Thishurt.
It made her feel like she didn’t know anything. About herself or about the man she’d been sure she knew better than anyone else on the planet.
She cleared her throat for something to do and looked at her salad. “Why…What?”
“Sorry, it didn’t come out right.”
She tried to imagine a way it could mean something wholly different if he rearranged the words, or it came outright.
“I hope it came out in all the entirely wrong words.”
“Not…entirely wrong.” He closed his eyes and let out a hard breath, and she couldn’t remember her husband ever making exactly that face before. “We’ve had that perfect life.” Well, she agreed with that. “We raised our boys, and we had a stable home for them. We transcended all the…the shame people tried to heap on us when you got pregnant in high school. We made a life so normal and so conventional the kids never faced any kind of scrutiny.” He let out an uncomfortable-sounding breath. “But have you ever thought about why we did it?”
She couldn’t answer his question with sincerity. “Why we went to Texas Roadhouse? Because I like the rolls, Will. I thought that was why.” Except right now she just had a salad, and she really needed bread and butter.
“No, why we got married.”
She felt like she’d been doused with a bucket of ice water. “No. I haveneverwondered that. Iknowwhy we got married.”
“That isn’t what I mean. Why marriage? We did that because it was the only thing we could do to avoid being shamed. To make ourmistakeright. Why did it even feel like a mistake? Because we were told it was by our youth pastors and by our parents. We didn’t think we were making a mistake.” He let out a hard breath. “We did it to please everyone around us.”
She rejected that. Hard. “No, Will, I married you because Ilovedyou.” Oh, God. She was that woman. That forty-year-old woman who didn’t have kids left at home and whose husband didn’t want her anymore. They weren’t special at all. They were cliché and terrible and…and… “Are you… Is this a midlife crisis? Are you asking me for a divorce?”
“No.” He put his hand out across the table and rested it over hers. A wave of calm washed over her. She felt safer, just like that. His touch had always done that for her.
She looked at him, at his light brown hair, pushed back off his forehead. His face, lined now and not as boyish as it had been. But there was still something in his smile that would always be sixteen-year-old Will to her, no matter their ages.
She could breathe again.
He was Will. He wasn’t a stranger.
That reminder, that mantra, helped her get through the next few seconds at least.
“I love you,” he said. “I love you as much now as I always did. But I… I’m not happy.”
She picked up her iced tea and tried to take a drink, but her throat was too tight. She had to put it down while she coughed, her eyes watering, and she was sort of glad because she might cry. The choking gave her plausible deniability.
“I don’t…” She tried to force the words out through her raw throat. “I don’t understand. How can you love me and not be happy?”
“Sam…it’s not you. It’s about me and what… We’ve lived a whole life. We’re forty, and we’ve already liveda whole life. The kids, the mortgage, over twenty years of marriage. After Ethan left for school last year, I started asking myself what other…livesthere are.”
Otherlives. Lives that weren’t their boring, normal lives?
Lives where men in their forties went windsurfing and got to have sex with whoever they wanted?
Lives like…
She didn’t need to think about anyone else, or make it about anyone else. She started to stand up because she didn’t know what else to do, and Will tightened his grip on her.
“I did this wrong,” he said. “The most important thing here, and the thing I should have said first, is that I love you. None of this is aboutnotbeing with you. I just… We have lived a life that looks exactly like everyone else in town.”
She settled back into her seat. “I don’t… It’s…the American dream, isn’t it? Slightly more kids than average, but we have our own businesses, we have a house, we’re a family, we…”
“Yes, but we can keep all those things and also try something new. We can keep those things, but explore different aspects of who we are. I want to try having an open marriage.”
“You want…” Her mind went blank for a moment while she tried to make sense of what he was saying.
That was what he’d meant, from the beginning of this conversation. He wanted to have sex with other people. That was what he meant. He wanted…to see her and see other people. He wanted to date other women.
