Chapter 14 - The Wine Tour

Pinot, Iced Coffee, Green Velvet and a Man With a Rope.

There were two Calebs, and the problem was that I loved one of them.

When I was on his page, when I was loose and laughing and saying yes, Caleb was the best husband I had ever imagined. Or so I thought at the time. Looking back, I’m not sure what I was actually measuring. He didn’t run me baths or take things off my plate. What he did was want me. He wanted to cuddle on the couch and talk for hours. He wanted me near him, always within arm’s reach. And he was good with the kids, properly good, the kind of dad who loved taking the boys to footy and basketball practice and bundling us all into the car for a day at the beach. He’d get down on the floor and let Stella style his hair into small ridiculous ponytails and laugh until his eyes watered. He was happy, and he was there, and somewhere along the way I’d started counting those two things as proof of a great marriage, the way you’re grateful for a clear day after a long wet stretch.

He was warm in the ordinary minutes, which felt like the thing that counted. He’d pull me in by the waist while I was washing up and breathe into my hair. I’m so lucky to have you. I really am. When we were deep in the world of Red Hot Pie, messaging couples late at night and laughing at strangers’ photos together, co-conspirators in something secret, he was the best version of himself. Lit up. Purposeful. Glowing with whatever it is that lights men from the inside when they decide life is finally happening to them.

And when I went still, when I got quiet or hesitated or said something had felt wrong, he became someone else. Heavy. Sullen. A man walking around the house carrying something invisible and very, very expensive. The whole place felt it. The kids felt it. I felt it before I’d even worked out what I’d done.

I told myself it was a phase. A midlife thing. He had never been like this in twenty years. Jekyll and Hyde, I started to think, when the cloud rolled in. He’ll come back. He always comes back. And he always did. The relief of it was so warm and so total that I would forget, properly forget, that the other one existed at all. That was the trick. The good Caleb was so completely good that the bad one had to be the fluke.

It had to be.

And we had a dream together, which mattered more than I can explain. A house in the country, off-grid, on acres. I would design every room, run my hands over linen and timber and brushed brass until I found the exact weight of the things that felt like us. We’d put cabins on the land and let people stay, city people, tired people, and they’d write reviews about how peaceful it was. At the end of a long day Caleb would stand on the verandah and look out over all of it and say we built this, babe. We did this. A sanctuary. That was his word. We were going to build a sanctuary for worn-out strangers.

I wanted that so badly it ached. I could see the bath I’d put under the window. I could see myself happy in it.

That was the cruelty of it. Not the bad nights. The good days. The good days kept me at the table, studying the menu, telling myself the rest was just one bad dish.

So when Caleb told me I was too conservative, that I couldn’t let go, that I was insecure, he wasn’t introducing an idea. He was confirming an old one. He was the latest voice in a choir that had been singing the same note my whole life. And it was beginning to dawn on me, in a quiet and sickening way, that the woman he’d been so dazzled by, the one from the Playboy Mansion party, was my opposite in every measurable way. Confident, sexually open, a tease, the kind of woman with no shame about her own appetites. I had spent forty years trying to be the other thing. The good girl. The princess. Cherished, treasured, loyal to the point of devotion. And on a fair audit of my romantic history, princess had not exactly been a winning strategy.

Face your fears, the fridge magnets said, right there next to live, laugh, love. My greatest fear was never spiders or heights. It was watching my husband with another woman and enjoying it. Forgetting me. Irrelevant me. And here I was being handed it as a personal growth project. A dragon to slay. In time I’d even feel proud of myself for enduring it without breaking, which is its own kind of madness, congratulating yourself for tolerating something you should never have been handed in the first place.

And then there was Red Hot Pie. Pages of messages a day, pinging in between school pickup and dinner, a whole secret economy running underneath my ordinary one. I lived in terror of the kids seeing my phone. Not my mother, not my friends, the kids. The thought of Sam or Stella or Jeremy ever knowing what their mother was doing, what their mother was becoming, was a physical sickness I had to swallow several times a day. So I hid it. I got good at hiding it. And still the messages came. Men, women, couples, all of them wanting to connect, to meet, to see me. Strangers calling me beautiful. Strangers calling me special. It did something to my maths. If this many people wanted this and only I was flinching, then surely I was the one wired wrong. The numbers only ran one way. Everyone couldn’t be wrong. So it had to be me.

