Original Fiction: Good Intent Part 1/?
Title: Good Intent
Rating: PG-13 at the moment. But it will go up to M at some point.
Summary: Jane and Tom Wilson have been married for fifteen years. Miranda and John Carter have been married for twenty years. But neither couple is exactly happy. Both women suspect that their husbands are cheating on them. As a last attempt to save their marriages, they plan a romantic vacation in Paris.
The couples meet in the hotel, run by the seductive Audrey Dupont. Soon both women accuse Audrey of seducing their husbands. But it isn't the men Audrey is after. Will the women be able to withstand the alluring Française or will one of them end up leaving Paris with much more problems than she came with?
A/N: About three months ago on tumblr I did a fake movie meme and there was one that some people wanted see turned into an actual fic. So here is the first part of that story and also my first attempt at writing original fiction. Just let me know if it's horrible and I won't continue.
A/N 2: The original post and summary can be found here
Disclaimer: These characters (even if I based their physical appearance on actors) are mine. So don't use without my permission please.
You're slipping through the fingers of your good intent
JANE
Dinnertime in the Wilson house had become an eerily quiet affair. Save from cutlery moving over porcelain plates and the slightly muted sounds of a teenaged boy’s iPod, it was silent at the dinner table. Jane pushed around her food with her fork, trying not to sigh in disappointment at yet another failed attempt at creating a nice family dinner that nobody but her seemed to want. Her husband was busy texting someone, had been for about ten minutes and her son was being a typical fourteen year-old boy whose puberty had just hit him with full force.
At fourteen, David was no different than other boys his age. He acted like the world was his playground one minute and the next he pretended that he couldn’t care less about anything. Lately he had taken to listen to his music every single moment of every day which included during dinner. Jane had tried to take it from him a few times, but that had only resulted in a temper tantrum and a mumbled ‘leave him be’ from her husband, so she had given up and now only hoped that this phase would pass quickly.
With her son, she was almost certain that it would pass, but this ‘phase’ that her husband was going through, she honestly doubted if that ever would go by. At first she had passed his working late and his incessant texting off as actual work. But after a few weeks Jane had grown slightly suspicious. Then after two months she had started picturing Tom with some young, pretty thing with fake breasts with white teeth and some horrible fake laugh.
And then slowly that blonde had started to evolve into his secretary or his colleague or his boss who Jane remembered to be attractive women. Especially his colleague who was some leggy, curvy seductive redhead who was always wearing perfectly tailored business suits and appeared to have walked straight out of some horny man’s fantasy right into her husband’s office with her high heels and her sexy smirk without even batting an eyelash. She had some horribly cliché name like Virginia or Georgia or another of the fifty states. It was probably her.
Or maybe it was just a perfect stranger. Someone Jane had never met in her life. Some beautiful woman who just happened to meet her husband, had bumped into him and had somehow caused Tom to cheat on his wife for fifteen years. She had turned an honorable, loving family man into a cheater, someone who would risk it all for a woman who had been willing to have sex with him without tying him down with responsibilities.
David shoved the last forkful of food into his mouth and pushed himself away from table without saying a word. Jane opened her mouth to chastise him, but from the corner of her eye she saw Tom texting with his mistress, so she shut it again and watched her son stomp up the stair and cringed when he slammed his door. When did it all go wrong she asked herself for a brief moment before she let her eye fall on her husband again.
He had the smallest of smiles playing on his lips and Jane hated him for it. She grasped her fork tighter when his phone buzzed again and his smile grew as he took another bite and for a short moment Jane could picture herself smashing his plate over his head. She wanted to confront him. She wanted to yell at him, to slap him but she couldn’t bring herself to. Instead she just watched Tom, eating food that she had prepared while texting his whore.
“I’m going out tonight,” he said, still chewing on a piece of meat. Jane grimaced. She disliked it when people forgot their manners and talked with their mouth full, but she just hated now that it was Tom doing it while informing her he was going out again.
“Where?” she asked him curtly, not even bothering to hide her displeasure. Tom didn’t notice. He just shrugged and ate the last piece of food on his plate.
“With some friends, going for a beer.” He had used that excuse at least three times in the past few weeks. Jane resisted the urge to roll her eyes. Every time he had said that and then come home to her late into the night or very early in the morning, she had never smelled alcohol on his breath. She hadn’t smelled anything. At least he had the decency to take shower before coming home to her and crawling into their bed.
“Fine,” Jane sighed, unable to put up a fight. Tom never even glanced at her as he picked up his plate and dumped it in the sink, leaving it to her to clean up. She heard him go upstairs and change into something else. All of her desire to eat just left her body and she pushed plate away.
