She laughed. She couldn’t help it. “You hoped I was unhappy?”
“Yes. We’re always so in sync. I started feeling… I guess unsatisfied a few years ago. Started wondering what else was out there, and I hoped you were feeling that too. That you would say, ‘Great, Will, I have some things I need too.’ I just thought maybe I was the first one who was willing to admit that I wasn’t happy with things as they were.”
“Well, no. Sorry. I was happy. I was happy with everything. We did the hard stuff, and now we’re supposed to just get to enjoy it.”
She realized, as soon as she said it, that it couldn’t be true if he didn’t like their life. It couldn’t be true ifhewasn’t happy.
“I love you,” he said. He’d said it a lot since last night. “Through all of this, all my questioning, I’ve known that much. It’s about me, it really is. But I understand that because we’re married, that makes it about you too. But it isn’t because of you. It isn’t anything you did or didn’t do.”
Sam didn’t know if that was better or worse. To know she couldn’t stop it, fix it, learn how to be bolder, kinkier, whatever he might want. To know that this was something happening in him she couldn’t change or fix.
Maybe it was good to know it wasn’t her fault, but that meant she couldn’t do anything. She hated that. She didn’t know what she was supposed to do with that.
“We got married so young, and I wanted to do right by you. By the boys. I became a middle-aged man at eighteen. We never got to do the things other people our age did. We didn’t go party, we didn’t drink, we didn’t do casual hookups. I guess this is what a midlife crisis is. I guess this is what it looks like. When you realize this is your life. For me, for us, this is the only life we’ve gotten to live. Our youngest son is going to Europe all summer, and we never did anything like that. You know other people were spending their summers traveling and having flings. We dated all through high school. We were married before we graduated. We didn’t have even a couple of years to find ourselves, to figure out who we were, to make mistakes…”
“Many people would argue,” she said, her throat feeling scratchy, “that we did in fact make a mistake. The one that ensured we had to get married.”
“That’s a good point. We made one choice very young that put us on a path, and now…we don’t have to be on that path anymore. Or we can widen it.” He let out a ragged breath. “I don’t want to blow our lives up. That’s what led me to kind of researching all of this. I want an open relationship because it means freedom and honesty. Because to an extent it keeps our relationships ours, but lets us have other things too.”
“When?” she asked. “When did you start… What was the moment?”
The breath he let out was heavy with regret, his teeth clenched. He looked away from her, the muscles in his face going tense.
She wasn’t going to like his answer. That was clear.
“There was a feeling. You know, just…these weird moments when I’d think…is this it? Is this all life is?”
Those words were like a knife, and she did her best not to look stabbed. She nodded, to show she was listening. If she made a sound, it would be a little bit too much like dying.
“But the actual moment I started realizing what I wanted…it was…Logan.”
“Oh, of course it was. You lied about this last night.”
“It’s not as simple as what… I don’t know, I guess it is. It was just watching him. We went to some bar and this woman was flirting with him and he got her number.” He covered his face with his hands. “It feels shitty. To admit that I envy anything about his life, because I know he didn’t choose to lose Becca, and I don’t want to lose you. It’s just what I thought then was…he got to live both lives. He got married young, he has a daughter, but he…he gets to flirt when he goes out. He gets to drink too much if he wants. He can travel when he feels like it, and he isn’t stuck doing a nine-to-five. I jumped into this when I was a teenager, and I didn’t get to make choices. I want to live the life I didn’t get to have, see what choices I could make, and I want to do it without destroying what I’ve got.”
She tried to imagine it. Because they were always on the same page, except it was clear now they weren’t. That it was a story she told herself, because Will was exceptionally good at seeming fine when he wasn’t.
Apparently.
She was very good at seeing what she wanted to.
Apparently.
“I keep trying,” she said. “I keep trying to imagine it. I keep trying to picture myself…going out and finding someone and seeing where it goes, and I… I don’t want it.”
She wanted this life.
Their life.
But she could see that he was always going to question if he could have been happier with something else if he didn’t get to try it.
So she tried to imagine that. Being home while he was out. Accepting him being with other women.
Touching him after he’d touched someone else.
She stared past him, through the kitchen into the living room, where she could see the edge of one of their framed family photos. She could see the space they put their Christmas tree in every year.
The edge of the coffee table where they often sat on the floor and played board games.
