“Hi beauties! My name’s Frankie. Justin gave me your profile, isn’t he the best, I’d love to connect with you two, here’s my link.”
Caleb held the phone up in front of my face like it was scripture. Like the message had been hand-delivered by God, a proclamation, a prophecy fallen straight into our laps. There she was. Frankie. Justin’s ten out of ten, the one from that conversation about scores, the one he’d rated so highly that Caleb had never quite let go of the number.
He tried to play it casual, which he was never any good at.
“What do you reckon, babe?” he said, turning the phone back to read it again himself. “She seems all right, doesn’t she. Justin said she was really nice. Pretty chill.” And then, more quietly, the thing underneath all of it. “It’d be so good, wouldn’t it. To finally have my turn. You’ve had all these experiences. It’d just be nice to have one of my own.”
And there it was, laid on the table between us, gentle and reasonable and impossible to argue with. My turn. Because by then we were keeping a kind of score, though neither of us would ever have called it that. I’d been with Justin twice, and other men besides. Caleb had managed one half-successful evening with Kate and her Lucas and nothing since, and in the tally he carried in his head, this left him owed. He wasn’t demanding about it. That’s the part that’s hard to explain to people. He was almost wistful. I just want to experience what you got to experience. As though I’d travelled to a country he’d only ever seen photographs of, and it was his turn to go.
What could I say to that. Of course, I said. If this is what you want, we can try. Because it was fair. Because I wanted to be fair, and fairness had become the rope they led me around by, and I took hold of it every single time, and it walked me straight into rooms I never wanted to enter.
There was a great deal else going on, which is part of how these things happen, in the gaps you don’t have time to guard. We’d sold the old house, the one we’d restored with our own hands, and just before the island we’d moved into the new one, the one we’d built, and it was still half a shell, half-landscaped, half-decorated, a whole home waiting to be finished around us. So, on top of the marriage and the children and the work there was a house being made from the dirt up, and the days came at me end to end with no gaps in them, no quiet corner to sit down in and ask myself what was becoming of my life. Life kept coming, and I kept meeting it, and there was never a spare hour to do anything else.
By then the lifestyle wasn’t an event anymore. It was just a fixture, running alongside the school runs and the landscaping and the client meetings, part of the furniture of our week. There was no longer a before and after around each encounter, no agonising, no line to cross, because it had all become routine. There was a list of couples in our phones, people forever wanting to catch up, and most of it, I’ll tell you flatly, was unremarkable, because the myth of that world is all heat and abandon and the reality was closer to admin. Half the time not much happened. We’d meet a couple and not gel, or something would feel off, or we’d get as far as the bedroom and someone would lose their nerve and we’d all pretend that had been the plan. Something nearly always went slightly wrong.
And I was tired. Bone-tired of it, in a way I couldn’t say out loud. But here is the thing I need you to understand about where I was, right up until Frankie, because it’s the last piece of me that would go. I had stopped fighting, mostly. The island had taken that out of me, the arguing, the resisting in the moment, the belief that I could put my body down between us and hold a line. What I hadn’t yet lost was the hope. Some small, stubborn thread of it survived, whispering that this might still end, that there was a finish line up ahead somewhere, that if I could just endure long enough Caleb would be satisfied and I could have my life and my body and my quiet back. I wasn’t fighting anymore. But I was still hoping. That was the very last thing, the ember under all the ash, and I kept it lit without even knowing I was keeping it.
They have a word for her, in that world. A unicorn. A single woman, usually bisexual, willing to join a couple, and the word tells you everything about how she’s seen, because a unicorn is not a person, it’s a rare and magical thing you’re fortunate to catch. I’d learned that whole vocabulary fluently by then, the way it sorts people into types, and I’d only understand much later that the one it had turned most completely into a category was me.
