the door open and help her in. She looks tired.
Five minutes later and we’re on our way back to our apartment. It takes a good twenty minutes but tonight it’s going to be longer. The traffic is heavier than usual. I’m ducking in and out of lanes like a madman, but not without cost.
“How was work?” she asks me quietly.
“Okay,” I tell her. “But I had a visit from Chloe today.”
“Should I be jealous?”
“No,” I say defensively. “She wanted to apologise for last week.”
“For grabbing your...”
“Alright,” I say tersely, interrupting her. “Yes. But she and Wade set it up.”
“They were playing with you?”
“That’s right.”
“We’ll have to get them back.”
“No one is getting anyone back,” I tell her. “This will just go on forever and I’m never going to live down having her fondle my crotch.”
“But it is a nice crotch. I can’t really blame her.”
“After everything, is this really what you want to talk about?”
She shrugs. “I suppose not.”
Later, after dinner, we’re on our lounge, and I’m doing what I do most nights, rub her tied and swollen feet. I look up from the television to find her regarding me with an expression that I haven’t seen before. I don’t know what she’s thinking.
“Judd,” she says.
“Yes,” I say hesitantly.
“You’re pretty tense.”
“What?”
“With work and driving me around. You’re getting stressed.”
“I’m fine.”
“Maybe. But maybe you need to relax.”
I raise my brows. “What are you suggesting?”
She pulls her feet from my lap, stands and extends a hand for me to take. “Come with me,” she says.
I like where this is going, but I’m also aware that this will break our agreement. The closer we get to the bedroom the less I seem to care.
“Take off you shirt,” she says. I obey.
“What are we doing?” I ask her.
“Lie on the bed,” she commands, ignoring my question. “On your front.”
I obey. I’m lying there topless and unsure. She doesn’t say anything, she goes to the drawers on her side of the bed. I can’t see her, my face is turned the other way, but I can hear her moving things around. Then she gets onto the bed, I can feel it shift next to me. Then she is sitting on me, on my hips. Her thighs are on either side and her feet are next to my knees.
“What’s happening?” I ask her, but she leans down so that her lips are right behind my right ear.
“Shhhh,” she says. “Just relax.” But I can’t. The woman I love is sitting on me, I can feel her skin against mine. I can feel her breath in my ear. I can feel tingles at the base of my spine.
I feel liquid on my back. She puts her hands onto where a puddle has formed, spreading it out. It warms by her touch. She spreads it out over my back and up to my shoulders and back down again. Then she starts to press deeper, harder into my flesh. She works my shoulders, into the blades and then down my spine, lower and lower, then back up and she starts all over again.
I groan. I’m in heaven. Her touch is electric and soothing all at once and my body responds as it should. I can feel her fingers rubbing, probing, looking for spots of tenderness and tenseness.
She leans down again and whispers to me.
“You always feel it... here,” she says, and her fingers have found the worst of places, the tightest. She pushes, kneads, squeezes until I can barely stand it. I’m moaning with pain and pleasure as she keeps going until the knot has been loosened.
Then she says: “this is the good thing about knowing someone completely.”
I can’t speak, I can’t reply. All I can do as gasp as she finds another well known place to inflict pain upon.
“I don’t know anyone like I know you,” she is saying. “Not anyone. Not even Wade. And I don’t want to know anyone else, not ever.”
She’s done and I feel so much better, so much more relaxed. She climbs off me and I sit up with the oil on my back almost all soaked in.
“That was great,” I tell her, then I grab her hand as she turns to climb off the bed. “Do you want me to...”
She shakes her head. “This is just for you,” she tells me.
I’m flicking through our old photo albums. I’m trying to remember the things I’ve lost. I don’t really need to think to hard, I mean things went sour not too long ago, but then these pictures show a deeper story, a deeper sadness that I had not seen until now.
I’m in my room, in my little bed. The lamp is on and the door is shut. Quinn has gone to her own room, her own bed, an hour ago.
