Together Apart: Change is Never Easy (14 page)

“It’s okay.”
 

“No. It isn’t. I’ve missed you.”
 

“I’m here, Sam. I’m right here.” But he wasn’t. It was like she had jinxed something. So Sam reached down and put him there, guiding the head of his cock against her opening. Then, with permission granted, Zach pushed himself inside her.

She gasped and repeated her whisper. “I’ve missed you.”

“Sam, I never left.”

But he had. She had. They both had.
 

They were once two kids hopelessly in love, married in a ceremony that annoyed both families — at the courthouse, too young at 20, with four years of school left between them. Everyone said they were being stupid, even though everyone on her side loved Zach and everyone on his loved Sam. Friends loved them both. Their marriage made sense, rushed and young as it was, on a cosmic scale. It was like their worlds were waiting for fusion.
 

But in the months since graduation, with the protective patina of college gone and the real world pressing upon them, it was as if their carefree bubble had popped. They had to stop being two dreamers and become two individuals. They had been those people, in the same marriage, in the same apartment, in the same places many of the same times. But where were the kids they used to be?
 

Where had
this
been?

“Just fuck me,” Sam said.
 

Zach’s cock slid all the way inside her, the pad of flesh at his base pressed against her wet lips. She wrapped her legs around him, interlocking her ankles, heels clacking together. They’d never been together precisely like this: her in her work skirt and heels, him with his work pants pooled around his work shoes, up against a wall like two sexy adults in a grownup thriller. It was exciting. But it was also quite different. Foreign.
 

Zach moved faster, his urgency increasing. Her arms circled his neck as her back slammed into the wall with his thrusts. She felt an orgasm build. Crest. Explode. She raked her nails down his back and bit his neck, calling his name. The sounds of her cumming seemed to excite Zach further. He pushed harder, her skirt-covered ass banging into the plaster hard enough to shake the light fixture. He pulled back, separating their torsos, wanting to watch her tits sway on her chest. His ravenous eyes moved to her face, and he slowed without stopping.
 

“What is this?” he said. A hand left her side to brush a spot under her eye. His finger came away wet.
 

“Nothing.”
 

“Nothing?”
 

She forced a smile. “You’ve never fucked a girl so hard she cried?”
 

Zach stopped entirely, his cock buried in her pussy to the balls. She tried moving against him, but was fixed to the wall.
 

“No, Sam.” He shook his head. “No, I haven’t.”
 

“Don’t stop.”

“It’s hard for me
not
to stop.”
 

She looked hard into his eyes, knowing that he’d never understand the complex web of emotions warring inside her. She
was
sad, in a way, but not in the way he’d think. And regardless, she still wanted him to fuck her.
Needed
him to fuck her. Sometimes, a girl wanted to be left to wallow, sometimes she came to forget. Some things were what they were, neither good nor bad, not worth stopping to pine for nor pausing to regret. Men thought they could fix things, and Sam didn’t want to be fixed. There was nothing
to
fix. She missed their yesterday, but that was gone. They’d once made love in a meadow like two creatures in a fairy tale, but even if they returned to that meadow today, it wouldn’t be the same. The truth could be hard, but truth was truth and never less. You could only keep moving forward, to make present and future the best that you could.
 

“You don’t understand girls,” she said, squeezing him with her pussy, reaching back and gripping Zach’s ass to pull him in tighter. “We can get overwhelmed by anything, and so many of those things look the same. To the untrained male eye, anyway.”
 

“You’re sure?”
 

Sam leaned forward so he wouldn’t be distracted by her tears, then gently bit his ear and whispered,
“You’re overwhelming me.”
 

Still, he hesitated.
 

“Keep overwhelming me, Zach,”
she said.
 

He resumed thrusting. She rubbed her face on his shoulder, then pulled back and allowed her lust to dominate, and poke through whatever strange, unfounded malaise had descended so suddenly, like a guillotine. After a few thrusts, Sam’s lust became less acted and more sincere. This time when she came, it was so hard, her legs squeezed Zach tight like a vice and he couldn’t pull out. Sam couldn’t arch her back, but arched anyway and him from her.
 

