Chapter 7 Nipple Shrinkage
Nipple Shrinkage
Aaron
I closed my email app early the next morning, and a wave of relief swept over me as I counted the weeks since the last message.
Outside was quiet and still. For the first time in months, I was too.
And although it was bitterly cold up here at Moose Lake, nestled inside the cabin with Nadine, away from the rest of the world, I was warmer than I’d been in months.
Hearing the bedroom door creak, I looked up and smiled at the sight of my sleepy wife wandering into the hall.
A closer look caused my smile to fall away. The stiff set of her shoulders betrayed a tension I’d only seen in her once before. Whatever progress we’d made the night before had dissipated.
I didn’t like it.
Knowing I was the probable cause made me like it even less.
“Good morning, baby,” I murmured. “I made coffee.”
She smiled wanly and dipped her chin as she turned to the kitchen.
Grabbing her wrist as she moved past me, I tugged her to an abrupt stop and cupped my hands over her shoulders, pushing them down, easing the tension from her frame. “The last time I saw you in this state we were pregnant with Thalia.”
She winced as her eyes flicked up to mine. “Sometimes I worry I trapped you.”
My eyebrows shot off my face. “Trapped me? What are you talking about? You didn’t trap me.”
“You were so young—”
“We both were,” I interrupted.
She held up a palm. “You don’t need to defend me from myself, Aaron. You were a teenager when we got pregnant. A teenager! And you were tied down with a wife and child by the time you were twenty.”
“If I remember correctly, and I do, it was me who asked you to keep the baby and take a chance on me. And you had just turned 21 when we had Thalia.”
She grimaced. “I hate it that I thought about terminating for even a minute. I can’t imagine a life without her in it.”
“You wouldn’t have known any different,” I replied gently. “It was a difficult decision that wasn’t made any easier by everything that was happening at the time with your parents and my grandfather.” I paused, my hand slipping down to weave my fingers through hers.
My grandfather took every opportunity to punish my mother for being a single mother. Being friends with Nadine’s father, he was also instrumental in antagonizing Nadine’s home life until she moved in with me.
Those scars ran deep.
I tugged on her hand. “Getting married was never about Boomer for me. Never. It was always about you. It will always be about you. I have no regrets. Do you?”
Her throat worked convulsively as she swallowed hard. Tears balanced on the curve of her bottom lid while I held my breath. “No. I have no regrets. I have loved you since I was seventeen years old, and I love you still.”
I searched her eyes. “So, the separation? That’s because of how things have been recently? It’s not something you want?”
She nodded shortly. “I didn’t understand what was happening.
I still don’t. And I’ve been feeling so off, you haven’t touched me, I’m dry and sore and I don’t even want to have sex anymore.
I can’t sleep, my…nipples are shrinking…
” The corners of her mouth tugged down as she swiped her finger beneath her nose.
I stopped short.
Her nipples are shrinking?
What the fuck?
“Nadine,” I ventured gently, cursing myself for my lack of attention the night before. “I’m so sorry I missed all this. Come,” I tugged her gently toward the couch. Coffee could wait. “I want to hear what’s going on. What do you mean your nipples are shrinking?”
She laughed wetly and padded along beside me. “Figures that’s the part you latched onto.”
“Speaking of latching…” I wagged my brows and garnered another laugh from her.
Her garbled giggle sent a pang of regret through my heart.
My sweet wife had been suffering and I, wrapped up in things I couldn’t change, missed it. Sitting down in the corner of the couch, I pulled her onto my lap.
Offering a half-hearted resistance, she protested, “I’m too heavy.”
I scoffed. “You will never be too heavy to sit on my lap.”
Before we got pregnant with Thalia, Nadine had been shy and undemonstrative, especially in public.
With all the emotional upheaval surrounding Thalia’s impending entrance into the world, she craved closeness, grounded in proximity to me just as I was with her.
If she wasn’t pressed up beside me in those days, she was in my lap.
