Chapter 4
Fred
Church is over, but I wait behind to speak with the pastor.
As the sanctuary empties around me, she crosses my mind.
I look at the wooden bench beside me, staring at the empty space where she would have been seated if she had come along with me.
I pull out my phone, scrolling through the gallery to find her pictures, letting my eyes linger on her beautiful smile.
A wave of fondness washes over me, and my thumbs fly across the screen, eagerly opening the location tracker we installed together.
I smile, happy and anticipating the dot that will tell me she is safely resting back at our house.
“I hope she’s home,” I mutter under my breath.
The screen loads, and my focus freezes on the map.
The breath catches in my throat. I blink, staring at the coordinates because my brain completely refuses to process the data flashing against the glass.
I cannot believe it. I zoom in closer, my fingers trembling as the street names become legible, until eventually, the truth is laid bare.
She is at a hotel.
It feels as though the walls inside the sanctuary have suddenly gone perfectly still. I swallow hard against a dry throat, dropping the phone into my pocket as I rub my palms together over and over again, trying to generate some sort of warmth.
I bow my head, trying my best to push the images away, to think nothing of it. “I trust my wife,” I whisper to the empty pews.
But the silence only feeds the doubt. What if she went there to see someone else?
I nod into the dim light, a moisture stinging my eyes.
If she does... if she goes through with whatever it is, I will just act like I know nothing.
Even as the thought forms in my head, it feels as though my heart is being chewed on.
I blow a harsh breath from my lips, forcing my chest to slow down as my breathing grows erratic, coming out in fast, ragged gaps.
If she does whatever she wants, I’ll just pray for her soul. Then I’ll act like I’m not aware, just so she doesn’t leave.
The desperation of my own logic vexes me.
I blink back the tears that threaten to expose my thoughts to the public.
As I sit there trying to steady the sudden panic, the quiet of the building fractures slightly.
I can hear the distant mutter of voices from the remaining churchgoers echoing near the exit, their faint murmurs reminding me of the world moving outside my crisis.
Trying to stabilize the pressure, my left hand moves down, my fingers touching the fabric of my shirt over the left side of my abdomen. The pain from the past comes up fresh and raw in my mind.
“Anointed Fred,” a voice calls out.
I immediately force my lips into a smile, lifting my head to mask the turmoil. “Pastor John,” I say, standing up to wrap my arms around his shoulders in a brief hug.
“The Lord be with you, brother,” he says, sliding onto the bench beside me, occupying the space where I had just imagined Ana. He glances at my phone resting on the wood. “So... trouble in paradise?”
A dry, hollow laugh escapes my throat. “You could say that.”
“Brother Fred,” Martha calls out as she passes our row. I give her a tight nod. “Martha.” She offers a brief nod to the pastor beside me and continues down the aisle.
Once she is out of earshot, I look at my friend, dropping every formal, religious honorific. “I want to tell her, John.”
He turns his head, studying my face. “Which?”
“All of them,” I say. I swallow, a sudden dryness itching my throat as the magnitude of the intention hits me. “But I am scared.”
“That is valid,” he says softly.
I nod, my eyes tracking the light filtering through the stained glass. “She told me she wants to be intimate with me, John. You cannot imagine how happy I was when I heard the words leave her mouth.” A breathy, watery laugh breaks from my chest. “But I can’t.”
The first tear overflows my lashes, tracing a hot path down my cheek. I reach up, using my thumb and index finger to rub at my eyes, desperately trying to lock the emotion back down.
“What if she leaves, John?”
He moves his hand, patting my shoulder to steady me.
“Jesus,” I murmur, licking my dry lips. I can already feel my stomach quaking from the weight of the panic.
I lift my head, looking him square in the eyes.
“What if she leaves, John? I love her.” I pronounce each syllable with all the strength left in my lungs.
“She says she loves me, too... but so did Mom. So did Celeste.”
My voice cracks on the names, the old betrayal tasting like ash in my throat. “And they left. They ran away from me.”
John stays silent. What does he have to say anyway? There are no easy words for a ghost that haunts a marriage. He just sits there, leaving the two of us staring at each other in the empty sanctuary.
“Have you prayed to God about this, Fred?” he asks eventually.
“I pray to Him every day,” I whisper, my fingers tightening against my knees. “But it seems the devil keeps using my fear to make me think different things.”
“Things like what, Fred?”
“Each time the fear creeps in, I look for a justification. I look for any scriptural excuse to justify not being intimate with my wife.”
“Mmm,” John groans, nodding slowly.
“But when I see her,” I confess, the raw yearning spilling past my teeth, “I think about all the things I wish I could do to her. Sometimes... I undress her in my mind.”
He lets out a sudden laugh, followed by a short cough as he tries to compose himself. “She’s your wife, Fred. It is fine to think that way about her.”