So after Barb and Barry, something in me hardened into a decision. I was tired of being the one who flinched, the one who got it wrong, the one trailing behind everyone else looking faintly horrified. If this was the game now, I was going to learn to play it. I wasn’t just going to endure it. I was going to get good at it. I would fake it till I made it, perform the woman I was supposed to be until one day I simply became her.

And the most insidious part is that it all made sense at the time.

---

Caleb had been gentle for weeks by then. Tender, attentive, careful with me, the way he always was after I agreed to keep going. He’d clearly given some thought to making the next step softer, and what he produced was the wine tour. A way to meet a dozen of the couples we’d been talking to on Kik all at once, in daylight, in wine country, cheese boards and a coach and nothing required of me at all. And then, at the end of the day, back to the venue to carry the night on at the club itself.

Listen, baby. We won’t do anything, he promised. We’ll just meet people, have some wine, see what it’s about. You don’t have to do a thing. I just want you there. I want you to see it isn’t scary. It’s just people. He said it in the gentle voice, the empathic one, the register he’d been using more and more since I’d started saying yes. He thanked me for continuing the adventure with him. He kissed the top of my head. I know it’s hard for you. I see how brave you are. I love you for that more than you know.

It worked. Of course it worked. The worst that could happen, by his telling, was wine and small talk.

In reality, it was two dozen fellow swingers and us, meeting in the carpark of a place in a dodgy industrial estate, climbing onto a white tour bus, and heading for the hinterland. The venue, where we’d change and finish the night, advertised itself as Queensland’s premier swingers club. There was nothing premier about it. It was a place straining to sound classy while remaining, in every fibre, deeply suburban and faintly sticky, which I would soon discover was also an accurate description of nearly everyone inside it. I can’t print its real name. We’ll call it Château Velour, though after that night Caleb and I privately agreed it should have been called Château Delusion.

The wine-tour part I could almost handle. Daytime. Wine. Cheese. Cardigans and lipstick. It was the club that frightened me. I knew sex clubs the way most of us do, from the careful slow pans of a television drama, and I had pictured glamour. Beautiful, confident people, naked and sophisticated. I’d need to get my head in the game, because by then I’d started thinking of it as exactly that. A game. The day was the warm-up. The night was the match.

I dressed in two stages. For the day, a short fitted beige skirt with boots, and a white linen blouse with a delicate lace bra showing through the gap at the top. Classy, with just enough mischief. The cute girl with a secret. For the night, zipped into a separate bag I refused to open in the kitchen: green velvet. Pure slut. A dress I hadn’t yet tried on a body that did not, internally, identify as the kind of body that wore it. I packed lingerie I’d never worn, a rust-orange bra trimmed in black lace, sheer enough that you could see straight through it, that I’d had to talk myself into at the counter. And black strappy heels I could barely walk in.

The plan was simple. Be sexy. Drink too much. Fake it.

On the bus, twelve couples introduced themselves cheerfully. Caleb and I had agreed never to use our real names, not on Red Hot Pie, not with anyone we met. He was Cal. I was Evie. A small, ridiculous disguise that made me feel about three percent safer. Barb and Barry had used fake names too, I was fairly sure. It seemed to be the done thing.

By the second vineyard the veneer had thinned. By the third, couples were openly pawing at each other and trading stories like recipes. A policewoman beside me, an actual police officer, bellowed across the tasting room to another couple about a g-string she’d lost at a party the month before, the one with the missing crotch, while her engineer husband laughed and ran his hand up her thigh in full view of the brie wheel. I sipped my pinot and worked hard to keep my face on.

The crowd was not what I’d pictured. Some couples were daggy in the way of people who’d stopped trying decades ago and were here for what they could no longer get at home. Others were trying so hard it hurt to watch. Too much makeup, too much perfume, too much bling for a Saturday in a winery. There was no soaring free-spirited connection, no liberation in the air, none of the thing Caleb described when he talked about this world. There was diet talk, and gym talk, and who-did-what-to-whom at the last party, and under all of it a low constant hum of what’s in this for me. Smarmy. Shallow. Greasy at the edges.