She once loved that man. She still loved him, with all her heart, even if he did seem like a complete stranger nowadays. He had changed, of course, everybody changed, but Tom had changed into a man she didn’t even recognize anymore. It was like the college boy she had fallen in love with when she had been in high school and the boyish man she had fallen in love with a second time years later had just disappeared and now this man that she didn’t know had taken his place.
Jane heard him come down the stairs. He was wearing a clean shirt that she had ironed that same day after she had come home from work. It was her favorite shirt, light blue that accentuated his slightly tanned skin and his grey hair. It seemed to make his brown eyes even darker. He looked handsome. As he fastened his last button, Tom leaned down and pressed a kiss to her cheek. He even smelled nice.
“Have fun,” she heard herself say in a voice she didn’t recognize. Had she become that kind of woman now? The kind that told her husband to have fun when he was going to screw another woman all the while pretending everything was fine.
“I will,” he replied. “Don’t wait up for me.” Jane watched as he left the dining room and disappeared into the hallway. She heard how he grabbed his coat and the car keys. A moment later the front door opened and closed and he was gone. She was alone now with her pubescent son who wouldn’t come down anymore unless he craved a coke or something.
Jane stared at her half-eaten dinner, her hands clasped in her lap so tightly that her knuckles had turned white. In a flash of anger, unable to control herself, she grabbed the plate and threw it as hard as she could against the wall. It shattered into a dozen pieces, shards of porcelain flying through the dining room as the remnants of dinner slowly slid down the soft yellow wall. She took a deep breath and forced away the tears that were suddenly burning in her eyes. She would not cry.
Calmly, as if nothing had just happened she got up from the table and looked at the mess she had made. She tied her blonde curls up into a ponytail and set herself to task of cleaning up. Careful she picked up all the pieces of what once had been a plate and threw them in the trash before she started on cleaning the wall, but no matter how much she tried to focus on making the wall spotless she couldn’t help it when her mind wandered back to her marriage, what was left of it anyway.
Could she confront Tom about her suspicions? Would he be a man and own up to what he had done or would he take the cowardly way out and deny everything? Would he swear that it had been just a mistake and that he loved Jane with all his heart and that he would never do something like it again? Would she be able to live with him, to trust him if he did that? Would she ever love him again the way she had?
Maybe she ought to just leave him, make him feel her pain. Could she do that to David, though? He already seemed like a slightly troubled teenager. A broken home surely wouldn’t improve that. And could she do it to herself? She had love Tom when she was girl, just sixteen years old. And then again when she was twenty three. They had lived together for so long that she hardly remembered what it was like living alone.
When the wall was clean again, the dishes had been put in the dishwasher and there was no more evidence of dinner anymore, Jane sank down on a couch in the living room, hugging a cushion to her chest. She owed to her son, to herself and even her husband to give them one more chance. It had to happen. She couldn’t just throw away seventeen years of marriage because Tom made a mistake. It was fucking big mistake, but a mistake nonetheless. Maybe she could still repair them, bring them back to a semblance of what they used to be.
She wasn’t in the mood tonight to watch television or read a book. Everything always revolved around relationships in one way or another and tonight she really didn’t want that. She wanted to forget everything and not think about what and who her husband was doing. Jane turned off most of the lights downstairs, leaving one on for when Tom came home in the middle of the night, before she ascended the stairs and went into the bathroom. A long soak in the bathtub might make her feel a little less horrible than she did at the moment.
As the water was filling the tub, she undressed, sparing herself a look or two in the mirror. She looked good for her age, she knew that. Anyone who looked her would not guess that it was the body or the face of a forty five year old. Her stomach was still flat and muscled, her breast were still firm, her skin still soft and supple and there were barely any lines on her face that marked her age. She ran her hands down her body, feeling the curves, the skin. It all felt so familiar. So what had changed for Tom?
Shaking her head, Jane stepped into the hot water. No more thoughts about Tom. Tomorrow she would try to figure out what she could do, if there was something that could be done, to save her marriage. Tomorrow. Today, tonight, she was going to relax, clear her head and enjoy the silence and definitely not think about her husband.
The water was hot, it turned her skin red, but Jane sighed and emerged herself completely, soaking her hair, letting the water clean her face. The tub wasn’t that large or deep, but like this, not an inch of skin above the water surface, she felt weightless, careless, free. There were time she wished she had put in a pool in their garden. Nothing made her feel quite as free as being underwater. The bathtub would have to do. Maybe she’d go swimming tomorrow.
