Page 3 of Cruel Summer

Suddenly she was just…mad. Because she had seen this summer stretching before them like so many other summers. She’d thought they might go to the beach or maybe go camping. Go to dinner, sit on the back deck and drink wine at night.

Instead he’d detonated this bomb between them, and yes, he was being honest. Yes, he’d done this instead of sneaking around. But she hadn’t been ready for it, and it felt brutal.

“You want to fuck other women,” she said, the language she so rarely used hard and echoing in the car, like she’d slapped him.

“Sam…”

“No, like, let’s be really clear about this.

You want to have sex with other women.” She realized there was another aspect she’d never considered.

Because he had been talking so much about the things you did just because they were the accepted things to do.

Maybe there was more to it. “Or is it men? Are you like… Have I been holding you back from…”

“No. Not men.”

“So just…you want to sleep with other women.”

That was worse. At least if it was men, she’d know what they had that she didn’t. She’d still feel upset she wasn’t enough for her husband, but she wouldn’t have to wonder if it was just about her stretch marks and her forehead wrinkles.

“Yes.”

She looked at him and watched his face as they passed Target, then Starbucks, the light from the signs illuminating his face and letting her see a muscle there as it twitched.

It was jarring. The normality of it. Of being out with him, going by stores they shopped at, having this conversation that was anything but normal. Anything but okay.

“Well.” She rolled the window down a little bit, trying to get some air. “I’m glad you’re being honest about that.”

“It’s part of what I want, yes.”

“Am I not hot enough for you? Is it the stretch marks? Is it the fact that my boobs are solidly an inch lower than they used to be?” She rolled the window down a little more.

“No.”

“Should I get Botox? Implants? Fillers?”

“It’s not about changing you.”

“It is, though,” she said. “Because I have to change to be okay with this. My idea of what marriage is has to change.”

He sighed. “It’s not about you not fulfilling me. It’s about wanting to experience things I haven’t. Some of that is sex. Some of it is just…going out and feeling like…something could happen even if it doesn’t.”

Something about that last sentence made her feel a surge of…

Shame. And her own deeply buried feelings that she’d done such a good job of suppressing, she would never have even thought of them again if not for this.

“You want to do all this while keeping me at home?”

“No, you would be free to do it too, and we would set our boundaries and talk about what we were okay with and…”

“Nothing! I’m not okay with any of it. We are… We would be the people I would make fun of with Elysia and Whitney. I would be texting them right now like, ‘OMG you won’t believe what Sam’s husband just said,’ except I am Sam and you are Sam’s husband and it isn’t funny at all.”

He sighed. “So this is about what other people think?”

That struck her as astonishingly unfair. “No, it’s about the fact that it’s breaking my heart .”

They said nothing for a long time, and then they pulled up to the front of their house. He pulled the car into the garage, and she wanted to yell at him and tell him not to do that, because for some reason the idea of bringing this all home, into their home, felt wrong.

He shut the engine off and closed the garage door behind them. He put his arms on top of the steering wheel and stared straight ahead, and what shocked her most of all was how sad he looked.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “But I needed to tell you I… I’ve never felt trapped by you. But sometimes I feel trapped by this .”

“I can’t separate the two things. This ,” she said, waving her hand around the space, “is us .”

“I’ve always loved our relationship. I just want more. I never wanted to hurt you. But I felt like I needed to be honest with you.”

I want you to lie.

But she couldn’t say that.

You couldn’t say that. You couldn’t wish that your husband would keep on lying and keep pretending to be happy so that you could keep things just the way you wanted them, could you?

You were supposed to value and prize honesty.

But his honesty was making her frantically scroll through her every memory of them. Every moment. Every time she’d thought they were on the same page when they were clearly reading different books.

She wanted to jump out of the car and run away and…

That was the problem.

“How long have you wanted to tell me this? How long have you felt this way?”

He turned his head and looked at her. “A while. But there’s not an easy way to do it, because hearing you say that…

that I want to fuck other women makes it sound like something I didn’t think of it as.

It feels like something bigger to me. Like letting each other have freedom we haven’t had while we were giving our kids structure.

While we were trying to be responsible and…

to not be judged by everyone in town. What if we hadn’t felt like we had to get married?

