Chapter 11
Eight-thirty a.m., bleary-eyed and caffeine-dependent as we climbed out of Detroit into a beautiful spring sky.
Not bleary-eyed because of the time—eight-thirty was positively civilized by my recent standards—but bleary-eyed because of lack of sleep.
Sasha had finally appeared back home to make her ‘you really want me home tonight?’ offer at around one a.m. And let’s just say the five hours between that moment and waking for the airport weren’t my best ever hours of sleep.
And now I had five hours of flying time ahead of me before we touched down at LAX. Five hours of trying and failing to concentrate on my briefing notes for my upcoming meetings and plant visits. Five hours of trying and failing to put thoughts of the weekend behind me.
Strangely enough, it wasn’t the physical depravity—Sasha as sexual plaything for six horny young athletes—of what I’d seen that stuck most in my mind.
(Well, aside from that image of Sasha hyperventilating and clawing at Masho as he and Zain double-stuffed and stretched her to the limits.
That was an image that would never leave my mind.)
Aside from that image, much of the physical side of the weekend reminded me of that weekend three years ago when Sasha had been tricked into a weekend of being the plaything for her then boyfriend Andre and Jordan, his future brother-in-law who was blackmailing him so he’d get to sleep with Sasha.
No, strange as it may seem to anyone who has a normal, monogamous marriage, it wasn’t the physical side that kept troubling me. It was the emotional and psychological side that kept giving me jarring, troubling thoughts.
I kept thinking back to how Thomas had sidled up to me as we watched Sipho and Rambo fucking Sasha and, as cool you like, he calmly told me what he considered a blindly obvious plain truth.
‘She’s a permanently changed woman… whatever she promises, she can’t help herself… the best you can hope for is you find the right family-play balance… ain’t no way she’s gonna stop… you saw that with your own eyes…’
He’d not said it confrontationally or to hurt me—he’d said it like it was the most natural thing in the world.
His tone almost one of an earnest and concerned friend.
‘Hey man, the sooner you stop seeing your woman through rose-colored glasses, the better for you… don’t kid yourself man, it’ll only hurt more in the long-run… ’
And that was the trouble. However much my brain tried to argue with what my wife’s Black boyfriend had said, I knew deep down their was a huge element of truth.
Maybe I wasn't as black-and-white (no pun intended!) as he was. I kept a flame of hope that what she'd said about this being her 'end-of-phase' Kool-Aid was true.
But even with this flickering flame of hope, Thomas's words still troubled me. Because I knew his words carried a huge element of truth. And because they echoed so closely what Benson had said on that fateful night—that Sasha needed him, and that if I truly loved her, I’d let her choose rather than guilt her into staying with a man she might love but who could never physically satisfy her like he could.
And it wasn’t just Thomas’s words—or their echo of Benson’s—that kept coming back to me. However much I tried to focus on the words on my laptop screen, what Sasha had said on Saturday was never far from my mind.
‘I have a husband with a tiny white dick… a husband who prefers to watch me being fucked by strong, masculine black men than being the that strong, masculine man himself… that is, if he were capable…
‘Your not selfless, this has always been about your uncontrollable desire to see me fuck masculine black guys with big cocks…’
Hardly surprising such words stung so bad. At face value, hardly ‘new news’. Trash talk between her, her boyfriends and me had often strayed into these areas.
What stung and hurt so bad was the venom with which she’d spat these painful, hard truths. And not just spat them out with real anger—which was bad enough—but spat them out in front of a laughing audience of arrogant young teenagers.
All through the five hours of the flight, it was these twin conversations—rather than all the sex—that were like a constant throbbing drumbeat at the front of my skull.
By the time we finally started our descent into LAX, I didn’t know whether to feel fatalistic about the future of my marriage, or whether I needed to fight like hell in a battle that might well already be a foregone conclusion.
By the time I was walking up the jetway, I’d definitely decided on the ‘fight like hell’ solution. The trouble was I genuinely didn’t know what this meant and whether I’d left things too late.
The whole weekend—what Sasha and Thomas had said, how she’d spent her time—it all felt like a series of watershed moments.
Had I left things too late? And just what did ‘fight like hell’ look like?