The grip was enough; Zach took a few small strokes as her pussy tightened on his dick and a fresh, frustrating flood of tears began to brim beneath her lids. He spilled inside her. She filled up, ran over. With her legs up, his cum dribbled out and ran down the length of his dick. Exhausted, Zach sagged with Sam against the wall. They slid down, coming to a rest side by side, four legs parted, both spent, disheveled and weary.
 

They got dressed.
 

The pizza came.
 

They set the flowers in a vase on the table.
 

Then they ate the cherry cordials with the pizza, the competing flavors horribly clashing. It was the kind of thing two dumb kids might do, except now they were adults and fooling no one.
 

CHAPTER TEN

Present Day

The experimenter opens the box.
 

The probability wave collapses.
 

The cat materializes upon observation based on probability, either alive or dead.
 

When Sam took introductory physics freshman year, she didn’t understand the famous Schrödinger’s Cat experiment, and had never precisely understood why her professor (a bald man who’d been deliriously excited about physics) felt the need to tell them about it in a 101-level course. The only reason Sam could figure was that the professor had explained it for his own reasons, seeing as physics deliriously excited him. Regardless, the details had seemed both mystical and uninteresting to Sam.
 

One thing Sam did understand was that whether the cat was alive or dead when the experimenter opened the box, that’s how it stayed.
 

She sat on the couch, feeling stupid and angry, facing the window with her arms crossed. Their old apartment, in Portland, had a second bedroom that she had used as an office. This apartment only had the one bedroom. And since that’s where Zach was when she stormed out on him, there was nowhere for her to go other than the bathroom — unless she wanted to leave the apartment in her pajamas.
 

She could sense Zach behind her. She didn’t want to talk to him. Didn’t want to explain. Because it wasn’t supposed to be this way. She’d approached that pee-soaked e.p.t. test with fear, certain she was collapsing their entire marriage’s probability wave in the act of observation. The test would either show a plus or a minus, and she had recalled physics and the bald man and Erwin Schrödinger, and had felt sure that until she looked at the test, it would remain blank. Only when she looked would it reveal their lives’ direction — into parenthood, or a suddenly shattered sense of limbo, where they’d no longer be able to pretend that nothing had changed. Whatever the test said, it would be Sam’s fault. She was the one opening the box, and taking that first peek.
 

But once Sam had looked and known she was pregnant (and, truth be told, once she had confirmed it four more times in the following 24 hours just to use the 5-pack’s remainder), the wave was supposed to stay collapsed. She had looked and observed five separate tests, all collapsed toward parenthood.
 

The cat had lived. It wasn’t supposed to suddenly, magically, turn out to have been dead all along.
 

“Sam?” said Zach from behind her.

“I don’t want to talk right now.”
 

“Sam.”
This time it was a statement. His hand was on her shoulder, but she still wouldn’t look back.
Goddamn Zach.
God damn him and how well he knew her. God damn him with his artist’s soul — still there after all these years, latent, working behind the scenes. She couldn’t hide from Zach. She couldn’t deflect and pretend to be mad at him. He could always read her. He knew exactly what to do, like setting a gentle hand on her shoulder. Sam wanted to stay mad, because anger was empowering. When you were angry, you could act. You weren’t helpless, like she was now.

Sam didn’t trust herself to speak. Still staring out the window, still with her arms crossed, she twitched her head. She felt tears on her cheeks. God damn them. And God damn Zach for forcing her to tell the truth — not just to him, but to herself.
 

He came around the couch and sat on the small, tan ottoman opposite her. He looked at her face. She could see him wanting to reach out and touch it, to wipe tears from her cheek. But she couldn’t take that, not yet, and of course he knew it. Because God damn him. Sam sniffed, trying to make it sound empowered and angry. It was all she had left.
 

“What is it, Sam?”
 

