Chapter 15 - Three's A Crowd (Part 2)

Chocolate Strawberries, Sheer Stockings, Sultry Music, and a Mole in the Wrong Place.

The door opened, and there he was, the man from the photographs, the man from the texts, smiling like a host at a dinner party.

His unit was neat. That surprised me. I’d built him in my head as a man living in chaos, and instead it was tidy, ordered, the home of someone who’d decided to take himself seriously. He’d plainly done a lot of gym for his new vocation as the coast’s resident playboy, and it showed. There were candles. There was sultry music turned down low. And there was, laid out on a plate, a small pile of strawberries dipped in chocolate, which softened me a little even then, because nothing announces a man who has watched a film about romance and taken diligent notes quite like strawberries dipped in chocolate. I wanted to laugh and cry at once. The sweet, deluded, off-the-rack effort of it.

When I walked in, Justin stopped, put a hand flat on his own chest as though to keep his heart in, and said, to Caleb more than to me,

“Wow. Mate. She’s stunning. Look at her!” He kept it up all night, the two of them, a duet passed back and forth over my head. So sexy. So amazing. You’re a lucky man. Caleb glowing under it, agreeing, proud, as though he’d grown me himself. We made small talk first. Awful, ordinary small talk, the weather, the drive, while the actual reason we were all in the room sat between us like a fourth drink no one would pick up.

Then Justin smiled at me, gave Caleb a look over my head, a quick ready-to-go-mate look, the kind men exchange before lifting something heavy, and waited until I had set my wine glass down. He came and sat beside me on the couch, bold as anything, and breathed into my ear, “I’m sorry, I just have to taste that neck, you smell incredible.” and put his mouth to it, slow, unhurried, with the confidence of a man who had never once paused to ask whether he was allowed.

My breath went still. My heart was going hard. And Caleb, on my other side, watched him for a beat and did the same, following Justin’s lead the way he would follow it all night. Justin lifted one of my legs across his thigh and Caleb lifted the other, so I was opened between them, a leg over each lap, and even then it struck me as a fairly literal picture of what was being done to me, a woman split clean down the middle. Two mouths at my throat.

Hands moving over me in stereo, one warm palm flattening over my breast through the silk while the other slid up the inside of my thigh, both of them finding their way under the lace at the same time, until I couldn’t tell anymore whose fingers were where, moving inside me together, the candlelight low and the music lower and the wine loose in my blood, and that was the moment it caught, the moment my body went on ahead and left my mind standing in the doorway. I heard myself make a sound I hadn’t decided to make. A mouth closed over mine, then drew back, then the other, and once, almost, both at the same time, and I felt cherished and erased in the same breath, the only woman in the world and no one at all.

They were both breathing hard now, low sounds against my skin, Justin’s mouth at my ear saying “you are divine, you are unreal” and Caleb’s at the other saying “I love you, baby, you are the hottest woman alive”, the two of them narrating me to myself from either side until I half believed it.

It was, I have to be honest, working. There was heat in it I hadn’t let myself feel in years, something that had been asleep and was now, inconveniently, awake. Justin slid down the couch then, unhurried as ever, and found the clasp of my garter with two fingers, and unhooked it without looking, the way other men find a light switch in their own house. He peeled the stocking down my leg so slowly that the whole room seemed to slow with it, his mouth following the bare skin behind it, the inside of my knee, my calf, my ankle, and I heard my own breath go ragged. Then he glanced across me at Caleb, a small generous nod, your side, mate. And my husband, went after the second clasp like a man trying to free a tangled fishing line. The garter held its ground. The garter, frankly, won. Justin reached over and released it with one click, no comment, no smirk, and Caleb rolled the second stocking down my other leg, slower now, copying the master, stroke for stroke, and I stayed there between them, propped against the back of the couch, half undone and half dressed, shivering and doing my best impression of a woman entirely at ease, which I think might be the most honest my body was all night.

And when Justin sat back up level with me and said, slowly, “All right, your turn sexy.” Show me what your husband keeps promising me.” there was something so unbothered in it, so flatly in command, that a part of me I’m still ashamed of leaned toward it like a plant toward a window. Here was a man simply telling me, and the relief of being told, of having the deciding taken clean out of my hands, was its own dark and unexpected pull. So I slid from the couch and knelt on the floor in front of the two of them, like a servant at their feet, and gave them what the night had been promising, first one and then the other and then, somehow, both together, and I will leave it there except to say that for a few long minutes the only sounds in that room were the music, and two men groaning, and my own pulse in my ears.

