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You gaze from across the room and all shadows are cream corners in the light of day.
He’s outside with the kids now, wrestling around in the leaves while you finish up and send off a couple work emails. You watch them from the window, almost wistfully. You could probably wrap up work early, call it a day and save those last few emails for early tomorrow morning, but John’s hours with the boys are precious and his alone.
John catches your eyes when he glances up at the window and gestures with a wave for you to come out. You smile instead. A shake of your head. When he smiles back, it almost disappears beneath his mutton chops, making your heart swell so much that it hurts.
It’s been four months since you broke your own heart. Four months since John moved into the apartment across town, an extra thousand pounds a month that would be better spent on the kids, but—and you think this with a wince, face crumpling whenever it comes back to the forefront of your mind—you just had to demand the impossible. Again.
No amount of forehead kisses and gentle words seem to alleviate the guilt near crushing your heart. John sure does try though.
The most you can say in your defence was that it wasn’t your decision for John to move out. If anything, you’d be gunning to sell the house and put the burden on both of you, but he’d insisted you keep the house. Practically demanded it. He’d justified it by saying that he was used to setting up for the night in half-crumpled buildings—an apartment was still something of a luxury in his world.
“Besides,” he’d murmured, your cheeks still cupped tenderly in those big mitts of his, head angled up to receive another kiss to your forehead like a benediction, “y’think I’d just let my wife live anywhere? It’s your house, darling. Your dream house.”
He never stops calling you that. His wife. Still keeps the ring on his left hand too, always glittering in the morning light when he stops by to pick up the kids for swimming lessons.
In a sense, your whole life has changed. In another, much more real sense, nothing’s really changed. You still have his boys at home and he still has a key to your house (technically, his house too because the house is in both of your names; you didn’t sell it because you bought it before property values started going up and it just doesn’t make sense to sell the house when it’s the perfect distance between school and your work).
You still keep his ring in your organiser with the rest of your jewellery. Sometimes, you think that you probably would’ve made a bit of extra cash if you’d pawned it, but you haven’t yet.
You still go to him for help around the house, still seek him out when you’re in a bind or in trouble, still invite him over for dinner with your parents because your dad still loves Price (they bonded over old Louis L"Amour novels and books about Ernest Shackleton), and still look up at him with wide, desperate eyes when you’re aching for it because you haven’t yet found a man that knows you as well as he does.
“Why did you then?” your therapist asks during your monthly appointment. You’re caffeinated from an early coffee date with a friend, one of the moms from the boys’ preschool days, so you’re jittery sitting across from your therapist. More than usual anyway. “You’ve never mentioned going to marriage counselling or having a trial separation, so…maybe it’d be helpful if you gave me some more context.”
Context. You can give that. You fiddle with the edge of the cardboard coffee sleeve, pulling it back enough that it starts to tear.
“Well…yeah, sure, I can.” You shift in your chair. “First, you have to…you have to understand that it wasn’t—I never wanted to get divorced. And it wasn’t anything about John. Not personally, at least.”
Your words fizzle out when you look to her for encouragement, but she sits there like some obscure Rodin sculpture, head collapsed on her closed fist. Waiting you out.
You can only handle the silence for so long before you have to fill it. “Before he made captain, we moved around constantly. I always knew it would be hard. We never stayed anywhere long enough to make friends—only ever acquaintances. It was isolating, but it was…well, it was what I signed up for. I never loved it, but it was a sacrifice that we were making together. John and I.”
“And when did that change?”
“When I had the boys. Then it was…it became increasingly difficult.”
“How so? Did the situation change?”
“It didn’t change, but it became more complicated.” This is the part you always hate; by nature, you run from confrontation, from complexity. In the dead of night, you wonder what it would be like to hold your entire world as a perfectly smooth sphere. “Moving around too much was hard on the boys. I might’ve made that sacrifice, but they didn’t and I just—I just think they deserve to grow up in one place.”
“It’s important for children to have stability.”
“And the job itself, I—I don’t think I used to think about it all that much—what would happen if John didn’t come home one day, I mean. Then suddenly it was all I could think about. And it kept getting worse, every year.” The cardboard sleeve tears under your fingers. “I couldn’t stop…I couldn’t stop thinking about what I’d do if he didn’t come home. What I’d tell the boys. I’d spend hours wide awake at night because I couldn’t get it out of my head. John somewhere out there, hurt or d-dying or just missing.”
“Did the two of you ever discuss another way forward? One that didn’t involve a divorce?”
Your eyes harden. “Yes. It didn’t go anywhere.”
