14. 14
14
Tilly
“ W hat are you watching?” Jordan asks. She stands in the living room—
She’s standing exactly where I was standing four nights ago when Dexter made me come with his mouth.
It’s thoughts like that, that flit through my mind and make it very difficult to concentrate.
I pat the seat on the couch beside me. “Come sit.” Because it’s not comfortable to be talking to my daughter standing there while images of Dexter flash through my mind.
Jordan curls up beside me. It’s Monday night and the first day of school is tomorrow. I can tell Jordan is nervous about starting high school because she’s my daughter and she gets nervous about everything.
I tell myself that’s the reason I haven’t texted Dexter, but that’s not the full truth. I have been focusing on the girls, doing some last-minute back-to-school shopping, but I had time to contact him at night when they went to bed.
I don’t know why I haven’t, and with each day I wait, it makes it more difficult. And what would I say to him, anyway? Hey, I really liked how you fucked me. Want to do it again?
It had been just sex. Good sex—amazing, incredible, possibly best sex of my life—but just sex.
I think it might be how good it had been is what is stopping me from calling. Because what happens if the next time is better? What would that mean?
I’m not sure I have the energy to figure out what things mean. To navigate dating. Relationships are complicated at any age, but especially when you’re forty-five and have two teenage daughters who can smell an excuse a mile away.
But Dexter isn’t looking for a relationship. It was just sex with him, and why wouldn’t it be? He’s smart and sexy and young . Why would he ever be interested in a relationship with someone like me?
But what if he was ?
That little voice, with the big question, has kept me from texting him.
“Return of the King.” I point at the screen. “Classic epic tale about good versus evil.”
“I know, Mom. I’ve seen it.”
“Yes, but you’ve never sat down and watched it all the way through with me. All eleven hours.”
Jordan looks horrified. “This movie is eleven hours long?”
I smile. “Three movies, plus the three Hobbit movies.”
My smile widens as Jordan takes the seat beside me, leaning in to scoop a handful of popcorn from the bowl on my lap.
I ordered pizza for dinner, and then Jade went out with her friends, and Jordan escaped to her room. They have become comfortable here, but it’s not their home yet. Carlos kept the house—something I will always regret. That was my house—I took care of it as much as I took care of the girls. I gave up a career to look after my family, only to be replaced when Carlos found someone younger. Sexier. Prettier.
I left when I found out about the affair, and I took the girls. I cowered in a too-small apartment for three months while I figured out how to stifle my hurt and anger so the girls wouldn’t think their mother was falling apart.
I didn’t fall apart—only a little at the beginning. And I think that showed more about the status of my marriage than anything Carlos did.
As soon as I moved out, Carlos had moved in with his girlfriend. I knew Heidi; she was a yoga instructor. My yoga instructor. I had introduced them, taking Carlos to an introductory couples class as a way to find something we could do together.
It was such a sad cliché.
The girls, to my utter surprise, handled it well. I think it had a lot to do with my acting abilities. How I made it seem like the split was mutual. Or it could be that they’ve repressed their feelings about it, and it will show up later in life.
I’ll be watching for that.
But in the meantime, I’m grateful that they are so well-adjusted that I have the opportunity to watch a movie with my fourteen-year-old without dealing with anger and depression or even sulky moods.
It’s enough to have to deal with my own.
I sit with my daughter and eat popcorn as we watch Pippin cower beside Gandalf, waiting for Gondor to be overrun by Orcs. “Dad doesn’t like this movie,” Jordan says out of nowhere.
Dad doesn’t like anything. But I vowed not to let my bitterness and hurt affect the girls’ relationship with their father. They see too much as it is, but I won’t be the one who taints them. “He says it was too unrealistic,” I explain. “Your father likes facts and truths and things he can understand.”
Except for our marriage. He never understood how much I gave up for him, even my identity.
But there’s no sense thinking about this now. It only leads to bitterness and resentment, and I’ve had enough of both.