I did the things the night asked of me, and I’m not going to walk you through all of it, partly because some of it I’ve folded away somewhere I don’t go. I’ll only say there was a moment I half-recognised from videos I’d studied like homework, both men close, me trying to be the woman they’d spent all night describing, and a small clear voice somewhere far above the scene noting, calmly, that I had no idea who that woman was.

When Justin stood, it was with a kind of urgency, a man done with patience. “Right” he said, voice gone rough, “time we took you to bed, woman, and enjoyed you properly.” He took my hand and walked me, naked, toward the bedroom, and the fantasy broke on something extremely ordinary. He had a mole on his backside. A real, protruding one, and a scatter of others up his back. They didn’t bother me. People have moles. But there is no fantasy on earth that survives a clear, well-lit view of the back of a stranger, and mine popped like a soap bubble. I followed him down the hall thinking, of all things, that he really should get those checked.

The bedroom is where the heat and the wrongness finally met.

We arranged ourselves across the bed, Caleb behind me, Justin in front, the sheets cool against skin that wasn’t, and for a while the heat held and held. Justin unhooked my bra with one hand, the way you’d slip off a watch, no fumbling, and brought his mouth to my breast, slow circles, a graze of teeth, his hand following close behind his mouth, cupping, testing weight, while Caleb pressed the length of himself against my back, warm and solid, and kissed the nape of my neck, my shoulder, the knob of my spine, slow enough that I felt every separate point where his lips landed, his hands sliding round my ribs, finding the places Justin’s mouth and hands had already claimed. I was held front and back, skin against skin against skin, a mouth at my breast and breath in my ears, two men moving with me, unhurried, deliberate, and for a stretch of seconds I let go of the steering entirely. I let myself be touched, and kissed, and worked over, slowly, by two people who both, as far as I could tell, actually wanted to be doing it, no performance in it, nothing borrowed from anywhere else, just want, plain and unhidden, and there was something almost dizzying in that, in being wanted by two people at once and believing it.

I arched into it, into both of them at once, my whole body tightening toward something neither of them had touched yet. I made those sounds again, the ones that weren’t decisions. Justin was, to put it plainly, ready against my hip. And Caleb, when I reached back for him, was not.

I turned my head. “Are you okay?” I whispered. “We can stop. Are you okay?”

His eyes were huge and somewhere very far away, and he said. “Yeah, I’m good. I’m ready to see him inside you.” He said it the way you’d narrate a dream you were still half inside, and Justin heard, and just like that he was there, and the shock of it went through. And Justin heard, and just like that he was there, and the shock of it went through me like current. “Oh God”, I thought. “This isn’t my husband. It’s not him, it’s not my husband, it’s happening, it’s too late, it’s happening”, and underneath all of it came a second feeling, one I recognised even as it landed, the same lurch as a first time, except backwards. Something that had only ever been Caleb’s, something I hadn’t even realised was still whole, was gone now, handed over, and there was no version of the rest of my life in which I could give it back to him. His hands were still on my back the whole time, and somewhere in that exact instant my brain began to fold in on itself like wet paper.

I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t get out of my own head and into my own body. It felt wrong in a way I had no argument for and every cell of. I reached for Caleb to bring him in, to make him part of it, and he was soft under my hand, and his face was doing something I’d never seen it do, processing, stalled, naked and lost in a stranger’s bedroom.

Justin, I’ll give him this, was paying attention. He read the room before I did, moved me, repositioned us to fold Caleb back in, tried to give everyone something to do. And still Caleb stayed soft and Justin stayed urgent, and the more lost Caleb’s face became the harder Justin seemed to work, as though one man’s helplessness were the other’s fuel. The gap between those two facts was where I was lying, exactly in the middle, being pulled apart along the same crack that had been running through me since the wine tour.

I wriggled away. “Let’s slow it down”, I said. Caleb nodded. He looked dumbfounded, like a man who’d organised a party and realised partway through that he didn’t want to be at it. We tried to come back from it. We went back to kissing, the three of us, and for a moment I thought we might rescue the evening. But the air had changed and we all felt it. Caleb sat back and asked to watch the two of us instead, and something in me twisted at that, a new and colder separation. I did what he asked, but I kept my eyes on him the whole time, half questioning, sending it across the room as hard as I could. “Babe, we can stop. We should stop. Is this what you want. Make it stop.” He was touching himself and nothing was happening, and that nothing filled the room like a sound.