She stayed underwater until her lungs started to burn and the need for air was overwhelming. Jane sat up and took a deep breath, the fresh air making her lungs ache. She wrapped her arms around her knees and shivered as the cold air hit her shoulders and arms. Sometimes she wished she could just disappear into the water, just go down and never resurface. It would be peaceful and it would give her freedom she would never know in this life.
But she couldn’t leave her family like that. She was too strong, too stubborn to run away from her problems, no matter how tempting it was sometimes. She would clench her teeth and stand her ground against whatever might be thrown her way. And she wasn’t ready to give up her marriage like that. She would give it one last fight.
MIRANDA
She had been one of the ‘lucky ones’ or at least that was what she had been told by everybody so many times that eventually she had convinced herself of the fact that it simply had to be true. She had been that one exception to the rule. Miranda had been the other woman and instead of stringing her along with empty promises John had actually left his wife for her and in the end he had even married her and remained faithful to her for more than twenty years, as far as everyone knew.
Yes, she had been one of the lucky ones.
Those words were furthest from Miranda’s mind as she rolled on her back, the sheets silky soft against her skin. But she sighed, unable to get comfortable with the empty spot beside her, unable to sleep when the need to feel her husband, kiss him, make love to him was so overwhelming and he wasn’t there. Again.
She should have gotten used to it by now. It had happened so frequently these past months. Not at first. At first it was once every two weeks, maybe even less and then it was once a week and then two times and now it three or four times. John always came home after doing whatever it was that he did, but it was always late, three or four in the morning and by then she’d be asleep or at least pretending to be. She never wanted to face reality.
John was cheating on her. He had to be. Miranda recognized the pattern. She had been the pattern once, a long time ago. She wasn’t completely ignorant and she should have seen this coming. She had always thought it would have been sooner, like when she started getting old. When the wrinkles appeared or grew deeper, when her breasts started to sag slightly or when her stomach wasn’t tight as it used to be, nor were her thighs. She would never have thought he would have lasted this long with an old woman like her.
John wasn’t young anymore either. He had been a fit man in his late thirties when she met him while she had still been on the right side of thirty five. He had been all muscles and a charming smile, tanned skin. She had wanted him as much as he had wanted her. But now, in her eyes he was still handsome, but he had a belly now and his muscles weren’t nearly as well defined as they used to be. He had grown old too. But the thought of cheating on him had never even crossed her mind, much to her surprise.
She wasn’t wife material. Miranda had always pictured herself making a career and having brief relationships here and there, but never something steady. She never thought she could fall in love. She was too much in control of her life for that. She hadn’t been that girl who dreamed of a white wedding with a handsome man. She instead had dreamed of power suits, high heels, people listening to her and doing whatever she ordered them to do.
And she’d had that. She had taken the path of power and money with one-nightstands here and there, sometimes a weekend of wild abandon with someone handsome or beautiful. She never really did care if there were male or female. As long as they wanted her, and they usually did. And then she’d met John. Handsome, strong, attractive and married.
What had started out as a fling, a few nights together, turned into a long lasting affair and much to Miranda’s horror she had realized she’d fallen in love with him. Something she told herself she would never do. What had been irregular fucks here and there turned into regular meetings until one day he came to her and told her he had left his wife. She had never asked him to do that, but he had done it for her anyway. He said he loved her.
With a soft groan Miranda sat up in bed, not even bothering to clutch the covers to her naked breasts. There wasn’t anyone here to judge her for them anyway, not that John ever had. She wasn’t going to be able to sleep tonight, not when he wasn’t there beside her. The younger her would be appalled that she had become so dependant of a man, or merely a man’s presence. She had been a raging feminist in the seventies and eighties and then John happened.
At least her younger self could be proud of the fact that had still managed to stay on the career path, even with a husband. She had risen in the cooperate world, so high that she ended up on a list with New York’s top hundred most influential women. That had been five years ago, but Miranda was fairly certain she still had a place on the list even if she had cut back on work a little bit since passing fifty five. She was still the most powerful woman in her company, right below her male CEO.
She looked around the dark room. The silence was pressing. This high above the streets of New York, traffic could barely be heard and since John and she never had children, there were no teenagers playing their music too loud or bringing back their girl- or boyfriends in the middle of the night. They were alone in their penthouse apartment. She was alone and what was worse, she felt lonely. Finally deciding that sleep really wasn’t going to come without John there, Miranda turned on the light and reached for her book.
After barely reading five pages, she gave up and closed the book. Even if the main character wasn’t anything like her, it hit too close to home. Loving someone powerful, someone who would eventually leave the main character because she had changed, had become too human, it was too familiar. She could feel the woman’s loneliness, could relate to it. It terrified her.