One man drank no wine at all. He worked steadily through an enormous bottle of iced coffee for the whole bus ride, his face the colour of underdone meatloaf. He told me, unprompted, that he got through two litres of it a day. Two litres, he said again, in case I’d failed to be impressed the first time. His wife wore a leopard-print blouse losing a slow war with her body, and he looked me up and down the way you’d eye a steak you weren’t sure you wanted to commit to. I’m flattered, I thought, but the gentleman who hydrates exclusively with International Roast is not exactly my type. I would learn later that his preferences were extremely specific, and not at all complimentary to my facial features.

Then there was the host. Of course there was a host. Kenny. Mid-thirties, linen shirt unbuttoned to a hopeful depth, gold chain glinting on a smooth tanned chest. He carried himself with the confidence of a man who had recently watched a documentary about P Diddy and taken extensive notes. Kenny ran the club. Kenny was polyamorous. Kenny kept appearing at my elbow with more wine, asking what I was hoping for tonight, telling me I had a great figure, promising me I’d be spoilt at the club later. Come find me if you get worried, babe. You can always come play with me. I smiled and walked into another room. He found me there too.

And here is the part I’ve never quite been able to explain to myself: I had fun. Some of it. Real fun. Caleb was relaxed in a way I hadn’t seen in months. He kept finding me across the room and his eyes weren’t hard, they were delighted. He whispered things behind his hand. Look at that bloke’s chain. You reckon it’s load-bearing? He muttered something about iced-coffee man and the leopard wife and I had to swallow a laugh into my glass. He squeezed my hand under the cheese board. You’re killing it. You look incredible. I’m so proud of you. And I drank it in, every drop. I hadn’t had his approval at this volume in a very long time.

That was the part I couldn’t square. He was lovely. Genuinely lovely. So lovely that I started to wonder whether the awful nights were the anomaly and this was the real us, and I’d simply been too rigid all along to see it. Maybe Mum and Dad had been wrong. Maybe the church had been wrong. Maybe this was just what a modern marriage looked like, and I’d been standing in the corner of it being Mary Poppins.

I was also drunk. Worth noting. Two forces converging.

Caleb was having the time of his life. Every man and woman on that bus seemed to be fawning over me, and he was watching it happen, and he was thriving. I’d expected jealousy. Possessiveness. At least a flicker of something protective. Instead I got a man whose chest visibly inflated with every compliment a stranger paid his wife. They love you, he murmured into my hair. Look at them all. You’re the hottest one here. And there was a small, terrible part of me, the part that had spent decades not feeling like the hottest anything, that took that and held it.

There’s one more piece, because it explains the dress. Caleb used to call me cute. You’re so cute, Eva. Affectionate, in its way. Also, I’d learn later from his own journal, a quiet diagnosis. Cute, not sexy. Cute, not glamorous. The girl next door in jeans and a white tee, the kind you marry, not the kind you fantasise about. I’d carried that distinction half-consciously for years. So when the chance came to be glamorous, to be sex-on-legs, the bruised cute part of me leaned all the way in. I’m going to do it, I thought. I’m going to be the siren. The bombshell. The version of me he can’t take his eyes off. The version no one ever told me I was allowed to be.

That was the dress.

---

The bus pulled into Château Velour as the light was going, and the day folded into night with the abruptness of a stage manager yanking a curtain.

The club deserves describing properly, because swingers club does no justice to the specific texture of the place. Picture an industrial shed renovated by someone whose vision board read Leisure Suit Larry meets the local RSL. Box TVs mounted near the ceiling played seventies pornography on a loop, the kind where the women have not been waxed, plucked, lasered or otherwise persuaded to apologise for being mammals. To my 2019 eyes, trained on a more recent and more ruthless standard, it played like a documentary. A reminder that even this, even the body hair we now treat as a moral failing, is just a fashion we’ve agreed to forget is a fashion. The lighting was brothel-magenta and flattered no one. A disco ball turned slowly over all of it, scattering little squares of light across the plastic-covered furniture, as though someone had wanted, against all available evidence, for the night to feel festive.