Was Thomas right, that the best I could hope for was some kind of precarious and unstable balance between Sasha as mom and wife and Sasha as BBC addicted hotwife?
Was that the best I could hope for? A marriage and family with a Jenga-like level of stability?
And there was the twin problems of my continuing absence from home and the emotional bandwidth consumed by my newly senior role.
I still had another three weeks to go of the ‘meet and greet’ phase when I was a virtual visitor in my own home, only back for weekends. And even after that, I’d be near-permanently away three days a week.
At heart I was a ‘high-IQ, low-EQ’ techie.
Dealing with all the relationship side of my new role was bad enough.
But layer on top the needs of understanding where exactly Sasha and I were at and repairing what needed repairing…
well, I genuinely worried that the emotional burdens of the two together might be too much.
As the week progressed, I became more and more convinced that my realization on the plane was right: the previous weekend had indeed been some kind of watershed moment.
Why the certainty? I sensed it in a changed rhythm and structure to my evening calls home to Sasha. And in how she spoke and smiled during those calls.
To a technical mind like mine, some of the changes were demonstrable and factual. Across four calls home, Thomas was evident in only one—and even then there was no sex play, and after just a few minutes of chat he was gone, off-camera.
That much was fact, and it was hugely different from how the calls had been before he’d gone home for his friend’s wedding.
But what drove me crazy was not knowing why things had changed, and not knowing what happened after each call ended.
I knew Sasha was still on short-haul flights because the backdrop to every call was our home.
What I didn’t know was whether Thomas was still sleeping over every night.
And, to be honest, I didn’t have the courage to ask.
I kept telling myself I’d ask when I was back home and face-to-face with Sasha.
Partly, I took that coward’s way out because of how Sash seemed during our calls. I kept telling myself I was imagining it, but something almost imperceptible felt different.
When I’d dragged her out of bed for a pre-flight hug and kiss on Monday, she’d been too sleepy for me to tell whether anything was off or completely normal.
But now I was talking to fully awake Sasha, I thought I could detect a tiny remoteness and hesitancy—in her voice, in the way she smiled, and in what her always-expressive eyes seemed to be saying to me.
Trying to read micro-signals like that, it was impossible to be certain. Especially for someone like me, Mr. Techie-head. Give me an equation any day of the week—far easier to read than any woman I’ve ever been with.
She smiled… she laughed… there was definitely love and warmth there.
But I still couldn’t shake the feeling that something had shifted.
And not in a good way. I sensed a little more distance and hesitancy, a little less spontaneity and openness.
Almost as though she was hiding something, so that every time she said or did something, there was this tiny, microsecond pause before it came out.
Like I said, I couldn’t be sure about any of it. It was just a nagging feeling that refused to go away.
Just as I couldn’t be sure what happened with Thomas after our calls ended.
Which meant when Friday finally arrived and it was time to head home, I was one mighty happy camper when I finally opened the front door and saw Sasha sat alone in our living room re-reading one of her favorite books.
As we'd been at Honda's R&D center just ten miles from LAX, I'd hoped that our eight a.m. start would allow me to catch the noon flight and be home just after seven.
Fat chance! Extra topics on the agenda meant a late afternoon flight and me dragging my tired ass through the front door just past midnight.
Hardly a time to start profound and intense conversations!
Saturday morning, just woken, we were cuddled up in bed. I’d been downstairs and brought coffee, OJ and a light breakfast back to bed. Both of us awake and replenished enough, now was the time to raise the questions that had been troubling me all week.
“Sash, honey… can I talk to you about something?”
That got her attention, her eyes lifting from the croissant she was buttering as a guarded, almost anxious look appeared on her face.
“Sure, what’s up?”
“You and me… last weekend… I know we talked, put things right… but this week, every time I rang home… I couldn’t help but feel something had changed… like we’d passed over some kind of watershed last weekend…”
Sasha didn’t answer immediately.
A handful of moments, she still looked at me, but I could tell her mind had turned inward. Even though she tried to hide it, I could see the cogs whirring. My instinct telling me was wondering what I’d seen to cause such a question.
“Sweetheart, I’m really not sure what it is you think you saw, what you think changed during our calls. Can you help me understand?”