And then there was that speech that simply sent cold chills down her spine. Michael Cunningham had always had a knack for touching on those subjects that were sensitive or taboo, but with that little speech that he had written, he had bared everything that was wrong with the American society and put it down so clearly with too many words, without making it sound worse or better than it was. It was just true. Too true. A truth that many people wouldn’t dare to face. Herself included.
Miranda knew that John was cheating on her and she didn’t do anything about it. She just continued to pretend to be ignorant when he came home to her, knowing full well that he had been fucking another woman. Her mother would be ashamed of her, for letting a man do that to her. She ought to be ashamed of herself. All her ideals from when she had been young had gone right out the window the minute John told her that he loved her.
She simply kept telling herself that she didn’t have any actual proof of him being unfaithful to her. She merely suspected it. Sometimes she tried telling herself that she just getting more paranoid because she was aging and thought that John wouldn’t find her as desirable anymore as he once had. But then she remembered that he had aged too and she still craved his touch, his mouth, the feeling of him being inside her, completing her.
Swinging her legs over the edge of the bed, Miranda got up, shivering as the cold night air hit her bare skin. Her long auburn hair brushed against her back and the tops of her breasts as she walked over the big window. She couldn’t care less that she might be seen naked. Let them look. The city that never sleeps. There couldn’t be a better description than that for this city. No matter what time she looked out the window there were always cars driving, thousands of lights dancing through the wide streets.
There were always lights on somewhere. She had seen so many things over the years at all hours of the day. Tonight she could see a middle-aged man bent over his desk, furiously typing on his computer. There was a woman in another building sitting in bed, reading a book. In another room a couple was watching television. Her breath stopped in her throat when a few stories below the reading woman there was a couple making love against the window.
She remembered doing that years ago. It seemed an exhilarating idea then. Just the thought that anyone might see John and her. Her skin pressed up against the cold glass, legs wrapped around his waist. She had been sure that someday pictures might turn up and that would have been the end of her career. Sex scandals always were. She had barely managed to avoid a scandal when the whole John affair started. Suddenly feeling a lump in her throat she looked away and closed the curtains.
The room was too quiet. They had lived here for more than six years, they had had the whole apartment professionally redecorated when they moved in until everything was exactly the way they wanted it. They planned to grow old there together. But since a few weeks, the bedroom, the entire apartment really, seemed so strange to her as if this wasn’t her home anymore, but the home of a woman she didn’t know, didn’t recognize.
She wrapped her arms around herself as she walked back towards the bed. Maybe she ought to read some more, something that could calm her thoughts a little. But as she eyed the dark cover of Specimen Days, she changed her mind and just slipped back under the covers, warming her now cold feet. Her head had barely hit the pillow when she heard the telltale ping of the elevator, signaling her husband’s return.
Immediately her hand shot out to turn off the light and Miranda curled up under the covers, pretending to be asleep or at least in a state of drowsiness instead of being wide awake. She closed her eyes and listened to the sounds John made as he walked through the apartment, getting rid of his shoes, tie and jacket before quietly entering the bedroom. He never checked if she was asleep. Perhaps he simply knew that she was always awake, even if she pretended otherwise.
He silently undressed himself, putting his clothes with hers so they could be taken out for dry-cleaning the next morning before he entered the bathroom and closed the door behind him. Miranda rolled onto her back. She wanted to see him when he exited, wanted to touch him as he lay down beside her, to feel his skin against her own, even if he had been with another woman.
The door opened again and Miranda watched him as he exited, his salt and pepper hair, his rough face, his broad chest, his slightly bowed legs. She knew every inch of his body, every scar, every little imperfection. She’d seen them all, kissed them all and loved every single one of them separately and him together as a whole.
“Did I wake you?” he asked when he noticed her eyes on his body. Miranda merely shook her head. She didn’t want to answer him for fear of sounding as desperate, as lonely as she felt, even with him here now. He mumbled a soft ‘good’ before sliding into bed with her. Immediately she felt her body release a tension she hadn’t even realized it had been holding.
Leaning over she kissed him softly. He tasted vaguely of toothpaste and there was just a hint of Chanel no. 5 about him, a perfume she had never worn, but she decided to ignore that for the moment. John was home with her now. She could feel his skin, taste his lips. He was real, solid and in her bed. She curled up against his side and he wrapped an arm around her waist holding her close.
But even like this, Miranda couldn’t stop herself from wandering if he had held another woman like this only hours ago. If they had fucked, or worse, made love, while she had been at home, waiting for him to come home. John breathing evened out pretty quickly and the last thought that crossed Miranda’s mind before she joined him in his sleep was that she was truly pathetic for keeping up this façade. She was going to have to fix it, one way or another.