There are things too painful to talk about, even in the presence of someone you pay for that very pleasure. Your mouth is dry with the taste of those words.
Nights spent leaking tears until there’s nothing to leak out. Wrangling the boys into the car in a state of total exhaustion, crumpled inward. Arguing with John on the phone in a hushed whisper, trying not to be too loud for the sake of the boys. Turned inside out when he says in an offhand manner that he’ll be gone for a few months, that he’ll call when he’s able to; every time becoming the bad guy when you have to tell the boys that their dad won’t be home anytime soon. That you don’t know when exactly he’ll be home.
Asking John for the ten thousandth time if you’ll have to expect this forever, if his commitment to your family will ever outweigh his commitment to his career only to receive the same answer time and again.
The days are ripe with the smell of geosmin and the bird songs sound in the thinly perfumed air, but you are shaped in the echo of blue. Blue, being the colour of immediate relinquishing, the comfort of giving into it.
You remember the day you told him, the day you had the papers drawn up and delivered to him. The punched, devastated look on his face, lips going slack, open-mouthed. Your own frustration at this being a shock (that he should’ve seen it coming). Then getting upset all over again when you watched the calm acceptance flow over him, how easily he signed the papers and packed only enough to fit into a duffle bag before getting a hotel room. One last lingering look at the door before departing.
You never ever talk about what it was like to sit the boys down the morning after John moved out and explain it to them in the simplest terms. Your whole body on the verge of simply expiring when they started bawling, crying so hard that the littlest one almost wretched. That memory gets buried so deep inside of you that it simply can’t ever resurface.
The first few months pass by like a loon’s call, but they’re not lonely.
Price is stationed nearby, so while you don’t see him during work hours, he still occupies your weekends. At the boys’ soccer games, at least. John still pulls up in the parking lot by the field at the same time as you and brings all the kids snacks. The other parents love him. Some of your friends still side-eye you about the divorce, but it’s impossible to describe every single individual thing that went wrong during your marriage, so you just sigh and keep it to yourself.
He throws an arm around your shoulders as the game progresses. When one of your kids scores a goal, the two of you spring to your feet to clap. He drags you to him, pressing a hot kiss to the side of your head. It makes you feel dizzy, scrutinised. You know some of the other parents aren’t even convinced that you actually got a divorce.
He sits on your side of the booth when the four of you grab pizza after the game. His hand stays hot on your thigh the whole time while he showers the boys with praise and advice for their next game. They always listen to him with rapt attention, hanging off his every word. You’re only a bit miserable when you see how much they hero-worship your ex.
It’s part of what made the divorce so difficult in the first place—they were miserable for months when John first moved out, when they only got to see him every other week because of the custody arrangement. It’s part of what made you capitulate to allowing John to spend more time with you, to slowly allow them to acclimatise to the distance.
There’s no acclimation period when your ex-husband finds you in the laundry room after putting the boys to bed that night. Not when he lifts you up and sits you on the machine that just started running, spreading your legs and dragging your panties down your legs before licking a hot stripe up your pussy. “Your reward” for giving him such good boys, he says.
You put your foot down after that.
“This can’t happen again,” you start, dragging your underwear back up your still trembling legs. You do not make eye contact with him.
John chuckles, rubbing his hand over his beard and probably—you let this thought pass by only briefly lest it drive you crazy—wiping your juices off. “Of course, honey.”
“I’m serious, John. That’s it.”
“I hear you, I hear you.” When you finally chance a glance up, his eyes crinkle with the stretch of his smile. Your body buzzes with the need to pepper kisses across those fine lines. “Last time.”
It’s not the last time. Not by a long shot.
Occasionally you think you’re managing the divorce better than John. That’s a laugh riot.
One of the PTA moms approaches you after a session one day and asks if the divorce has been finalised. Something about her tone immediately puts you on guard. You answer her with a hesitant “Yes?” and then feel your blood go cold as ice when she smiles and asks if it would be alright if she asked your ex on a date then, since the two of you aren’t involved anymore.
It’s a reasonable request. It’s even sort of nice of her to ask for your permission instead of going behind your back. That rationale doesn’t shake the sudden influx of anger that rumbles up in your belly.
You’re too conflicted and irked to say anything other than a terse, “Sure,” but when you go home that evening and John is there with the kids, sitting on the couch like nothing’s amiss, like he still lives there with the three of you, you feel something give. Just a little bit. After putting the kids to bed, you pull him to the bedroom and practically wrench his belt open, sinking to your knees before you’ve even pulled his cock out.