It was laid out like the worst school dance imaginable: a main bar and dance floor; a darker room with red lights, a stripper pole and a DJ booth; a second room with a small raised stage backed, inexplicably, in army-camouflage netting. Above the stage, in a glass-walled mezzanine, was the BDSM dungeon, where people in black vinyl and peaked caps were beginning to gather. A St Andrew’s cross. A padded beam I’d later learn was a spanking bench, and which appeared to be in use by a man being struck, restrained, and serviced all at once. In the middle of the floor sat little private rooms with single beds and bedside tables stocked with lube, condoms and a generous stack of folded white towels, like BIG4 cabins for the deeply unwell.

It was the tackiness that floored me. Not the sex. The tackiness. The plastic furniture. The disinfectant failing to mask the smell of human. The conviction, somewhere in the design process, that army camouflage was the correct mood for a night of consensual abandon. I could not believe people took it seriously. I needed a drink immediately.

And the people were the biggest surprise of all. I’d braced for divas. Porn stars. Beautiful confident strangers who did this for a living. What I got was the neighbours. Accountants and tradies and women who taught grade three, all dressed up in outfits bought specifically to look sexy and all looking, instead, like ordinary people in costumes that didn’t fit the occasion or, in several cases, them. An elderly couple drifted past in matching see-through mesh, everything on display, utterly serene about it, the way some people are serene about gardening. Nobody here was a fantasy. Everybody here was somebody’s plumber. That, somehow, made it worse.

The wine-tour group had the place to ourselves for the first hour, which gave everyone time to change. I took my dress bag into a velvet-walled cubicle and got into the green dress with shaking fingers. New lingerie underneath. The heels. Hair down. Mascara redone. When I stepped into the corridor and caught myself in the smoked mirror at the end of it, I genuinely couldn’t place the woman looking back. She was not cute. She was not the girl next door. She was sex-on-legs. The dress stopped just below the curve of my arse, her legs went on for kilometres, and her mouth was set in a small hard line that said I dare you.

Fuck, I thought.

And then, immediately: Caleb is going to lose his mind.

---

I walked into the main room and Kenny stopped mid-sentence, mouth open. Babe, he said. Babe. You are fucking sexy as. Save me a dance. I smiled tightly and kept walking. Caleb was at the bar. He turned, saw me, and the breath went out of him. He came across the floor and put his hands on my hips like I was a car he’d just been handed the keys to, and leaned into my ear. Jesus Christ. We could go and use one of those rooms right now. You have no idea what you’re doing to me.

The relief was enormous, and embarrassing in hindsight. I’d pulled it off. He was mine again. He was seeing me.

The room had filled while I changed. People I’d never seen had arrived from somewhere, doubling and tripling the crowd. Where do they all come from, I thought. What is this whole world I never knew existed. I recognised faces from Kik. The boldest came straight over. Brie and Rob, profile name Glam U and Us, a couple I’d been incredibly intimidated by for weeks, because in her photos Brie was a pin-up bombshell, all hair and pout and flattering light. In real life she was short. Properly short, the kind where I could have rested my chin on her head, had I wanted to, which I did not. Attractive in a way, but not threateningly so, late forties, hair styled in a manner that had last been current in 1988. Her breasts had been purchased with optimism rather than restraint, so large on so small a frame that I worried she might pitch forward. She fluttered her lashes at Caleb the way they do it in films, then licked her lower lip slowly at me, a gesture I assume she intended as seductive and which I received as a minor medical event. Ewww, I thought, smiling.

Rob was an accountant and looked like one. A man who spent his weekdays under fluorescent light staring into spreadsheets. Balding, soft in the middle, short-sleeved checked shirt, thin lips arranged into what I think he meant as wolfish. He couldn’t take his eyes off me. Brie couldn’t take her eyes off Caleb. She suggested, lightly, that the four of us go back to a hotel once the club shut. Yeah, Caleb said, before I could open my mouth. That could be fun. I shot him a look that should have drawn blood. He didn’t notice. Or pretended not to.

More couples drifted in, people we’d messaged but never met, until there was a loose ring of eight of us sizing each other up like the most awkward dance in history, except half the room had already decided what was going home with what. You could feel the assessing. And inside any given couple you could tell who the keen one was. There’s always a keen one, towing the other along. I wondered, with a cold little flutter, which of us we were.