Here’s the part I still can’t square. Caleb, through all of it, believed with his whole chest that he was becoming a better man. Not getting away with something. Becoming better, freer, more open, reaching for some higher version of himself and, he was certain, of us. He moved through the world smiling, calling strangers beautiful, delighted by everyone, proud of me, forever encouraging about my work. The harm never once arrived wearing the face of harm. It arrived wearing the face of love, and of growth, and of a husband who was proud of you, and you try, some time, to fight a thing dressed like that. Try explaining, even to yourself, that something is deeply wrong, while the man causing it is smiling at you and telling you how far the two of you have come. There’s nothing to push against. He was hurting me tenderly, and he had no idea he was doing it, and both of those things were true at once.
And I think, in his mind, it was my turn too. Because by then I’d done all of it. I’d been with the strangers, said yes more times than I could count, been passed between men and lived through it and got up the next morning and made the school lunches. From where Caleb stood, I had graduated. I’d handled everything, so surely I could handle this. He looked at me and saw a woman who’d grown into the life, a full and willing partner in the adventure. What he couldn’t see, what I could barely see myself, was that the thing he read as readiness was damage. My compliance wasn’t consent. My yes wasn’t desire. My calm was not peace, it was absence. I’d gone so numb that the numbness looked, from the outside, exactly like ease, and he read my disappearing as my arriving. The quieter I got, the more certain he grew that we were winning. The very proof that I was being erased was the proof he took that I was fine.
Her name was Frankie. She was thirty, training to be a firefighter, and she’d done a stint in the army, and she was fit in the way of someone whose body is a tool she maintains rather than an ornament she displays, broad-shouldered and easy, cowboy boots and cropped hair and glasses. Nothing about her belonged to the world of body glitter and fairy wings. She looked like she could carry you out of a burning building, which is a kind of unicorn all its own. And she was gentle. That was what I hadn’t braced for. Not predatory, not slick, not frightening the way the stripper had been. Shy, almost. Warm. In another life she and I might have been friends, and that I can write that sentence is one of the things about this I find hardest to hold.
Justin had passed her number along, the way you’d pass on a good tradesman. It reached Caleb, and Caleb gave it to me, and Frankie and I began to message, and here’s where it curdles, because the person Frankie truly connected with was me. Not Caleb. Me. She told me I was gorgeous, that she was drawn to me, that she’d dreamed for years of finding a couple like us and belonging to them, of being folded into a life instead of standing outside every one she’d ever brushed up against. She wanted to be my friend. And I told her, more than once, plainly, that we weren’t looking for that, that I wasn’t interested in that kind of thing, and she heard me and kept messaging anyway, kind and hopeful and lonely, and over that month I came to see that Frankie was a woman who’d been left by everyone she’d tried to love and had decided that if she couldn’t be somebody’s one, she’d settle for being two people’s third. I felt no desire for her. I want that on the record, not to spare myself but because it’s the whole truth of what this was. What I felt was an obligation with a date attached.
And under the obligation, still, after everything, was the jealousy.
I’d assumed, somewhere along the line, that this at least would have burned off. That a woman who’d watched her husband with as many others as I had would be past feeling it. I was not past it. It hadn’t settled an inch. The thought of Caleb wanting another woman, being turned on by her, still went through me like something cold, and it fixed, the way it always did, on my body.
The tangle of it is the truth, so I’ll give you the tangle.
On a good day I felt I looked well for my age. I did. I’d held up, I took care of myself, and there was a real and quiet pride in it. But holding up well for a woman in her forties who’s had three children is a different currency altogether from being thirty and never pregnant, and no amount of feeling good in my own clothes closed that gap. My breasts weren’t what they’d been before I fed three babies. There was a softness at my belly that hadn’t been there once. There was a whole private catalogue of ways I felt my body had been changed, spent, worn in the service of a family, and I couldn’t stop being ashamed of the parts of it that showed. And here was the thing that set Frankie apart from all the ones before. The other couples had been like us, parents, near enough our own age, bodies that had also carried and fed and settled and wore the ordinary evidence of it. There’d been a grim kind of safety in that, all of us on level ground, nobody holding a card the others couldn’t match. Frankie was the first who wasn’t. Thirty and childless and athletic, taut in all the places mine had given itself away, she was the first time the comparison wasn’t between equals. She had the one thing I could never get back, and she was bringing it into the same bed as me.