Rating: PG-13 at the moment. But it will go up to M at some point.
Summary: Jane and Tom Wilson have been married for fifteen years. Miranda and John Carter have been married for twenty years. But neither couple is exactly happy. Both women suspect that their husbands are cheating on them. As a last attempt to save their marriages, they plan a romantic vacation in Paris.
The couples meet in the hotel, run by the seductive Audrey Dupont. Soon both women accuse Audrey of seducing their husbands. But it isn't the men Audrey is after. Will the women be able to withstand the alluring Française or will one of them end up leaving Paris with much more problems than she came with?
A/N: About three months ago on tumblr I did a fake movie meme and there was one that some people wanted see turned into an actual fic. So here is the first part of that story and also my first attempt at writing original fiction. Just let me know if it's horrible and I won't continue.
A/N 2: The original post and summary can be found here
Disclaimer: These characters (even if I based their physical appearance on actors) are mine. So don't use without my permission please.
You're slipping through the fingers of your good intent
JANE
Dinnertime in the Wilson house had become an eerily quiet affair. Save from cutlery moving over porcelain plates and the slightly muted sounds of a teenaged boy’s iPod, it was silent at the dinner table. Jane pushed around her food with her fork, trying not to sigh in disappointment at yet another failed attempt at creating a nice family dinner that nobody but her seemed to want. Her husband was busy texting someone, had been for about ten minutes and her son was being a typical fourteen year-old boy whose puberty had just hit him with full force.
At fourteen, David was no different than other boys his age. He acted like the world was his playground one minute and the next he pretended that he couldn’t care less about anything. Lately he had taken to listen to his music every single moment of every day which included during dinner. Jane had tried to take it from him a few times, but that had only resulted in a temper tantrum and a mumbled ‘leave him be’ from her husband, so she had given up and now only hoped that this phase would pass quickly.
With her son, she was almost certain that it would pass, but this ‘phase’ that her husband was going through, she honestly doubted if that ever would go by. At first she had passed his working late and his incessant texting off as actual work. But after a few weeks Jane had grown slightly suspicious. Then after two months she had started picturing Tom with some young, pretty thing with fake breasts with white teeth and some horrible fake laugh.
And then slowly that blonde had started to evolve into his secretary or his colleague or his boss who Jane remembered to be attractive women. Especially his colleague who was some leggy, curvy seductive redhead who was always wearing perfectly tailored business suits and appeared to have walked straight out of some horny man’s fantasy right into her husband’s office with her high heels and her sexy smirk without even batting an eyelash. She had some horribly cliché name like Virginia or Georgia or another of the fifty states. It was probably her.
Or maybe it was just a perfect stranger. Someone Jane had never met in her life. Some beautiful woman who just happened to meet her husband, had bumped into him and had somehow caused Tom to cheat on his wife for fifteen years. She had turned an honorable, loving family man into a cheater, someone who would risk it all for a woman who had been willing to have sex with him without tying him down with responsibilities.
David shoved the last forkful of food into his mouth and pushed himself away from table without saying a word. Jane opened her mouth to chastise him, but from the corner of her eye she saw Tom texting with his mistress, so she shut it again and watched her son stomp up the stair and cringed when he slammed his door. When did it all go wrong she asked herself for a brief moment before she let her eye fall on her husband again.
He had the smallest of smiles playing on his lips and Jane hated him for it. She grasped her fork tighter when his phone buzzed again and his smile grew as he took another bite and for a short moment Jane could picture herself smashing his plate over his head. She wanted to confront him. She wanted to yell at him, to slap him but she couldn’t bring herself to. Instead she just watched Tom, eating food that she had prepared while texting his whore.
“I’m going out tonight,” he said, still chewing on a piece of meat. Jane grimaced. She disliked it when people forgot their manners and talked with their mouth full, but she just hated now that it was Tom doing it while informing her he was going out again.
“Where?” she asked him curtly, not even bothering to hide her displeasure. Tom didn’t notice. He just shrugged and ate the last piece of food on his plate.
“With some friends, going for a beer.” He had used that excuse at least three times in the past few weeks. Jane resisted the urge to roll her eyes. Every time he had said that and then come home to her late into the night or very early in the morning, she had never smelled alcohol on his breath. She hadn’t smelled anything. At least he had the decency to take shower before coming home to her and crawling into their bed.
“Fine,” Jane sighed, unable to put up a fight. Tom never even glanced at her as he picked up his plate and dumped it in the sink, leaving it to her to clean up. She heard him go upstairs and change into something else. All of her desire to eat just left her body and she pushed plate away.