Then Kenny’s voice came over the speakers, ringmaster-bright, and announced it was time for everyone’s favourite game.

I had not been told about a game.

The crowd herded into the dark room with the stripper pole. The DJ cut the music and started something slower, more pulsing. Kenny explained the rules with the breezy cheer of a children’s party host. The women would be blindfolded first. We’d stand in a loose circle. The men would move among us and could touch however they liked. One rule: you couldn’t touch your own partner.

A young woman moved through us with a basket of black silk blindfolds and tied one over my eyes with practised hands.

The dark came down like water.

I stood very still in my heels with my heartbeat in my throat. I could hear breathing. Footsteps on concrete. The shift of bodies. Then hands. One cupped my breast through the velvet. One found the small of my back. One slid into my hair. A man pressed against me from behind and ground himself slowly against my arse in a circular motion that turned my stomach, and at the same time another came at me from the front and kissed me boldly on the mouth, his breath sweet with bourbon and stale with cigarette, a man I had never seen.

This is the strangest thing to write and I want to write it honestly. Some thin, drunk corner of me leaned into it. I’d decided on the bus that I was going to be Madonna tonight. Brave. A bad-ass sexy slut. I was going to show Caleb I could do this, and I was hoping, hoping, hoping he was watching, hoping he was somewhere in the dark falling further in love with this version of me. The thought I should have been having, get these hands off my body, was not the thought I was having. The thought I was having was where is he. who is he touching. I wish I could see through this blindfold.

Then a different hand found mine. Familiar. A gentle tug. A kiss on my mouth, slow and known and right, his palm sliding to my jaw the way it always did, and I knew him, I knew him instantly in the dark, and my whole body uncoiled. He came to me. He found me. He’d broken the one rule, the rule against touching your own partner, to reach me. He was the one who’d wanted me in the dark.

We slipped out of the circle together to our stools at the bar, his arm around my waist, and for one bright moment I felt like a woman whose husband had picked her out of a room full of options.

Then the men were blindfolded. I stood and started toward Caleb, but Brie was faster. She’d been waiting. Before I’d cleared two metres she was on him, pressing her enormous chest into his front, then turning to grind her arse into his groin like a woman who knew all the moves, which, I’d learn one day, she did, having performed them professionally. I caught my breath. It hurt to watch. I searched his face. His hands rose, found her waist, hesitated. He didn’t recognise the hips. They weren’t mine. I could see him register it. He held her, but he didn’t stroke her, didn’t lean in. He just stood there politely while a stranger pressed against him in the dark.

I breathed. Okay. He’s not into it. This game is stupid but we’re getting through it. I moved in next to Brie, slid a hand up his chest to claim him, reached up to kiss his mouth. Brie, undeterred, slid behind him and started kneading his shoulders. I will not pretend I didn’t consider, briefly, telling her to get the fuck right out of my marriage. But this was, apparently, what we were here for. She hadn’t technically broken a rule. She gestured at me with a small smile that I should go and find her husband. Hard no. I stayed put.

Mercifully, Kenny called time. Blindfolds off. Caleb pulled his off and blinked at me, then at Brie, then back at me. He flushed, smiled, slightly sheepish, and grabbed my waist and pulled me into him, and we walked off toward the bar together. Relief surged through me like a drug. He’d chosen me. In the dark and out of it, he’d chosen me. Brie slunk back to her husband. I caught it in the corner of my eye and tried not to look smug.

I was a long way past sober. I was trying so hard to be a sex toy that I’d nearly convinced myself I was one.

Kenny reappeared with someone in tow. A man in his thirties, lean and gymnastic, bare-chested in lycra trousers, like a circus performer who’d wandered into the wrong building. The rope artist. He introduced himself with the easy warmth of a man practised at making nervous strangers feel chosen rather than inspected. I’ve been watching you, he said, and his eyes moved over me the way you’d study a sculpture you found genuinely interesting, slowly, taking in the lines of it. I’d love to use you for tonight’s demonstration, if you and your husband are open to it.

Kenny chimed in. She’d be perfect, mate. Look at her.

The rope artist turned to Caleb. Would you be okay with that? It’s up to her, obviously.