And the sharpest fear wasn’t about how I looked in a mirror. It was about the bed. The thought of Caleb actually being with her, his hands on a body that had never carried a child, and finding it better. Firmer, younger, easier under him, and knowing the difference, and preferring it, while I lay right there and watched it cross his face. That was the one I couldn’t sit with. Not being left for a younger woman some day in the abstract, but being compared in the moment, in the same bed, with the evidence of my own body lying inches away. There’s no hiding anything in that situation. No soft lighting, no good angle, no holding your stomach in. Just you and her and him, and his hands and his face telling the truth, moment by moment, about which of you felt better. I dreaded it more than I dreaded anything. And it was already there, that fear, long before Frankie, the fear of not being enough, and the lifestyle didn’t invent it, it fed it, put it to the test over and over, until refusing the test began to feel like its own kind of failing, becoming the jealous wife, the uptight one, the one who couldn’t keep up. So I kept sitting the test. And to get through it I told myself the story that kept me upright, that it wasn’t really her he wanted, it was me, that I was the point and she was only the scenery. I was almost certainly kidding myself. But you tell yourself what you have to, to walk into the room.
The plan was that we’d drive up the night before, have the night with Frankie, and the next day I’d give my talk.
Because there was a talk. I’d been asked to speak at a conference on the coast, not to attend but to stand up in front of a room and talk about my work, my career, about creativity and where it comes from and how you keep it alive, to a room full of younger women who wanted to do what I did and had come to hear how. I can’t easily put into words what that invitation meant, arriving when it did. It was the one part of my life still entirely my own, untouched by the rest of it, a thing I’d built with my own eye and my own name, and someone had noticed and wanted me at the front of a room as the authority on it. And Caleb was thrilled for me, truly, this is so good for you, this is what you deserve, people seeing how talented you are. He meant every word. He just also thought, in the same breath, that we could fit his night in around it, and saw no clash there at all, because in his mind the two things sat happily side by side, my triumph and his turn, two good things on one lovely weekend away.
I need to tell you how these things actually begin, because people always want to know, and the truth is stranger and more ordinary than they imagine.
She arrived as the sun was going down. She’d driven a couple of hours to reach us, and the plan, as far as there was one, was that she’d take the second bedroom and stay the night, and leave in the morning, and if she didn’t like us she could simply go. She pulled up in her car and climbed out in her denim shorts and her cowboy boots, her soft mullet and her thick-rimmed glasses, and she knocked on the door shy and a little nervous, nothing dominating about her at all, just friendly, natural, easy. We hugged. We introduced ourselves. And then we sat in the little lounge of the apartment and had drinks and talked, and it was pleasant, genuinely, nice enough, all the ordinary pleasantries, how lovely to finally meet you, how was the drive. Three adults having a perfectly civil evening, and underneath it, unspoken by any of us, the flat assumption of exactly why we were there.
I got up to fetch the second round. Caleb said he’d show Frankie around the apartment. And when I came back with the drinks in my hands and rounded the corner into the corridor, there they were, and he was kissing her.
I felt it drop through me, that egg-crack down the spine, though by then it was a familiar drop and I carried the drinks over anyway. And as I handed hers across she took my wrist and drew me in and kissed me, forward about it despite the shyness, and I remember, of all the things to remember, noticing that her teeth were a little yellow and her breath was not quite fresh. Which is a strange thing to be thinking with a woman’s mouth on yours. But that is exactly where my mind went, up and out and sideways into some small mundane flaw, because that is what my mind had learned to do to get me through, and I did not enjoy kissing her, not for a second, and I let it happen anyway. Then Caleb was there too, and the three of us stood in the corridor with our arms looped around one another, kissing between the three of us, him and her, then him and me, then her and me, a slow rotating thing, and then we moved into the bedroom, because it was simply understood that that was where this went. We took our clothes off. Nobody proposed it. There was music playing. It had the choreography of a thing already decided.