She was my anchor. My true north. My purpose and direction.
She always would be.
Tucking her head under my chin, I prodded, “Tell me. Tell me what’s going on with my nipples.”
She snorted. “I missed a couple of periods.”
I froze, then laughed at the thought we’d been caught out twice. Something suspiciously close to joy erupted in my heart. “Are you telling me you might be pregnant?”
“No!” The single word broke on a sob. She threw out her hand.
“It’s over. It’s all over. My sex drive is in the toilet.
I haven’t even touched myself and you know how much I like orgasms!
My kitty is dry and sore…I need lubricant,” she spat out the offensive syllables.
“All the time, Aaron! I haven’t had a period in three months, which I used to think would be great, but it’s not because I’m crying all the time, and I don’t even like plants all that much.
You know? The kids don’t need me, you don’t want me, I don’t even want me,” she sputtered with a watery gasp.
“Menopause?” I asked, my laggy brain struggling to make sense of her flood of emotions. “Is this about menopause?”
“Yes!” She struggled to get up, but I tucked her back in.
“Stay,” I urged as I cuddled her close. “Stay here with me.”
“Kay,” she murmured brokenly, settling back against me as she continued.
“I’m not sleeping well. I’m overtired. My brain is whirring all the time.
I feel like my life is over. We had the best sex life and now it’s over.
” Her hand fisted in my shirt. “I don’t know what I want or even who I am anymore. ”
I rubbed slow, steady, circles over her back.
She continued quietly, her voice a mere murmur. “And I don’t feel like I know you anymore, either.”
I drew in a deep breath, knowing I could not spill all over her in the condition she was in. The sense of relief brought me low, my opinion of myself sinking by the day. Still, I could tell her something.
“There have been a few issues at work. I’ll tell you about it but first I want to hear more about what you’re going through. I know we haven’t been having sex much, but I thought it was because you were grieving.”
She wiped her cheeks with her free hand. “It’s just menopause.”
“It sounds horrible,” I admitted.
Pressing her cheek against my chest, she nodded. “It is. It really is.”
“Have you gone to the doctor?”
“Yes. She said just to monitor my symptoms.”
“There’s nothing they can do to help?”
“I can look into Hormone Replacement Therapy.”
“And?”
“And she suggested I give myself some grace, lower my expectations for a while until my hormones level out, and try to add joy to my life.”
“What about counselling?”
“I told her my husband is a therapist.”
I chuckled. “Not with me. With someone who you can talk to freely.” I squeezed her gently. “Someone you can vent to about me if necessary.”
“I’ll think about it.”
“And the plants?”
She barked out a short, self-deprecating, laugh. “Carlos is going to fire me.”
I chuckled. “Carlos is not going to fire you. He loves you too much. Besides, you keep an eye on him for Vera. She won’t let him fire you.”
She stilled in my arms. “Does Vera keep an eye on you?”
I froze. Had word of Lynda’s infatuation made its way back to my wife?
“She does,” I answered carefully. My heart thumped in my chest. If I didn’t take this opening, she’d never forgive me. And she’d be right. “And it’s been appreciated.”
She stiffened further. “What do you mean?”
I swallowed my trepidation. “Do you remember Lynda?”
She drew back to look at me, her eyebrows raised. “Lynda from the staff barbecue? The one whose son you helped?”
“Did she tell you about her son?”
“She did. She sat with me for an hour, said you were a godsend.”
“Hm.” Would this make it better or worse?
“What happened?”
“She told me she was in love with me.”
Nadine struggled to get up. This time, knowing better, I let her go.
“What?” she clipped, her eyes narrowing on my face.
“About six months ago—”
“Six months?”
“Yes,” I answered drily. The confession was long overdue. “Around the same time your mother passed away, she started behaving differently. I didn’t want to burden you and thought I’d dealt with it.”
“What exactly did you do about it?” she challenged, her eyebrows snapping together.