Then Justin, who had been a host and a gentleman and was now, understandably, a man who’d been ready for an hour with nowhere to put it, turned me over across the bed and moved in behind me, and started in earnest. He was rough now, the patience gone, the urgency entirely his own, and it had stopped having anything to do with me. It was too much. I looked up and found Caleb’s face, big-eyed, still soft, standing slightly apart from the whole thing he had built, and I felt the last of whatever I’d been performing simply leave my body. I locked eyes with him across the bed and screamed without making a sound.

And then I saw his hand come up to his throat. A finger drawn across it in one hard line. Stop. For a moment my whole body went cold, because I knew that gesture. I’d seen it on the stage at the club, the throat cut, the cloud coming down, and my stomach dropped straight through the bed. “Oh God. It’s happening again. I’ve done it again, whatever it is this time.” I braced for the anger. And then I understood, slowly, that it wasn’t anger on his face. It was shock, and something close to fear. He wasn’t ordering me to stop performing. He was begging the whole thing to stop. And we said it at the same moment, the two of us. Stop. His hand at his throat and mine flat on Justin’s chest.

“I’m so sorry”, I said. “I’m so sorry. I need to stop”.

There was a terrible intimacy in it, in finally wanting the same thing again, here, of all the places in the world.

Justin stopped at once. He was, I’ll give him this, completely decent. Breathing hard, plainly frustrated, a man who’d laid out candles and chocolate strawberries and been ready for an hour with nothing to show for it, but he said of course, of course, the way you’d reassure someone cancelling a dinner. We gathered ourselves in a silence I could have leaned against. We thanked him. Caleb couldn’t speak. He pulled his clothes on like a man dressing after bad news.

The drive started silent. I watched his profile in the dark, his jaw working, and I waited for the cold version of him to settle in for the trip home. Instead, a few kilometres on, he indicated, pulled hard onto the gravel shoulder, and stopped the car. I thought he was going to be sick. He grabbed me. Pulled me across the console with a desperation I’d never felt from him, his whole body shaking, and he broke. Properly broke. He held onto me like that for a long moment, dragging at my skirt, reclaiming me even as he wept. “I’m so sorry”, he sobbed into my hair. “I’m so sorry. We should never have done that. I don’t know what happened, what have we done?” And then, still crying, he pulled back just enough to reach past me, found the lever on the side of my seat, and shoved it back until it dropped flat, and climbed over after it, and took me right there on the gravel shoulder, the trucks going past and the hazard lights ticking, and it was nothing like the unit, nothing like the couch, none of the performance.

It was frantic and clumsy and wet with both our tears, and underneath it I understood exactly what it was. He was claiming me back. Undoing it. Reaching past Justin and the candles and the whole wrong evening to take back the woman he’d just handed away, to make me his again with his own hands, because some animal part of him could not bear what he’d done. I held him through it and let myself be reclaimed, and it was, against everything, the closest I’d felt to him in months.

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I didn’t know then what I know now, that closeness born out of catastrophe has a different chemistry to the ordinary kind. A tenderness that arrives an hour after a wound binds harder than a tenderness that arrives with the morning coffee, the way a bone broken and reset fuses thickest at the break. The worst night of our marriage had just produced the most passionate hour of it, and somewhere below thought, in the wordless place where the body keeps its ledgers, a terrible lesson was being written down without my agreement. That the deepest version of him lived on the far side of the awful things. That to reach the man in the car, you first had to survive the man in the unit. I learned it the way you learn heat from a stove, in one touch, completely. And I would spend years reaching back through fire after fire, certain the real him was waiting on the other side, because once, on a gravel shoulder with the hazard lights ticking, he had been.

Because in that car, he snapped back. The cloud lifted clean off him and the real Caleb came home, the one I married, and he stayed. For a few weeks he was wholly mine. He held me at night. He treasured me the way he used to, the way that had made it feel worth it, every time, to stay. We were us again. No profiles, no rules, no Kik pinging through dinner, just the two of us and the kids and the ordinary good days I’d been homesick for without knowing it. And I let myself believe, completely, that we’d found the edge of the thing and stepped back from it together.

In those weeks he was the father again, too, the one the kids adored. I’d find him on the floor of Stella’s room at bedtime, too big for the little bed, doing all the voices in the story she’d heard four hundred times, dragging out the last word until she shrieked. He sat with Jeremy at the kitchen table and worked through homework problems with him, patient, head bent next to his. He drove them to after-school activities and sat with them on the couch asking how their days had gone, lit up by the answers in a way that was entirely real. He loved those children with his whole open face, and watching him do it from the doorway I felt the whole impossible weight of him. And this was the thing I could never get to sit flat.