She once loved that man. She still loved him, with all her heart, even if he did seem like a complete stranger nowadays. He had changed, of course, everybody changed, but Tom had changed into a man she didn’t even recognize anymore. It was like the college boy she had fallen in love with when she had been in high school and the boyish man she had fallen in love with a second time years later had just disappeared and now this man that she didn’t know had taken his place.
Jane heard him come down the stairs. He was wearing a clean shirt that she had ironed that same day after she had come home from work. It was her favorite shirt, light blue that accentuated his slightly tanned skin and his grey hair. It seemed to make his brown eyes even darker. He looked handsome. As he fastened his last button, Tom leaned down and pressed a kiss to her cheek. He even smelled nice.
“Have fun,” she heard herself say in a voice she didn’t recognize. Had she become that kind of woman now? The kind that told her husband to have fun when he was going to screw another woman all the while pretending everything was fine.
“I will,” he replied. “Don’t wait up for me.” Jane watched as he left the dining room and disappeared into the hallway. She heard how he grabbed his coat and the car keys. A moment later the front door opened and closed and he was gone. She was alone now with her pubescent son who wouldn’t come down anymore unless he craved a coke or something.
Jane stared at her half-eaten dinner, her hands clasped in her lap so tightly that her knuckles had turned white. In a flash of anger, unable to control herself, she grabbed the plate and threw it as hard as she could against the wall. It shattered into a dozen pieces, shards of porcelain flying through the dining room as the remnants of dinner slowly slid down the soft yellow wall. She took a deep breath and forced away the tears that were suddenly burning in her eyes. She would not cry.
Calmly, as if nothing had just happened she got up from the table and looked at the mess she had made. She tied her blonde curls up into a ponytail and set herself to task of cleaning up. Careful she picked up all the pieces of what once had been a plate and threw them in the trash before she started on cleaning the wall, but no matter how much she tried to focus on making the wall spotless she couldn’t help it when her mind wandered back to her marriage, what was left of it anyway.
Could she confront Tom about her suspicions? Would he be a man and own up to what he had done or would he take the cowardly way out and deny everything? Would he swear that it had been just a mistake and that he loved Jane with all his heart and that he would never do something like it again? Would she be able to live with him, to trust him if he did that? Would she ever love him again the way she had?
Maybe she ought to just leave him, make him feel her pain. Could she do that to David, though? He already seemed like a slightly troubled teenager. A broken home surely wouldn’t improve that. And could she do it to herself? She had love Tom when she was girl, just sixteen years old. And then again when she was twenty three. They had lived together for so long that she hardly remembered what it was like living alone.
When the wall was clean again, the dishes had been put in the dishwasher and there was no more evidence of dinner anymore, Jane sank down on a couch in the living room, hugging a cushion to her chest. She owed to her son, to herself and even her husband to give them one more chance. It had to happen. She couldn’t just throw away seventeen years of marriage because Tom made a mistake. It was fucking big mistake, but a mistake nonetheless. Maybe she could still repair them, bring them back to a semblance of what they used to be.
She wasn’t in the mood tonight to watch television or read a book. Everything always revolved around relationships in one way or another and tonight she really didn’t want that. She wanted to forget everything and not think about what and who her husband was doing. Jane turned off most of the lights downstairs, leaving one on for when Tom came home in the middle of the night, before she ascended the stairs and went into the bathroom. A long soak in the bathtub might make her feel a little less horrible than she did at the moment.
As the water was filling the tub, she undressed, sparing herself a look or two in the mirror. She looked good for her age, she knew that. Anyone who looked her would not guess that it was the body or the face of a forty five year old. Her stomach was still flat and muscled, her breast were still firm, her skin still soft and supple and there were barely any lines on her face that marked her age. She ran her hands down her body, feeling the curves, the skin. It all felt so familiar. So what had changed for Tom?
Shaking her head, Jane stepped into the hot water. No more thoughts about Tom. Tomorrow she would try to figure out what she could do, if there was something that could be done, to save her marriage. Tomorrow. Today, tonight, she was going to relax, clear her head and enjoy the silence and definitely not think about her husband.
The water was hot, it turned her skin red, but Jane sighed and emerged herself completely, soaking her hair, letting the water clean her face. The tub wasn’t that large or deep, but like this, not an inch of skin above the water surface, she felt weightless, careless, free. There were time she wished she had put in a pool in their garden. Nothing made her feel quite as free as being underwater. The bathtub would have to do. Maybe she’d go swimming tomorrow.
