Page 6 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’spartof 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…somethingcouldhappen 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’sbreaking myheart.”

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 sadhelooked.

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

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

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