Caleb was so happy. Happy with me, happy with the night, happy that I was the woman the men were lining up to display. Of course. It’s totally up to you. But his eyes were saying please. They were saying show me you can do this. They were saying I’m so proud of you tonight. You’re so hot, he added, slipping a hand around my waist. We should show you off.

I looked past him and saw Brie at his elbow again, murmuring something close, her chest against his arm.

Yes, I heard myself say. Let’s do it.

He led me up onto the small stage in the second room, under the glass dungeon, where leather-clad bodies moved through their choreographed pain. The club had gathered below, pulled in by Kenny’s announcement. Most of the wine-tour group was there. Caleb stood near the front, watching me.

The rope artist’s hands were astonishingly gentle. He slid the green velvet dress from my shoulders without ceremony, the way a hairdresser settles a cape, and underneath I was in the new lingerie and heels and very little else. In any other room I’d have wanted to die. Here, with blue and red light washing over my bare skin and Caleb’s eyes shining at me and a crowd already murmuring its approval, it was something else entirely.

It is a strange thing to describe, being wrapped. He circled me slowly, looping silk across my collarbones, drawing it down over my chest, framing my breasts in a careful geometry, then taking my wrists behind my back and binding them with the same unhurried patience. Breathe for me, he murmured against my ear. You’re doing beautifully. He kissed my neck, softly, not in a stranger’s way but the way a dance partner might, leading me through a movement too frightening to attempt alone. He moved his body with mine, swayed me, adjusted my weight on the heels. The music throbbed. The light ran over me, blue and red and gold. The crowd went quiet, the way a crowd does when it has decided it’s watching something beautiful.

And for one suspended moment I felt something magical.

Powerful. Seen. Chosen. Sexy, and not in the surface, performing way I’d worked at all afternoon, but somewhere deeper, as though my body had unhooked itself from my self-loathing and was being allowed, for once, to be looked at without apology. The rope burned where it crossed my inner thighs and I welcomed the burn, because physical pain was so much easier to hold than the wordless country I’d been wandering for months. This, I thought, is what he meant. This is what he meant by liberation. The spotlight made a cocoon and everything outside it disappeared. No marriage. No kids at home with a sitter. No Kik. No Brie. Just rope and breath and light and the surprising fact of me, upright, on display, and not falling apart.

I looked up for Caleb’s face. For the pride I’d performed all day to earn.

It had changed.

A cloud had come down over him, dark and fast. He was furious. His jaw was set. He drew a finger across his throat in one hard line. Stop.

I’d got it wrong again. Whatever it was this time.

I stammered something to the rope artist, my voice gone small, and his face changed too. He stepped back at once, kind, professional, and began unwinding me as fast as he could without making the moment uglier than it already was. It’s okay, he murmured. You’re okay. We’ll stop now.

As the silk came off, a voice called up from below, addressed to Caleb. The iced-coffee man, of course. Mate, when she’s done up there, I’d love to finish all over that pretty face of hers. Laughter. And Brie, close by, leaning to murmur that was so hot, babe as she walked past with her hand laced into Caleb’s, drawing him away from the stage.

The room came rushing back. All of it. The smell. The bass. The crowd. The lights. The lingerie I was suddenly half-naked in. I pulled the dress on with hands that wouldn’t cooperate, apologised to the rope artist whose routine I’d collapsed halfway through, and climbed down with the dignity of a drunk woman in heels, which is to say none.

I went looking for him.

---

The corridors had filled in the half hour I’d been on the stage. Hands reached for me as I pushed through. Compliments came at me from every angle. So hot, babe. Sexy thing. Where you going, gorgeous? I shook them off. Where is he. Where is he. The bar. The dance floor. The dim corridor of private rooms, where part of me dreaded finding him and part of me would have preferred it to what was actually happening. The alcohol pounded behind my eyes. The music was too loud, the light too red. I couldn’t get a full breath in the place. It was tacky and grotesque and I didn’t belong in it and I had to find my husband.

I went to the bar and ordered a drink to steady my hands. Rob materialised, because of course he had been waiting. You okay, gorgeous? He stood too close, trying to talk about the rope show. I wasn’t listening. My eyes were going over his shoulder, sweeping the corners and the booths and the dark angles of the room for the back of my husband’s head.