You make him promise in bed later that he won’t ever.
“Won’t what, darling?” Fingers playing with the ends of your hair, looping it around his finger again and again. John plays at not knowing, but you see it buried in the glimmer in his eyes.
“You know what.”
“I do?” He must see the pinched look on your face, even from where your cheek is smushed against his chest because his smirk immediately softens, big hand smoothing the hair from your face. “You know I wouldn’t, pumpkin.”
You feel infinitely fragile in that moment, like glass that might shatter in his hands. “You can’t, okay? I know we’re—I know it’s not reasonable, but you…you really can’t. Okay?”
John pulls you up until your head is just tucked under his chin, until all he has to do is pull back the smallest amount to press a soft kiss to the top of your head. “I know, darling, I know. It’s just us, right? No one else.”
You don’t know if it’ll change anything. Real life still complicates your marriage, still makes you bend and twist into incomprehensible shapes. But at least you know you can do so without the fear of completely losing him. You still sit at the centre of his world and he yours.
You still go to soccer games together and have family dinner once a week because it’s better for the kids if the two of you get along. John stops by to mow the lawn and clean the gutters, and then leans his forearms against the front door and asks if there’s anything else he needs to take care of. You don’t date because of the boys, you tell friends. You’re busy with work and mom duties.
You don’t mention that your ex-husband slept over twice last week, that your boys squealed when they barged into your room to find dad there curled around you. They’ll just remind you that you got divorced in the first place because his work life was too erratic and it was driving you nuts and isn’t it better now that you have some freedom? Don’t you like being single?
John drops you off after you drive the kids to sleep away camp. You had to stop at two different rest stops so he could bend you over the sink. He smokes in the car but keeps the window open after you bitch about the stench. His mouth tastes like spearmint and smoke when he kisses you before you step out of the car.
You forget to download Hinge for another week.
You are, in fact, doing a terrible job of maintaining a professional distance.
“Last time?” he says before you’re able to, a coy grin on his face. John sits on your bed while you hastily pull up your pants.
“Shut up,” you mutter, shooing him out the door a few minutes later. He laughs the whole walk down to the car.
You leave the boys with your parents when a mutual friend invites the two of you to their wedding. You’re hesitant at first to attend with John—neither of you are each other’s plus one, but it’s sort of expected that you’ll attend together. Plus, the thought of John going with anyone else nearly makes you see red.
The initial awkwardness (only on your part; John is predictably and annoyingly unfazed) dissipates in a matter of hours, forgotten about after your second shot of gin. You cry so much at the ceremony that John has to pull your face into his chest, dabbing at your eyes with a tissue ever so tenderly to make sure your makeup doesn’t run. He’s practised at that. At the reception, you drink enough for the world to go fuzzy for a bit, unburdened by self-doubt for a change; you don’t hesitate when the dance floor opens up to drag John up with you, squealing at some song you recognize from high school.
Ubering home and giggling as your drunk husband— ex-husband, you think only distantly, like a superfluous correction, like something that needs to be stated for accuracy but not for sentimentality—paws at your thighs and stomach. John’s always been a handsy drunk.
He makes you kneel in the foyer the second you walk through the door. Barely unbuckles his pants before pulling his cock out and grunts his way through a quick and dirty jerk, holding you by the hair and angling your face towards his dick. He makes you lick it a couple of times and then around his fingers in order to keep him wet. You’re still in your pretty, silky little dress from the wedding and when you try to fix a strap that’s slipped down, he growls at you to pull it down so he can see your tits.
“C’mon, darlin’,” he pants, cheeks splashed with red.
It’s intense, cataclysmic. Your head is still spinning from the five drinks you had (one over your limit) while John grunts and breathes in heavily through his nose, staring down at your face until his come stripes across your cheeks and he makes you open your mouth to catch some on your tongue.
When he props you up against the wall, you think it’s going to be rough and animalistic, but instead it’s all slow drags of his hips up into yours and foreheads pressed together. Deep sucking kisses and heady eye contact, breathing into each other’s mouths.
“C’mon, love, clench up nice and tight; that’s good—that’s a good girl,” John says into your mouth, barely pulling an inch away to speak. “Don’t worry if you need to come, darling. Not gonna be through with you anytime soon.”
You both pass out on the couch after that; you only manage to drag yourself back to your room around four or five o’clock, the oncoming of a hangover already splintering behind your eyes.
He snores on the couch until the wee hours of the morning. You wake up around half past nine to find him already gone, the car no longer parked in front of the house, but you swear in the back of your head that you remember dreaming of him coming into your room before he left.