I flick through the memories of our early days. There are the parties that we went to in college. There is us playing on the beach on summer break. There we are as young adults, with our whole lives ahead of us, standing in front of some monument that we visited. I can’t recall where it was or why we even went there.
In next album we’re engaged. There we are with our families. There’s my mother and my brothers and sister. None of us were attached then and I was on my way to marital servitude – at least that was the joke at the time. I didn’t see it that way. I saw it as adventure, a great leap into the unknown. Really I had no idea what I was doing, no idea how to be a husband. It’s funny that just as I’m learning how bad I was at the job, I’m having to face the next challenge. I have no clue how to be a father, but I’m determined to face this next adventure with my eyes open and my heart at least halfway teachable. A few pages along and we’re married. We look so young, so foolish, so full of hope and dreams. Maybe if we knew then what we know now we might just run like crazy. But we didn’t.
But we’re not running now. So either we’re just as stupid as back then, or we’re in on the secret of happiness.
Our marriage’s early years are faithfully recorded. We’re moving in and out of our first apartment, and then into the place we finally bought together. I’d saved a fair bit and the rest we borrowed. I was still paying for that place while Quinn lived there rent free. And she had a rich lover. Where was the justice in that?
Quinn gets pregnant in the next album. There is us, holding the strip proudly, kissing each other. She’s hardly showing at the start and she is so full of joy and vibrancy that I find I’m starting to cry. A few pages along and her belly is growing. We kept a record of this process, like a documentary. We were going to show our baby boy when he was older, show him how he grew and how happy we were. He’d be three years old now. We’d be looking for schools, thinking about his future, dreaming big things for him. At eight months he was gone. There are no pictures after that, not for a long while.
I turn the pages in the next volume, looking at pictures of an older Quinn and I, worn with cares and griefs that are now unspoken. We’re still together but the damage has been done. Our marriage is slowly decaying. Then I see pictures of Quinn’s thirty second birthday. It was held at our apartment. Our friends are there. Wade is there. He’s posing between the two of us. His arms are around us – his hand is on my shoulder and around her waist. I can see the connection forming between the two of them, the intimacy of the touch. I feel the tears forming again, and I almost start to cry, but I’m stopped by a gentle knock.
Quinn opens my door carefully, just an inch or two. “Is it safe to come in?” she asks. “I don’t want to interrupt anything.”
“Come on in,” I say, a little sarcastically, which I immediately regret.
She smiles as she appears, opening the door further.
“Everything okay?” I ask her.
“Fine,” she says. “I was wondering how your vows are going. I’ve finished mine.”
I smile and nod. “All done.”
“Can I see?”
“That will spoil the surprise.”
She shrugs, and then asks: “What are you doing?
”
“My homework,” I say.
She looks down at the albums scattered on the floor. She picks up one of them and motions for me to move over. She climbs in next to me, under the covers. Here we are, the three of us, in this small single bed like teenagers making out. Except we’re not making out. She’s in her tight singlet top and a pair of shorts and I can feel the naked skin of her thigh against mine.
All of this closeness, touching without there being sex, is wonderful and frustrating. It’s intimate.
She flicks through the first album, the one that I started with.
“So, what’s the homework?” she asks me.
I exhale deeply. “I’m looking at what I lost, and what I found.”
“Well,” she says, “you won’t find the second in these albums.”
She keeps flicking, pointing the one photo or another, laughing, poking me playfully. I’ve never felt closer to her than I do now.
“You know,” she’s saying, “Wade and I don’t have any photos.”
“What? None?”
“Well, maybe one or two, but not like these. These are our history, Judd. Wade and I don’t really have much of one of those. We didn’t take many photos because you might find them, and then after...” She shrugs. “These are beautiful. These are us, when we’re young and in love. I wish I’d looked at these when I was... you know.”
I murmur my agreement.
She drops the album on the floor and picks up another. This was the last one I was perusing. I feel my stomach tighten up. She says nothing as she turns one page after another.
She takes a deep breath. “This is when we’re falling apart,” she says, “but there’s still something there.