She shook her head.
 

“Sam. Just tell me. Please just tell me.”
 

“I’m not pregnant.”
 

It was out, the probability wave finally collapsed for good.
 

“How can you not be pregnant?”
 

“By not being pregnant!” Sam wiped her eye, furious that the tear was there at all.
 

“Did you take another test? Maybe it’s wrong.”
 

“I went to the doctor this afternoon. It was one of my errands.”
 

He sighed, now settling back. “Oh,” he said. Sam hated that she took satisfaction from watching him slammed by the news as hard as she had been. “But the home tests … ”
 

“I took five. I knew they aren’t always reliable, that’s why I used them all. And there was more: I was also puking in the mornings, which is why I got the tests in the first place. Hell, I was developing cravings. Or so I thought, anyway. The doctor said that was probably psychosomatic. I had decided I was pregnant, so my body tried to comply.”
 

Zach settled back. “Are you OK?”
 

Sam reached for a tissue and loudly blew her nose. “Apparently not.”

Zach started to say something, then closed his mouth. She’d seen him do it over and over and over throughout the time they’d been together. Usually, she was proud when he did it. Zach didn’t have quite the propensity for the wrong words at the wrong time like a lot of men. Zach seemed to understand what others didn’t: sometimes, the wrong things were all you could say, and sometimes, silence was the only right response. But this time, seeing Zach choke back his words only fueled her anger. It felt almost patronizing.
 

“Just say it, Zach.”

He sighed, now scooted back onto the chair behind the ottoman, leaning into it, hands up on the arms, flapped in resignation.
 

“Well, I was going to say maybe it’s not that bad. You were never pregnant to begin with, right? So, it’s not like a miscarriage. You’re healthy. And if we want, we can try again.” Then Zach finally did the wrong thing, cracking a smile and adding, “And again and again and again.” The second his attempt to thaw the ice failed, he curled back into himself like a dog in fear of a beating.
 

“We could try again,” she said. Repeating his words, not making a statement of possibility.

But that was where they’d started, wasn’t it? For years, they had discussed starting a family some day. They were both only 25; they weren’t even remotely too far along to do so — any time over the next decade. But they hadn’t tried, even though they could have. There was always a reason. Sam’s career. Zach’s need to focus on his art, if he ever hoped to break through. High-stress jobs in Portland. The move to Memphis, and new jobs here. There was never time, and family always something they tabled. But Zach and Sam had all of their years ahead of them; they could wait another two or three or five or eight years, settle in, find out what this new life wanted to become, then have kids. So, why had that option felt so wrong?
 

Sam had been pondering a creeping truth with a growing horror while waiting for Zach to return. Sam had a sneaking suspicion that having a baby later would be like switching to an alternate road too many miles from the fork. The longer you stayed on one road, the harder it was to switch. And, Sam suspected, she and Zach were on diverging roads. Time would stretch their gulf.

“Yes. We could try again.”
 

“I don’t know, Zach. This past week was great. The best ever. But it was all based on a lie. Doesn’t that bother you?”
 

“It wasn’t a lie. It was a misunderstanding.”
 

Sam sighed. It was a thin line. The thought of a baby had renewed them as a couple. They’d been hot and romantic, playful and close. She had even pulled up her old book on her computer — the one Sam had promised she would publish but never had — and had toyed with the idea of putting it out now to surprise him. But of course, it wasn’t just about him. It was about her. If anything, it was about him inspiring her to create, to put a life out into the world. And in turn, it was about her pleasing him by allowing him to contribute, to offer life by giving something to her.
 

But didn’t it seem wrong that it had taken a pregnancy (real or not) to make the past week’s good feeling possible? Shouldn’t they be enough with only each other? Sam should be a woman first, a wife second, and a mother third. Each step in that chain required the preceding step. If Sam wasn’t a fully realized woman, she couldn’t be a fully realized wife. She couldn’t give her best love to a child if she didn’t first have an intense love for her husband. Not if she wanted to stay married.