And then I found it.

In a corner banquette by the second bar, in the red dim, Caleb sat at a high table with Brie standing between his knees. She was saying something up at him. He laughed, head tipped back, like she was the funniest person alive. He leaned forward. His hands went to her waist, easy and possessive, the way they went to my waist in our kitchen. Then his head dipped and he kissed her on the mouth. Properly. Tongue. Slow. Her fingers slid up into his hair and pulled him closer, the way I do, the way only I am supposed to, and he leaned in further.

It took the breath out of me, the way a blow to the chest does, the kind that makes your body decide, without consulting you, whether it’s going to keep going.

I couldn’t move. The room turned itself down. He came for me in the blindfold, I kept thinking. He chose me in the dark. But here he was, in the light, kissing another woman like she was his.

Rob took advantage of the paralysis. His hand was on my waist, then under the dress on my arse, squeezing, his mouth at my ear. You were so hot up there. He leaned in to kiss me. I pushed him off, gently, and apologised. Of course I apologised. I’d spent my whole life apologising, for wanting too little, for wanting too much, for existing in rooms I’d been told I didn’t belong in.

At that exact moment a second couple drifted up. Younger, mid-thirties, people we’d been talking to on Kik for weeks who’d promised to find us tonight. You’re seriously so fucking hot in that dress, the woman purred, fingers trailing down my arm, and even better in real life, which never happens, the photos usually make people worse. She laughed at her own line. We’ve been watching you all night. Her husband stepped in and pulled me into a slow, swaying not-quite-dance. So hot on that stage, he said into my hair, near word-for-word what Rob had said, as if the place issued everyone the same script at the door. We’d love to hook up with you and Cal. Tonight?

I heard them as if through water. Across the room my husband had stopped kissing Brie and was talking to her now, his hand sliding up her arm, her hand moving over his bicep. He was nodding. He was not looking for me. He was not worried about me. He was not coming.

And something snapped. White-hot, clean, finally mine.

I pulled out of the younger couple’s hands, crossed the floor, and stopped in front of my husband.

We need to leave. Now.

Brie smiled at me like a kindergarten teacher at a tantruming toddler. Oh, don’t go, babe. It’s just getting started. Her hand sat on Caleb’s chest, possessive, settled. She turned to him. You guys should come back to ours after. We’re at the hotel just up the road. Rob had reappeared at my elbow, his hand finding my waist again. I shoved it off without looking.

Caleb didn’t move. His eyes met mine across the table and dared me to make a scene.

So I made one. I grabbed my bag and walked out into the night, and the air hit my flushed skin like a slap. I stood by his ute in the carpark, shivering in green velvet and heels, mascara already going, with no idea whether he’d come after me at all. Ten minutes. Fifteen. Cars pulled in, none of them his. He’s not coming. He’s not coming.

When he finally came out, his anger arrived ahead of him.

“You’ve ruined it.” He didn’t slow down, just passed me and unlocked the ute. “Parading around up there for everyone, loving every second of it, and the moment the spotlight moves you throw a tantrum like a two-year-old. What the fuck, Eva.”

“Are you joking me? “ My voice was already breaking. “You were all over that woman. You kissed her. With tongue. In front of everyone. I came off that stage looking for you and you’d vanished, and then I find you with your mouth on her and your hands all over her, and you didn’t even come and find me.”

“I had every right.” He said it flat. “That’s literally what we’re here for. You agreed to this. You’re the one who wanted attention, doing that rope show in your knickers in front of the whole room.”

We got in and slammed the doors and he started toward the hotel and I was crying so hard I could barely speak. I had never in my life felt anything like it, this much rage and this much grief in one body at once. I hated him. I hated myself. I hated all of it, the whole wrong fucked-up shape of the night. The crying was nothing like the crying in films. It was snot and broken half-sentences and the particular shame of being twenty minutes from anywhere I knew.

Halfway there I made him pull over. I had to get out. I needed air.

Both our phones pinged at the same instant. A Kik message from one of the couples inside. gutted you guys left so early.. you were the hottest pair in there.. let’s catch up. He looked at his. I looked at mine. He read it and sighed.