Yielding again and again to temptation; so easy when the alternative is endless grief. Grieving the loss of John in your bed every night, grieving the fact that everything’s changed and yet somehow you’re still the bad guy. You’re still the one that boys scowl and scream at when John leaves after supper, even when he takes them aside and gently scolds them.
It ruins your mood every single time because you keep trying to establish rules to make the divorce work and it’s not even fully Price’s fault that they keep getting torn down because you’re just letting it happen.
You let him stay the night after the two of you accompany the boys to a birthday party turned sleepover (not that you ever let the boys sleep over at someone else’s house, but you let them stay over until later than usual) and the two of you were just exhausted. Even John looks beat, and you know he’s used to going days and weeks without sleeping properly in the military.
And maybe you feel something ache in you when you thought about him going back to his apartment, all alone in the middle of the night. Quiet except for the sounds of the city outside. Sometimes it does keep you up at night, that he lets you stay in the house with the boys and he was the one that got an apartment after you separated. He could’ve easily insisted on selling the house, but he knew how much you loved this house.
So you let him stay the night. And he looks exhausted before you extend the offer, but that only lasts until he has the two of you tucked away in the master bedroom (your old bedroom, where the two of you used to sleep together when he lived here) after putting the boys to bed. He must not have gotten that the invitation to sleep over meant that he would take the couch.
John seems to remember your old bedtime routine quite well. You’re still so sleepy, so you let him turn you onto your belly and hoist your hips up. He opens you up on a couple thick fingers that have you gripping the bed sheets and muffling your moans into the mattress lest the boys hear. When he finally sinks into your heat, it makes your vision go white. It’s been so long. It’s only ever been John, but it’s been a while since you last did this and the stretch is as decadent as ever. He says he’s going to make a mess inside of you; that this is his job, where he’s meant to be, that he’ll give you another baby if that’s what it takes.
You can’t even find the words to answer him. Even if you could, he presses you down against the bed with a hand flat on your head.
He still insists on holding hands when you fuck. Always missionary with deep eye contact.
“I know, I know, big breath, darling,” John rumbles. “Such a good girl, taking me so well. Right there, sweetheart? That feel good?”
"John—" you gasp, body going taut with the impending rush of your orgasm. "John, please—"
"C"mon, darling, I"ve got you."
You’re all ruffled and sleep-addled the next morning. Fuzzy around the edges, like you usually are after sex. It only agitates you a little to find your ex-husband in top spirits in the kitchen, fussing over the boys and handing you your coffee, reeling you in with a hand on the back of your nape to press a kiss to the top of your head.
“Sleep well?” he asks, not bothering to hide the smug edge to his voice.
When you flick his nose, his booming laughter nearly shakes the memories out of the house.
Hand covering your eyes to shield you from the sun. You watch him park his car in front of the house and step out, the sight of his big, thick body already flooding you with something indescribable.
John always looks like he just stepped out of your loftiest daydreams, cargo pants stitched tight around his legs and cotton button-up left open over a plain shirt. That same boonie hat that he’s worn your entire relationship. He was probably born in it. The wrinkles on his forehead are ever-present now, not like a decade ago. Strange how everything changes so suddenly.
When he reaches you, you don’t even have it in you to voice a complaint when his hands sink into your hair, slotting his lips against yours and kissing you hot and wet.
“What’s the pretext for coming over this time?” you wonder aloud, smile half-slipping out.
His own smile is fond. “Don’t the boys have football practice?”
“That’s Thursday and—oh, don’t even try it, John, I know you already know that,” you scold, taking a step back to pick up the trowel and bag of soil. He laughs and pries the bag from your hands, holding it aloft with less of a strain that you had earlier. You let him take it—what’s the bother in putting your ex to use?
“Well, since I’m here, don’t suppose I can stay for supper?”
You scrunch up your nose. “Don’t know. My boyfriend’s supposed to come round in about an hour. Can’t have the ex hanging around the house—might spoil the mood.”
John follows you around back to the shed with the bag heaved up onto a broad shoulder, his chuckle darker now. “Oh, boyfriend, huh? Where’d you get one of those?”
“Hung around Home Depot looking confused.”
“Ah, can’t have been that. Those are my old stomping grounds—sure I would’ve seen you if you’d been there.”
Flirting takes on a whole new meaning when you’re divorced and covered in sweat and dirt. Your hair is matted almost flat to your head and frizzy from the humidity, the pits of your shirt damp with sweat. You likely smell positively ripe after being out in the sun for a few hours, but still John leans close to you like he’s a magnet of opposite polarity and there’s nothing he can do but fall farther and farther into you.