And Frankie, for all her shyness at the door, led it. She knew her part. I understood, watching her, that she’d done this before and been good at it, that she moved through it almost like a soldier who’d trained for the role, and the role was clear: please the couple, keep the wife calm and comfortable, make the husband feel like a king. She started with me, kissing me, touching me, telling me how gorgeous I was, and then she’d turn and give the same to Caleb, back and forth, tending both of us. She laid me down on the bed, and Caleb kissed me while she went down on me, and I lay there and felt nothing, nothing at all, no desire, no heat, only a kind of clinical detachment, as though I were being examined by a doctor. She was trying so hard. And I made the sounds you make, soft noises pitched to seem like pleasure, saying nothing real, performing a woman enjoying herself while the actual woman watched from a distance and waited for it to be over.
Then she lay back, and it was clear, without a word, that it was my turn, that I was meant to do to her what she’d done to me. And this was the part I hadn’t seen coming, the part that turned my stomach, because I’d walked into the night braced to be the one things were done to, and now the script wanted me on the other side of it, and I had never in my life wanted to touch a woman this way and had no idea how. She was my height but built like nothing I’d been near, small-breasted, her arms roped with muscle, biceps that looked like they could put a man on the floor, a body that trained and fought and hauled people out of fires. And I went down and did the thing, clumsy and unwilling and trying to seem neither, while she moaned that it felt so good and wound her fingers into my hair and pulled my head down onto her, guiding me, and I let her, and I thought about nothing except getting it right, the way you concentrate on a task you have no feeling for, wanting only to have already finished it. And here is the strangest part of my own mind that night: even as I did that, some part of me didn’t want to watch Caleb kissing her at the same time. I was being made a part of it and jealous of it in the very same moment. Nothing in me knew where to stand.
There was a moment I’ve never forgotten. She was riding Caleb’s face, turned toward me, and she threw her head back and let out this enormous, theatrical, ecstatic moan, loud, performed, an orgasm for the whole room, and my first clear thought, unbidden, was that Caleb had never once made me sound like that. And right behind it came the suspicion, because it seemed almost absurd, too much, surely she was performing. But Caleb didn’t think so. He was eating it up like lollies, lit right up by it, and that was its own small dagger, that he couldn’t tell, or didn’t want to. And then the spiral, the one that tells you everything about where I was: maybe I should perform like that, I thought, maybe if I’d carried on that dramatically in our own bed he’d never have wanted any of this to begin with, maybe this was my fault for being too quiet, too real. And in the same breath, the trap of it, because I couldn’t suddenly start now, and I wouldn’t make myself moan like that, because I didn’t want Caleb thinking I was having the night of my life, I wasn’t, and I refused to endorse the whole thing with my own throat, but I also couldn’t be silent, because then I wasn’t doing my part, wasn’t making his night special, and he might notice, might worry. So I lay there in a bed calibrating the volume of my own fake pleasure, caught between two performances I couldn’t give, while every other person in the room was carried clean away.
We did, I’ll tell you plainly and then leave it, everything a man imagines when he imagines this. Him and me while she kissed me. Him and her while I kissed him. Every arrangement, turn and turn about. And at some point I came off the bed to catch my breath and stood back for a moment, and from there I could see it too clearly, him moving inside her, the plain mechanical fact of it right in front of me, and my stomach turned right over. I thought I might actually be sick. I felt the room tilt. And the only thing I could do was climb back in and put my mouth back on someone, kiss my way back into it, so that I was too close to see it anymore, so I could pretend it wasn’t happening by being buried in the middle of it. Not once, in any of it, did Caleb check on me. Not once did he turn and ask if I was all right. He didn’t see me at all, and I had got so good at my face that there was nothing on it for him to see.
And I felt tender toward her. I had no desire for her, none, I knew with total certainty I wasn’t a lesbian, wasn’t drawn to her or to any woman. But she was lonely and she was trying so hard and she wanted so badly to be wanted, and some soft foolish part of me wanted to be kind to her, wanted to make it nice for her, wanted her to feel, for one night, that she belonged. Even there. Even then. I was managing her feelings in the middle of my own undoing.