He wasn’t a monster I could flee. He was the man doing the voices. He was both at once, and I had to live in the narrow gap between them.

And standing in that doorway one night, the old thought found me again, the one that always came when I watched our daughter, except this time it arrived back to front. I watched him cup the back of Stella’s sleeping head, so carefully, as though she were made of glass, and I heard myself think, he would never want this for her. Not for Stella. Not for the boys. If some future man ever pressed a profile into our daughter’s hands, Caleb would tear him apart in the front yard, wouldn’t he? I wanted my children to be cherished by the people who loved them, that was the whole of my ambition for them, and then the thought folded back on itself the way they all did by then. But he cherishes me. Doesn’t he? I stood in the doorway holding both halves of that and could not make them touch.

The only thing I knew with absolute certainty was that no one could ever find out. Not the kids. Not my parents, not my friends. Not a single soul we knew. If it got out I would sell the house and move towns, I had actually thought it through, suburbs and all. It would take me years to see what was sitting in plain sight, that when the thought of people knowing has you planning your own disappearance, somewhere inside you the verdict is already in.

Then Justin messaged him again, through Red Hot Pie, the same app that had started all of this in the first place. I watched it all seep back in, slow, like damp coming up a wall. And what came back wasn’t the same as what had left. Before, it had been desire, or curiosity, or whatever he’d been calling liberation. Now it was narrower. Harder. It had stopped feeling like wanting and started feeling like climbing. His body’s refusal that night, the erection that wouldn’t come, hadn’t landed in him as a warning. It had landed as a defeat, and Caleb was not a man who could leave a defeat where it lay. The thing had become a mountain. An addiction with a summit. A peak that had thrown him once, in front of another man, and that he would keep climbing if it took the rest of his life, because the alternative was living as a man who had failed at it.

And while that was rising in him again, something else had begun to rise between us, a sort of poison. I have spent years trying to find its name. It wasn’t a fight, or an affair, or any of the nameable things that wreck a marriage out loud. It was more like a gas, colourless, odourless, leaking in so slowly that neither of us ever thought to check the air. It didn’t announce itself. It simply changed how everything looked from inside it.

I looked at myself and saw a woman who needed increasingly elaborate stories just to be recognisable. And slowly, without either of us choosing it, the world reversed. The couples at the school barbecue with their sausages and their small talk began to look like the strange ones, the timid ones, the ones who’d never been brave. And the world inside our house, the rules, the profiles, the secret, began to feel like the real one. Because that’s the other thing the gas does, the cruellest thing. The secret itself becomes a kind of glue. We were the only two people alive who knew what we knew. No friend could be told, no sister, no doctor, and so the sicker we became the tighter we held each other, two people locked in a room slowly filling with something neither of us could smell, each mistaking the other’s grip for love, or proof of it, or reason enough to stay.

And none of it came with any less love. That was the part I could never square. If anything he loved me louder, told me constantly that he adored me, that he was the luckiest man alive, and he meant every word, in the same week he was scrolling for new couples to meet and the next man to hand me to. A man who didn’t love me would have been so much easier to leave.

But something new had moved in alongside the love, something small and black that I didn’t have a name for yet. The first time he raised trying again, I felt it flare in my chest, quick as a struck match, and it frightened me more than anything that had happened in Justin’s unit. I had never hated my husband. Now there were moments, watching him butter his toast or reach for his phone, when I did, and moments an hour later when I would have died for him, and no warning between the two. The arguments came back too, after months of me swallowing them. Sharp words over nothing, a dishwasher stacked wrong, a tone, doors meeting their frames harder than they needed to. We were louder in love and louder in war, both at once, the volume of everything rising together, and neither of us could hear it happening because we were standing inside the noise.

So when he came to me, gentle again, careful again, and said maybe we could try again, that he only needed to get it right, I didn’t fight him the way the old me would have. I went quiet instead. And in the quiet, something settled that I had no words for then and barely have now. The marriage I had been guarding was down to fragments, and I was guarding the fragments. I was living, from here on, in a new marriage with a stranger I happened to know everything about. I just hadn’t agreed to move into it. I’d been carried over the threshold while I was busy keeping the old house clean.

He only needed to get it right. Those were his words, and he would keep saying them, in one shape or another, for years, handing me toward other people the way you lower a child into a pool, absolutely certain I would always swim back to him. Here is the only thing I will tell you ahead of time. One day, I wouldn’t.

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Next Week: Chapter 16 - Rules Made To Be Broken

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