“For fuck’s sake, Eva.” The gear had shifted. The anger drained out and something heavier took its place. Softer. Wounded. The voice I never knew how to fight. “You think I wanted to be over there with her? I didn’t go looking for that. You put me there. You were the one up on that stage in your underwear with the whole room looking at you, and you didn’t look back at me once. Not once. Do you know how that felt? Standing there watching my wife give herself to a room full of strangers and not even glance at me?”

He let that sit. Then, quieter.

“I was hurting. And she was just there, being kind, and sexy, and really into me, and it just happened. That’s on you.”

He reached across and took my hand, and his voice went gentle, almost tender, which was somehow the worst part.

“I love you. You know I love you. But I can’t be the only one fighting for this. I keep showing up, I keep trying to give you everything you want, and you keep finding new ways to make me the villain. I’m so tired, baby. I just want my wife back.

”

I sat there and stared at the dashboard and could not, in that moment, find a single sentence of my own that would survive contact with his.

I had stood on a stage in my underwear. He had kissed a stranger. We had both done things that night we couldn’t have admitted to in daylight. And by the second set of red lights, I was the one apologising. I shouldn’t have gone up on the stage. I shouldn’t have let it go that far. I’m sorry I made you upset.

He nodded slowly, like a man accepting an apology he’d been owed all along, and pulled back onto the road.

Here’s what I understand now and didn’t then. When Caleb and I were on the same page, he was mine. The man I married. The familiar weight of his arm across my hip at three in the morning. But when the cloud came down, when his eyes went hard at me across that club for some crime I couldn’t name, he turned into someone I had never met. Not someone I hated. Not even someone I was angry at. Just a stranger I didn’t know and didn’t love. It would move through me like cold air from a door left open. I don’t know this man. Then he’d soften, and come back, and kiss the top of my head, and the door would close, and I’d forget the cold had ever come in.

I wasn’t ready to know what that meant.

We didn’t speak the rest of the drive, or the next morning. Another silence had moved in, denser than the last, the kind that sits at the kitchen table while you scrape the toast. I waited for my body to feel like mine again and it didn’t. My head was a muddle. None of what I’d done that night had felt like me. And in fairness to him, I kept thinking, if I’d done what I’d done and he’d done what he’d done in the other order, wouldn’t I have been just as wrecked? Right? Maybe? It was all tangled together like spaghetti and I couldn’t pull one clean thread out of it.

So somewhere in that long silent day, I did the thing that felt easiest to change. I decided the problem was me. Not the stage, not the blindfold, not Brie, not Rob, not the iced-coffee man and his ambitions for my face. Me. My rigidity. My old conservative wiring.

And I went looking for the fix where I always went, in books. Every title promised to make me less judgemental, more open, more free, and every one seemed to confirm what Caleb had been saying for years. Jealousy is a character flaw. Discomfort is weakness. Resistance is just close-mindedness in a nicer coat. Even my old faith got conscripted. Wasn’t Jesus all acceptance? Wasn’t judgement a sin? The gymnastics required to make it work were Olympic, and I performed them, gold medal, every time, on a body that already knew the truth and was simply being overruled by a mind I’d handed to someone else.

I told myself I was being resilient. That enduring this was its own kind of strength. But resilience is power. It’s the thing that lets you bend toward what you love and spring back as yourself. What I had wasn’t resilience. It was tolerance. The quiet, depleted capacity of a woman who has stopped believing she’s worth defending and so simply learns to withstand. I had mistaken my own erosion for grit, and I’d been proud of it.

I told myself Caleb was an extraordinary husband with one small flaw. That the sex thing was maybe one percent of our marriage, and if we could fix that one percent we’d be perfect. The dream was still out there. The house, the acres, the kids barefoot on grass that was ours, the slower and more natural life. Look what we built together, Eva, he’d say one day on the verandah. I held the good days up like a deposit I’d already paid and couldn’t bear to lose.

I was straightening pictures while the house quietly filled with smoke.

But the story that kept me trying was so much warmer than the truth. And I wasn’t ready to be cold yet.

I had no idea that the next time the gate opened, I wouldn’t be standing behind it alone. There would be another man on the other side. And Caleb, smiling, holding the latch.

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Next week: Chapter 15 - Three’s a Crowd