Then it was the configuration he’d dreamed out loud about for as long as I’d known this side of him, the one that undid him completely, two directions at once. Frankie lay beneath me and I lay over her, the two of us kissing, her hands moving on me, while Caleb took me from behind and moved between the two of us, and finished inside me while I was pressed against her mouth. The extra touch, he called it. That was his phrase for the thing that blew his mind, the extra touch.
And then it was over, and the ordinariness that came down over it was almost the strangest part of all. We didn’t shower. We just pulled our underwear back on, a t-shirt each, poured another drink, and lay in the bed together in the dark with the lights off, talking, low and quiet, the way you might after any late night, until one by one they drifted off. I was glad everyone was tired. I was glad the talking could stop. And they fell asleep quickly, both of them, contented, and I lay there wide awake and squished between them, sad and frustrated and wanting her out of my bed and having no idea how to say such a thing, what the considerate thing even was after what we’d just done, this being my first time lying beside a woman I’d been with. So I said nothing. I lay flat on my back in the dark between my sleeping husband and a sleeping stranger, listening to the two of them breathe, hearing them settle into their happy post-everything snoring, the only person still awake in a bed of three, the only one it had cost anything.
The next day would not end. I hadn’t reckoned on it at all, hadn’t once thought past the night itself to the plain fact that there’d be a morning after it, and an afternoon, a whole ordinary day still to be got through with the very people who’d been in the bed. And I had my talk that afternoon. I woke sick, hollow, running on almost no sleep, and what I needed was a few hours to prepare, to gather myself, to become the competent admired woman the conference had invited. What I had instead was Frankie, who would not leave. She lingered and lingered. And I couldn’t make her go.
That’s the shameful little truth of it. After everything she’d told me about being lost and alone and left by everyone, I could not bring myself to be one more person who put her out the door, and so I let her stay, and hated myself for it, the same weakness that had walked me into all of this to begin with, the flat inability to protect my own needs against the pull of someone else’s. She talked about becoming one with us. Caleb gave her massages. I sat in a chair on the far side of the room feigning a headache and dying, very quietly, inside my own body. She kept looking over at me. Isn’t she gorgeous, she’d say to Caleb, look how gorgeous she is. She sure is, he’d say, working his hands over Frankie’s back and watching me across the room, the two of them admiring me like a painting they were pleased to own.
Caleb suggested we all go down to the beach for a swim, and Frankie, delighted, said he should walk in the middle and the two of us should hold his hands, one on each side. And I watched it land on him, watched him go delirious down to his boots at the thought of it. Real people, out on a real street, watching him stroll along holding hands with not one but two fit younger women. He was the man. He walked in the middle with his chest out like a peacock, and I trailed on the end of his arm, still playing the part, not because there was any pleasure for me in watching him in his element but because that was what I’d promised I’d do. It irritated me, if I’m honest. I did it the way you do a duty. We swam. We lay in the sun. We came back for lunch, then pizza, and still she stayed, hour after hour, and I understood by then that Frankie wasn’t lingering for the sex or even for Caleb. She was lingering because for one night she’d belonged somewhere, and couldn’t make herself walk back out into a life where she didn’t. When she finally left she was glowing. One of the best nights of her life, she said. And I looked at her and felt, under my exhaustion, an enormous and useless pity, because I recognised her. A lonely, lost woman trying to buy her way into a family with the only currency anyone had ever wanted from her. I knew precisely how that felt. I was running a version of the same scheme myself.
And then, somehow, I went and gave my talk.