“Why’d you come? For real, John.”
“What? Now I’m not allowed to see my wife?”
That makes you wince and look off to the side. “Not your wife anymore, John. Divorced. Remember?”
He helps you load the flower pots and garden tools back into the shed before locking it up for the night. “Sure.”
“Sure?”
“Whatever you say, sweetheart,” he says with a smile that, on a bad day, you might’ve interpreted as patronising. In the golden light of midafternoon, you see it for what it is: enamoured.
“It’s not just whatever I say,” you mutter, prickled. “It’s the truth.”
He catches you wince when you pull your gardening gloves off, frowning at the look on your face. “What’s that? D’you hurt yourself?”
You show him where you accidentally cut yourself while tending to the garden.
“Darling, how’d you do this?” John murmurs, taking your hand into his and turning it over. A delicate, precious moment spoiled by the way your heart hiccups in your chest. Shy all over again.
“Forgot to put on gloves before I started planting,” you whisper back, all hushed and soft.
“Well, come on, let’s deal with inside, alright?” He flicks you in between the eyes, then lets his thumb caress down your nose. “Shouldn’t have to tell you that, should I?”
In the bathroom, he puts a bandaid on your hand and then cups your cheeks, leaning his forehead against yours to softly murmur, “Better now, pumpkin?”
You’re taken aback, staggered, left reeling when he plants the tenderest kiss on your lips. He"s only supposed to be here for the kids, not you. This is where it might all collapse in on itself like a house of cards. The tenderness in the mundane. Kissing you over a gardening injury.
He stays over for supper yet again. The boys crowd around him when the school bus drops them off in front of the house, hollering at the tops of their lungs. It’s been a few days since they last saw him, the government keeping John busy as usual. It is always painful, always bitterly sweet to watch their tiny bodies launch themselves at John’s legs, their backpacks almost half the size of them.
After dinner, your sons convince John to tell them a bedtime story, some half-true, half-fabricated military story that has them on the edge of their seats. It almost riles them up enough to push the exhaustion away, but John makes them pinky promise to try to fall asleep.
“Don’t you blame me for it?”
Downstairs now, in the solarium. Outside the windows, the world is near pitch black apart from the slight glow from the windows in the houses on the other side of the laneway.
“Never,” John says so adamantly, so quickly that it stuns you. “What for, though?”
That stings worse than if he’d said yes. His immediate refusal to cast aspersions on you, to blame you for any of this. It is your fault though.
“The boys hate me.” It hurts so much to say it. Your eyes well up under the weight of it, lips prickling like the words themselves eat away at the enzymes. “I don’t want to do this anymore, but it’s all wrong. I don’t know how to fix this.”
At that, he drags his chair closer to you and reaches over to heave you into his lap, the air rushing out of you at the show of strength. A big hand palms your cheek and makes you look up into his eyes, which are suddenly more serious than you’ve seen them in a long time. Spellbound.
“None of that now,” he says, hand holding you in place when you try to look away. “The boys don’t hate you. I don’t hate you. You’re doing something harder than I could do. All of the hard stuff gets put on you and it’s not your fault. We knew this was never going to be easy. You’re just doing what you have to do.”
“I don’t know if it was the right thing to do though.” The tears come heavy when they come. “I thought it was. I thought it would be easier this way than the alternative.”
“Bouncing all over the place and then seeing Simon at the door one day?”
“Don’t say it like that,” you whisper, nose already congested. You know from experience that you only have a few minutes before it starts leaking and you’ll need to peel yourself off John’s lap to go find a tissue.
“We’ll figure it out, honey. There’s no right or wrong answer, just whatever we want to do.”
The surface levels off. Some days, you want to come apart like a steady stream of air. It is something nearly unbearable to withstand and yet, you must, if you are to continue moving in approximation to the shuddering echo of you (like glass beneath the sea).
What good can come from emptying yourself of it?
Several things come to mind: a garden, a gourd, a grain in the wood you spotted one day when the house was quiet for the first time in weeks and outside the window John was raking leaves into large orange bags and—
Even now, the flannel hanging over the windows is pulled back, but it is as if the leaves can take all this, this seed of memory you hold like trembling and simply come apart; simply move back into place.
Outside, your husband plays with your sons in the leaves, throwing one screaming-laughing into the tidy pile so that it bursts open with his weight. The other tugs on his sleeve. When John catches your eye through the window, he gestures for you to come out.
The chair scrapes across the floor as you stand up.