She stayed underwater until her lungs started to burn and the need for air was overwhelming. Jane sat up and took a deep breath, the fresh air making her lungs ache. She wrapped her arms around her knees and shivered as the cold air hit her shoulders and arms. Sometimes she wished she could just disappear into the water, just go down and never resurface. It would be peaceful and it would give her freedom she would never know in this life.
But she couldn’t leave her family like that. She was too strong, too stubborn to run away from her problems, no matter how tempting it was sometimes. She would clench her teeth and stand her ground against whatever might be thrown her way. And she wasn’t ready to give up her marriage like that. She would give it one last fight.
MIRANDA
She had been one of the ‘lucky ones’ or at least that was what she had been told by everybody so many times that eventually she had convinced herself of the fact that it simply had to be true. She had been that one exception to the rule. Miranda had been the other woman and instead of stringing her along with empty promises John had actually left his wife for her and in the end he had even married her and remained faithful to her for more than twenty years, as far as everyone knew.
Yes, she had been one of the lucky ones.
Those words were furthest from Miranda’s mind as she rolled on her back, the sheets silky soft against her skin. But she sighed, unable to get comfortable with the empty spot beside her, unable to sleep when the need to feel her husband, kiss him, make love to him was so overwhelming and he wasn’t there. Again.
She should have gotten used to it by now. It had happened so frequently these past months. Not at first. At first it was once every two weeks, maybe even less and then it was once a week and then two times and now it three or four times. John always came home after doing whatever it was that he did, but it was always late, three or four in the morning and by then she’d be asleep or at least pretending to be. She never wanted to face reality.
John was cheating on her. He had to be. Miranda recognized the pattern. She had been the pattern once, a long time ago. She wasn’t completely ignorant and she should have seen this coming. She had always thought it would have been sooner, like when she started getting old. When the wrinkles appeared or grew deeper, when her breasts started to sag slightly or when her stomach wasn’t tight as it used to be, nor were her thighs. She would never have thought he would have lasted this long with an old woman like her.
John wasn’t young anymore either. He had been a fit man in his late thirties when she met him while she had still been on the right side of thirty five. He had been all muscles and a charming smile, tanned skin. She had wanted him as much as he had wanted her. But now, in her eyes he was still handsome, but he had a belly now and his muscles weren’t nearly as well defined as they used to be. He had grown old too. But the thought of cheating on him had never even crossed her mind, much to her surprise.
She wasn’t wife material. Miranda had always pictured herself making a career and having brief relationships here and there, but never something steady. She never thought she could fall in love. She was too much in control of her life for that. She hadn’t been that girl who dreamed of a white wedding with a handsome man. She instead had dreamed of power suits, high heels, people listening to her and doing whatever she ordered them to do.
And she’d had that. She had taken the path of power and money with one-nightstands here and there, sometimes a weekend of wild abandon with someone handsome or beautiful. She never really did care if there were male or female. As long as they wanted her, and they usually did. And then she’d met John. Handsome, strong, attractive and married.
What had started out as a fling, a few nights together, turned into a long lasting affair and much to Miranda’s horror she had realized she’d fallen in love with him. Something she told herself she would never do. What had been irregular fucks here and there turned into regular meetings until one day he came to her and told her he had left his wife. She had never asked him to do that, but he had done it for her anyway. He said he loved her.
With a soft groan Miranda sat up in bed, not even bothering to clutch the covers to her naked breasts. There wasn’t anyone here to judge her for them anyway, not that John ever had. She wasn’t going to be able to sleep tonight, not when he wasn’t there beside her. The younger her would be appalled that she had become so dependant of a man, or merely a man’s presence. She had been a raging feminist in the seventies and eighties and then John happened.
At least her younger self could be proud of the fact that had still managed to stay on the career path, even with a husband. She had risen in the cooperate world, so high that she ended up on a list with New York’s top hundred most influential women. That had been five years ago, but Miranda was fairly certain she still had a place on the list even if she had cut back on work a little bit since passing fifty five. She was still the most powerful woman in her company, right below her male CEO.
She looked around the dark room. The silence was pressing. This high above the streets of New York, traffic could barely be heard and since John and she never had children, there were no teenagers playing their music too loud or bringing back their girl- or boyfriends in the middle of the night. They were alone in their penthouse apartment. She was alone and what was worse, she felt lonely. Finally deciding that sleep really wasn’t going to come without John there, Miranda turned on the light and reached for her book.
After barely reading five pages, she gave up and closed the book. Even if the main character wasn’t anything like her, it hit too close to home. Loving someone powerful, someone who would eventually leave the main character because she had changed, had become too human, it was too familiar. She could feel the woman’s loneliness, could relate to it. It terrified her.