“Got everything ready for school tomorrow?” I lift my arm so Jordan can tuck herself against me. She hums her response. “You nervous?”
Carlos thinks we shouldn’t focus on Jordan’s anxiety; if we ignore it, it will go away. But I don’t think it works like that, and I know Jordan always feels better after talking about her feelings.
“How did you do it?” she asks instead of answering. “You started university last year, all by yourself and you were…” she trails off.
“Old?” I offer.
“You’re not old.”
“I’m older than most of the other students. And I’m not going to lie—it was tough. But I was happy to get the opportunity to study subjects that interest me.”
“Are you telling me to be happy that I get the opportunity to study math?”
“No.” I laugh. “Unless you really like math. What are you happy about studying?”
“Nothing.”
“There has to be something,” I urge. “What about just starting school? What are you looking forward to?”
“Nothing. That’s the problem.”
“What about getting a locker? And going to Starbucks at lunch without having to ask permission?”
“I can?”
“You and Maddy can go to the park to eat lunch, too.”
“Good, because the cafeteria sounds scary.”
“Cafeterias scare me, too.”
I’ve seen the movie enough times to be able to hold a conversation with Jordan but I do point out a few things—the character of Eowyn, Merry overcoming his fear, how attractive Legolas is, despite never laughing once in the all the movies, to her.
I like to laugh. Carlos rarely made me laugh. I think Dexter—
And he’s back.
Four days of him slipping into my thoughts as easily as the sun rises in the morning. Which I had been awake for this morning, same as yesterday.
No one told me that having sex for the first time in over two years would mean I couldn’t sleep. I wake up in the middle of the night and it feels like Dexter is with me. I changed my sheets yesterday because I could still smell him.
He smelled… good. I thought fresh sheets would stop me from thinking about him, but nothing seemed to work.
Talking to Jordan is good.
“Do you have everything you need for the week at your father’s?”
Talking about Carlos works as well. Except when I can’t stop myself from comparing Carlos with Dexter and—
It was one night. Even my internal voice is getting frustrated with how I can’t stop thinking about Dexter.
“Are you lonely when we’re not here?” Jordan surprises me by asking.
“Not really, no,” I tell her, even though I was miserable when Carlos suggested he keep them during the week to make it easier for the girls to be closer to school. Now missing them has settled into a dull ache, like the phantom pain of missing your hand if it gets cut off. I miss them desperately, but I can survive without them. “I keep busy. I miss you, though. I miss you every day.”
“I miss you, too.”
“Are you okay being at your father’s?”
“It’s fine, and the school is close. Heidi is only a little annoying.”
“She’s annoying?” Why does that make me so happy to hear?
“A little. I don’t like seeing Dad being all gross and sweet with her because he wasn’t like that to you.”
“Gross and sweet don’t really go together.”
“You know. He’s sweet to her, and it’s gross.”
Was Carlos ever sweet to me? Maybe at the beginning. He was a good husband for most of our marriage, and always a good father. I don’t like to think of how that good husband could betray me like that, because that makes me angry and my therapist told me there’s no sense creating anger in myself.
Dexter left me a note. That was sweet.
I need to get him out of my mind. I made up my mind not to text him, to let this stay where it belongs—as a fun night. It got me back to thinking of myself as a woman, let me feel things that I thought I lost. But it was one night.
I don’t think I’m ready for more.
“I’m okay with your dad being happy with Heidi,” I admit to Jordan. “He’s changed and maybe he thinks being sweet is what she wants.”
“Didn’t you want him to be sweet?”
I walked right into that one. “I had a different relationship with him than he does with Heidi. So I can’t really compare it because he is a different person now.”
“I wish he was sweet to you.”
“He didn’t need to be because you’re sweet to me. You and your sister.”
“Jade is not sweet. Do you know what she said to me?” As I listen to Jordan’s sisterly complaints, I can’t help but think of how Dexter was sweet to me.
And it was very nice.