I don’t fully know how. I was wrecked, sick, drained, unprepared, still carrying the night in my body and the whole long day on top of it. And I stood up in front of that room of hopeful younger women, and I found it somewhere, the poise, the words, the version of me who knew things and had built something worth admiring, and I gave them what they’d come for. People told me afterwards it was amazing, inspiring, that I’d given them something to reach toward. And it was good. I pulled it together and I did it and I made it work, the way I made everything work. Nobody in that room had the faintest idea that the woman inspiring them about creativity and courage had spent the night before as a body in her husband’s fantasy and the morning being admired like furniture, and had hauled herself up to that podium out of the wreckage on no sleep and sheer trained competence. I stood in the light and was the person they needed me to be. It might have been the loneliest hour of the whole affair, being seen so clearly by a room full of strangers and so completely by no one.
That night Caleb took me to a beautiful restaurant and poured praise across the white tablecloth like wine. How amazing I was. How free. How perfect. The best wife a man could ask for, he said, for giving him that.
I didn’t lap it up, exactly. It’s more that I noted it, the way you’d note a fact. It balmed me a little, I won’t pretend it didn’t, but mostly what I felt was the narrow relief of having survived. I’d passed the test. I was still here. He still loved me, and he was praising me and not Frankie, praising me and the night we’d got through, and some worn-out part of me simply logged it and hoped, quietly, that it would be enough. That this would be the one that satisfied him. That he wouldn’t ask again. I’d done it out of the love that was still in me for him, out of a wish to be unselfish, out of trust that he loved me and that none of it meant anything beyond an experience. And I told myself all of that, and I held the praise the way you’d hold a hand pressed to a wound.
Because that’s what it felt like. Not a triumph. A survival. Like I’d gone to a war I hadn’t chosen and come back alive but full of holes, still bleeding, still upright only because upright was the habit. Something in my chemistry had shifted on that trip, quietly and for good. I could feel it. I was drained in a way sleep doesn’t touch. I moved and spoke and smiled and I was not quite there in any of it, gone half to zombie, a woman running on the last of something she couldn’t name and didn’t know how to refill.
Because something ended on that trip, and it wasn’t only a night. It was the fighting itself.
Right up until Frankie, that ember had still been glowing. Small, buried, outvoted almost every time, but lit. The part of me that kept looking for the exit, that kept believing there was a finish line up ahead and a version of my life waiting on the far side of it. After Frankie, it went out. Not snuffed in some final dramatic gust. It just stopped, the way a pilot light stops when the gas is turned off at the main. And with it went the looking. I stopped searching for the way out, because searching for a way out means believing there is one, and that was the belief that finally left me. This was what we were now. I didn’t like it and I didn’t want it, and I stopped saying either of those things even to myself, because they’d stopped changing anything. I was no longer the one who ever said no, because the one in me who used to say it had gone.
And the strangest part is that I didn’t feel it happen. There was no moment of grief, no night I wept for the woman who used to argue. She left without a sound, and I didn’t feel her go. I moved through the weeks after in a fog, numb, mechanical, doing the things a life asks of you, present enough to function and absent from all of it, and at the time I didn’t register that anything was wrong. That’s what surrender actually feels like from the inside. Not despair. Despair still has some fight in it, still believes things ought to be otherwise. This was quieter than that. This was the lights in a house going off one by one while the person inside keeps moving through the rooms in the dark, no longer reaching for the switch, because she’s forgotten there was ever such a thing as light.
I thought that was the bottom. I thought the worst thing that could happen already had, over and over, and that the numbness was simply where I lived now, and that at least the cost of all of it was mine alone to carry.
I was wrong about that. I was about to find out that the night with Frankie hadn’t stayed in that hotel room. It had followed us home.
And the person who’d pay for it next wasn’t me.
If you’ve read this far, thank you for staying with it. I’m telling this story one chapter at a time, in order, and it only makes sense as a whole.
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Next Week: Chapter 24 - Sam
It hurts to read these.
I cannot.
Well i feel absolutely awful for this version of you! I feel like i want to reach into the story and just give you the biggest hug and tell you how much you matter and how much your feelings are valid and how much you need to run and never look back!!! Eva this was heart breaking to read, i felt every word and i could sense all of your pain and confusion! Thank you as always for sharing such an intimate part of your story! And i am so sorry that no one saw how much you were hurting during all of this, sending you all the love hunny 🙏🩷