“I told her I expected abject professionalism in the workplace. Explained it wasn’t uncommon to develop feelings when someone helped you through a rough spot. And referred her to Max.”
Nadine’s narrowed gaze never left mine. “Behaving differently? What exactly did she do to make you say that? Did she go to Max?”
“I told Max he needed to talk to her and why. We thought it was handled, then two months ago she came to me and denied it was gratitude she was feeling, and insisted she loved me.”
Red blotches suffused Nadine’s pretty face. “I’m going to fucking kill her.”
Alarmed, I sat forward and tried to draw her back into my arms, but she slapped my hands away. “No, Aaron, just, no. What exactly was she doing? Tell me.”
I held out my palms. “Okay—”
“Were you ever alone with her?”
“Just the one time—”
Her countenance darkened ominously. “What do you mean ‘just the one time’?”
“The day she made her confession, we were in my office. I marched her back out and directly to Max. We both talked to her, then I left her to him.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?” Her eyebrows rose. “Does Vera know?”
I winced. Vera was like a second mother to her.
Incredulous, her voice rose. “Does Wren know?”
I shook my head. “No. Mom doesn’t know. I made sure Max didn’t tell her because I didn’t want you upset when you were already grieving. There was no way Mom would keep that from you.” I chuckled. “She would have stormed the office and ground her into minced meat.”
Her posture relaxed slightly, but I could tell Vera’s perceived betrayal stung. “But Vera knew.”
I nodded carefully. “It would have been hard for her to miss. I did ask her to monitor the situation from her end and notify Max of anything we needed to know.”
“Why didn’t she tell me?”
“She knows how hard this past year has been…”
She shook her head sharply. “There’s a girl code, Aaron. You don’t stay quiet when some whore-cunt is trying to take your friend’s man.”
Whore-cunt?
I bit my lip. Nadine would be horrified later that the ‘c-word’ slipped from her mouth. It would not do to laugh.
I met her lethal gaze and immediately sobered.
No, it would not do to laugh, not at all.
Instead, I sought to reassure her. “No one on earth has ever had a snowball’s chance in hell of taking your man and no one ever will.”
She gritted her teeth and clenched her fists in her lap. “I want to kill her. Snatch her bald-headed.” Her eyes snapped as she leaned toward me. “I want to punch her in her fat, ugly, face.”
“We fired her.”
Surprise knocked some of the stuffing out of her. “She’s gone?”
I nodded. “She will be by the time I get back to work.”
“That’s why you’re off.”
“That’s why I’m off.”
“She did something else?”
“She came into my office again, so Max followed though on the plan we’d come up with and gave her two weeks notice.”
“Good. You should have done it sooner…”
“We were trying to avoid it. She’s a single mom—”
Her glare stoppered the rest of my sentence. “I don’t give two shits if she’s a single mom. You don’t do that! Fuck her. And fuck you if her feelings mean more to you than mine.”
Nadine never lost her temper. Never.
“You’re absolutely right.”
“She had this much of an effect on you?” She yelled, incredulous. “This situation made you treat me like this for all these months?”
Now was the time, the perfect opportunity. I swallowed hard, met her eyes, and opened my mouth.
Then swallowed the most bitter of words.
Instead, I blurted, “I’m not happy at work. I haven’t been for a long time.”
This was true, at least.
She stared at me slack jawed. “You’re unhappy other than the Lynda situation? But I thought you loved your job?”
I shook my head. “Not so much anymore.”
“What do you want to do?”
She still looked suspicious but settled back somewhat stiffly against me.
I rubbed her back, easing her closer. “I don’t know. I worked so hard, wanted so badly to make a difference—” I cut myself off, dangerously close to a cliff I wasn’t ready to throw myself off. “I feel guilty about leaving a position that provides desperately needed support to so many.”
Cupping my face, she leaned closer and pressed her forehead to mine. “Your needs are important, too, baby. You matter.”
I pressed my lips to her hair.
There were things I wanted, but I had only one need.
Her.