Maybe you could have gone to school like you wanted to. ”

“But I’ve always been happy I married you.”

“Let’s go inside,” he said.

They did, and they sat on their couch—was their couch too much like the neighbors’ couch?—and talked. And talked until their voices were hoarse.

He tried to explain it was about having the opportunity to experience new things without limitations.

She yelled about him seeing her as a limitation.

“Is this just about sex? Is it more blow jobs? Did you need me to get on my knees and show you that I love you? That I want you and this?” She was embarrassed that she was asking that of her husband, bargaining with her body, but shit, what did he want from her?

“Is there something you want to try? Is there…”

“No.” He put his head in his hands. “Because it’s about me. It isn’t just about sex. It’s about… I want to feel like a whole person on my own. Someone who can go out and see where the evening goes sometimes.”

“And still come home to your wife who made you dinner?”

“No. I want to come home to you because I love you, and you’re my partner. But there’s a way we look at marriage in society that’s…like we’re one.”

“Again,” she said, “I seem to recall that actually came up in our marriage ceremony.”

“I don’t believe in some of it. Not anymore.” He sat up straighter. “A lot of what we did was to make this…traditional family for the kids. Now we don’t have to consider them first. We can consider ourselves first.”

I considered us first.

But she wouldn’t say that out loud because it was even sadder than offering a blow job right now.

She kept making accusations. He kept telling her it was about him .

No matter how mean she got, he took it, and he never yelled. Which made her angrier, because he was making her feel like she was the one who was unhinged, and she wasn’t the one who had changed everything. By the time she was done, she felt exhausted and horrible and like she was a stranger too.

“We don’t have to do this,” he said. “We can go on the road trip you wanted. We can put a pin in this.”

Except now she knew. That his smiles weren’t all the way real.

That when he kissed her good-night, he was going to sleep in a bed, in a life, that didn’t satisfy him, and it made her want to light herself on fire to escape the burn of that humiliation.

She’d thought she was living in a happy marriage, and her husband wasn’t happy.

He was her everything.

And she wasn’t enough.

It killed her to know that being with her in a way that satisfied her was destroying something in him.

“I can’t ever forget that this is what you want,” she said slowly. “I can’t forget and go back to what we had, knowing that the life I love is making you feel suffocated. Knowing that you were keeping up with the Joneses while I was happy .”

“I’m sorry.” He looked so sorry. So really and truly sorry and like this was tearing him up from the inside, and she didn’t understand why he couldn’t do her a favor and scream at her.

Call her ugly or say she was boring in bed or something so her anger had something to grab hold of.

“I love you, and that’s why I wanted to figure out how to navigate this together. ”

She looked past him, out the window over the kitchen sink. How many times had she stood there washing dishes and looking out at the driveway, waiting for his car to pull in…

“Maybe we should…maybe we…should do this separate for a while.”

“I don’t want a divorce, Sam.”

“Neither do I.”

The house looked like a sitcom set all of a sudden. Like it wasn’t real. The house she carefully organized every week, that she worked so hard to make theirs. It was her haven, and his prison.

They’d raised three boys here. Ethan had taken his first steps here. They’d measured their heights on the wall by the kitchen. They’d bought the house when Will had started being successful in real estate and her freelance writing jobs had picked up.

They’d celebrated their kids’ high school graduations here. Mourned the loss of her mother here. Laughed, cried, made love.

It didn’t seem real now.

She was angry, and she was sad, and they’d had such a smooth marriage up until this point that she didn’t know how to have conflict like this.

“I need to go to bed,” she said.

“Sam…”

“Alone.”

They had never done this. Never had the kind of schism that made her feel like they couldn’t go to sleep beside each other. Sometimes they did go to bed mad, because he was right about her.

She didn’t like fighting, and sometimes she just shut down. Shut the door for a while and marinated by herself. Then they’d go to sleep silently beside each other, and in the morning it would be a much more amiable disagreement, rather than a fight that had built anger on top of anger.

She hoped that was true now.

In the morning maybe she’d wake up and this would be a weird dream. Or Will would forget he’d ever said anything.

The problem was, though, she would never be able to forget he’d said it.

So she had to figure out what she was going to do.