“I feel torn every single time I look at her face,” I say, the frustration making my voice rise, bouncing off the rafters.
“I have all these thoughts, but I can’t act on them.
Instead, I subject her to staying in the dark, forcing her to keep her hands to herself while I just push my seed into her. ”
I stop, checking over my shoulder as the volume of my voice alarms me, but the sanctuary is vacant now; everyone has left. I drop my head into my palms. “At this point, I think I should just let her go.”
“No. No, no. That’s the fear talking, Fred,” John says firmly. He shifts his weight, turning his body so he faces me directly. “Tell me, what is the worst that could happen?”
“She leaves.”
He nods. “And what is the best that can happen?”
The possibility of something positive has crossed my mind before, but I never let the thought linger. I always assumed it was best to think on the negative side of things to reduce the weight of disappointment.
“I’ll tell you what Second Timothy one, verse seven says,” John continues, his eyes locking onto mine. “I know you know the words, but I want you to listen as if you are hearing them for the very first time. For God has not given us a spirit of fear, but of power and of love and of a sound mind.”
I give a slow nod, the scripture familiar but hitting a different nerve today.
“You need to set yourself free from what the devil keeps using as a tool to hinder you from the bliss of your marriage,” John says, his hand squeezing my shoulder. “Don’t submit yourself to the panic. Yes, it happened before. And so?”
I look at him and shake my head. He has told me this a hundred times before, but the words have never quite given me the courage to break the lock on my chest.
He looks at me, his expression softening into something absolute. “I think God wants you to do this now, Fred. You’ve lived in this insecurity for far too long.”
***
With his words echoing behind my eyes, I drive back to the house, pulling into the driveway long before the clock strikes six. She isn’t home yet. I reach into my pocket for my keys, but the spare is locked inside the kitchen drawer, leaving me to sit alone in the car.
As I lean my head back against the leather seat, the stillness drags my mind back to the afternoon my mother left.
I had just recovered from an infected surgery scar.
I was disgusted with my own body, with the ruined terrain where a dog had bitten me years prior.
It hadn't been a simple wound; the dog had bitten out a huge chunk of my flesh right from the left side of my abdomen.
It left behind an indentation that looked like a disgusting hole, a crater in my skin that stopped just short of reaching my actual inner organs.
Even now, the surrounding tissue holds the distinct, uneven bite marks, a mottled combination of dark purple and deep pink that never faded.
The subsequent infection had made the healing process worse, ensuring the skin puckered unnaturally.
I remember the friction of her suitcase wheels rolling across the floorboards toward the front door.
I stepped into the hallway, shirtless, trying to block her path, trying to beg her to stay.
She stopped, her eyes dropping to my stomach.
A flash of pure disgust crossed her features as she stared at the crater.
“Don’t be like your father,” she said, her voice dropping as she looked past my shoulder toward the living room where my dad used to sit.
“Make sure when you are married, you have some self-restraint. Women love a man who has self-restraint—especially for one who claims to be anointed, or a man of God.”
She looked back at my belly one last time, her lips curling before she let out a broken cry. “I’m sorry.”
Years later, after a string of therapy sessions that didn’t do anything to heal the wound, I called her and asked why she said those words.
“I felt bad, Fred,” her voice had carried over the receiver, sounding distant and small. “I felt bad because I knew no one was ever going to be able to look at that disgusting scar and enjoy an intimate moment with you. And I felt like it was my fault.”
The explanation was supposed to heal me, but it only made the wall thicker.
I never went shirtless in my own house again.
Even when I am in the master bedroom, there is always a constant layer of clothing covering it, or a patch over the skin.
Whenever Ana asked about the binding, I would always brush it off, telling her it was just a small scar.
I wish it was.
The loud, piercing blare of a car horn shatters the memory, pulling me out of the deep fog of my thoughts.
My wife is here.
I watch through the windshield as she steers her car into the driveway, cutting the ignition.
The headlights snap off, returning the yard to shadow, but like me, she remains frozen behind the wheel, making no move to step out.
My brain travels through a dozen different scenarios, trying to think for her.
What if she is sitting there thinking about how to divorce me? I think to myself, a cold knot tightening in my stomach. What if she is trying to figure out how to tell me she just came from a hotel room with another man?
I shake my head roughly, trying to drive the toxic thoughts out of my mind.
I watch her profile through the glass until she finally opens her door and steps out onto the gravel. She walks toward my side of the car, her movements hesitant. I roll down the window, the cool evening air rushing into the cabin.
Our eyes meet in the dim light. Her eyelids are swollen, her eyes strikingly red from crying.
I force my lips to curve into a small smile. A sad smile.
“We are both a mess,” I say, my voice rough and breaking in the stillness.
She looks down at me, her lower lip trembling slightly before she forces her posture to steady. “We need to talk.”