer, simply hanging her head.
Fucking shame. I hope she’s feeling it because fuck knows I am.
‘When did you find out?’
‘When did I learn my life was a joke, and my wife a lying cunt? About three weeks ago.’
‘I still don’t know what you want from me, Dylan.’
I want to know if you ever loved me.