And then there was that speech that simply sent cold chills down her spine. Michael Cunningham had always had a knack for touching on those subjects that were sensitive or taboo, but with that little speech that he had written, he had bared everything that was wrong with the American society and put it down so clearly with too many words, without making it sound worse or better than it was. It was just true. Too true. A truth that many people wouldn’t dare to face. Herself included.
Miranda knew that John was cheating on her and she didn’t do anything about it. She just continued to pretend to be ignorant when he came home to her, knowing full well that he had been fucking another woman. Her mother would be ashamed of her, for letting a man do that to her. She ought to be ashamed of herself. All her ideals from when she had been young had gone right out the window the minute John told her that he loved her.
She simply kept telling herself that she didn’t have any actual proof of him being unfaithful to her. She merely suspected it. Sometimes she tried telling herself that she just getting more paranoid because she was aging and thought that John wouldn’t find her as desirable anymore as he once had. But then she remembered that he had aged too and she still craved his touch, his mouth, the feeling of him being inside her, completing her.
Swinging her legs over the edge of the bed, Miranda got up, shivering as the cold night air hit her bare skin. Her long auburn hair brushed against her back and the tops of her breasts as she walked over the big window. She couldn’t care less that she might be seen naked. Let them look. The city that never sleeps. There couldn’t be a better description than that for this city. No matter what time she looked out the window there were always cars driving, thousands of lights dancing through the wide streets.
There were always lights on somewhere. She had seen so many things over the years at all hours of the day. Tonight she could see a middle-aged man bent over his desk, furiously typing on his computer. There was a woman in another building sitting in bed, reading a book. In another room a couple was watching television. Her breath stopped in her throat when a few stories below the reading woman there was a couple making love against the window.
She remembered doing that years ago. It seemed an exhilarating idea then. Just the thought that anyone might see John and her. Her skin pressed up against the cold glass, legs wrapped around his waist. She had been sure that someday pictures might turn up and that would have been the end of her career. Sex scandals always were. She had barely managed to avoid a scandal when the whole John affair started. Suddenly feeling a lump in her throat she looked away and closed the curtains.
The room was too quiet. They had lived here for more than six years, they had had the whole apartment professionally redecorated when they moved in until everything was exactly the way they wanted it. They planned to grow old there together. But since a few weeks, the bedroom, the entire apartment really, seemed so strange to her as if this wasn’t her home anymore, but the home of a woman she didn’t know, didn’t recognize.
She wrapped her arms around herself as she walked back towards the bed. Maybe she ought to read some more, something that could calm her thoughts a little. But as she eyed the dark cover of Specimen Days, she changed her mind and just slipped back under the covers, warming her now cold feet. Her head had barely hit the pillow when she heard the telltale ping of the elevator, signaling her husband’s return.
Immediately her hand shot out to turn off the light and Miranda curled up under the covers, pretending to be asleep or at least in a state of drowsiness instead of being wide awake. She closed her eyes and listened to the sounds John made as he walked through the apartment, getting rid of his shoes, tie and jacket before quietly entering the bedroom. He never checked if she was asleep. Perhaps he simply knew that she was always awake, even if she pretended otherwise.
He silently undressed himself, putting his clothes with hers so they could be taken out for dry-cleaning the next morning before he entered the bathroom and closed the door behind him. Miranda rolled onto her back. She wanted to see him when he exited, wanted to touch him as he lay down beside her, to feel his skin against her own, even if he had been with another woman.
The door opened again and Miranda watched him as he exited, his salt and pepper hair, his rough face, his broad chest, his slightly bowed legs. She knew every inch of his body, every scar, every little imperfection. She’d seen them all, kissed them all and loved every single one of them separately and him together as a whole.
“Did I wake you?” he asked when he noticed her eyes on his body. Miranda merely shook her head. She didn’t want to answer him for fear of sounding as desperate, as lonely as she felt, even with him here now. He mumbled a soft ‘good’ before sliding into bed with her. Immediately she felt her body release a tension she hadn’t even realized it had been holding.
Leaning over she kissed him softly. He tasted vaguely of toothpaste and there was just a hint of Chanel no. 5 about him, a perfume she had never worn, but she decided to ignore that for the moment. John was home with her now. She could feel his skin, taste his lips. He was real, solid and in her bed. She curled up against his side and he wrapped an arm around her waist holding her close.
But even like this, Miranda couldn’t stop herself from wandering if he had held another woman like this only hours ago. If they had fucked, or worse, made love, while she had been at home, waiting for him to come home. John breathing evened out pretty quickly and the last thought that crossed Miranda’s mind before she joined him in his sleep was that she was truly pathetic for keeping up this façade. She was going to have to fix it, one way or another.