Our Thin Wall Life

*This one came from thinking about how even people who love each other can get lonely in the same bed. I wanted something raw but sweet, with a group scene that felt like healing instead of a performance. Thanks for reading.*

By the time I hit thirty-four I figured I knew everything there was to know about my own marriage. Turns out I didn't know squat. Let me back up a little.

Me and Trey both drive trucks. Have for years. We met on a cross-country route back when I was twenty-four, him riding shotgun for a company my boss subbed work to, and we got married three years later. So we've been hitched seven years now, and most of those years we were lucky. We actually managed to get on the same runs a lot of the time. Two drivers, one rig, tag-team the hours. You'd think that'd make a marriage bulletproof, right? Being locked in a cab together forty hours a week?

Well. It makes for great conversation and terrible privacy, is what it makes for.

Somewhere in the last year or so, the bedroom part of things went stale. Not dead, mind you. Stale. Like bread left on the counter. It was still there, you could still eat it, but nobody was excited about it anymore. We'd get home off a run, shower, fall into bed, and it was the same three moves in the same order we'd done maybe four hundred times. Trey would do his thing, I'd do mine, and we'd both say love you and pass out. Functional! Efficient! About as romantic as a pre-trip inspection.

The worst part was I knew he felt it too. He'd linger sometimes, like he wanted to say something, and then he'd just roll over. And I'd lie there staring at our bedroom door, which doesn't even close all the way anymore, the frame is warped, and think, when did we turn into roommates with really good benefits?

We live in a cramped two-bedroom apartment in a loud part of Memphis. Thin walls. I mean paper thin. We hear every argument the people upstairs have, every motorcycle on the street, and I'm pretty sure they hear us too, which is real motivating for a lively sex life, let me tell you. Living room doubles as the dining room, so there's a card table wedged between the couch and the TV. Cozy. That's the polite word for it.

Anyway. This story really starts on a Thursday night in September, and it starts with beer and cigarettes on our little concrete back patio with the neighbors.

That'd be Michele and Stanley. Michele's thirty-one, works mornings at the diner two blocks over, and she moved in next door two years ago. Stanley's thirty-nine, does night-shift mechanic work, so he's up at weird hours and half the time smells like brake cleaner. We all got friendly the boring way, over shared cigarettes on the patio at eleven at night when nobody can sleep. Which, if you ask me, is the only real way to make friends past thirty.

So that Thursday, Trey and I had just gotten home off a Denver run. Michele was out on her patio when we pulled in, and she hollered over the fence.

"Hey! You two look dead!"

"We are dead," I hollered back. "Come have a beer and be dead with us."

She laughed and went inside to grab Stanley up out of bed early, and ten minutes later the four of us were crammed onto our patio, two lawn chairs and a milk crate, passing a pack of menthols around like it was a party. We're all grown adults, thirty-one on up, but you know how it is when the night's warm and the beer's cold. Giddy. That's the word. Giddy.

Trey was on his second beer when Michele, out of nowhere, goes, "Can I ask you two something? And you can tell me to mind my own business."

"Since when have you ever minded your own business?" I said, and she flicked her cigarette ash at me.

"No, but seriously. You two been together what, ten years? Does it ever feel like..." She waved her hand around, hunting for the word. "Like you're on a bus together? Like roommates?"

And I swear the patio got quiet. Because Trey and I had had that exact conversation, the hard version of it, only two nights before in a truck stop outside Kansas City. I'd finally said it out loud. I said, Trey, I feel like you don't see me anymore. And he said, Sherrie, I was just thinking the same thing about myself.

"Wow," Trey said now, into his beer. "Yeah. Actually. Yeah, it does."

Michele's whole face changed. Like she'd been braced for us to laugh at her. "Oh thank God," she said. "I thought it was just us."

Stanley shifted on the milk crate. He's a big quiet guy, hands like catcher's mitts, and he looked real uncomfortable for a second. Then he said, "It's not just you. Michele and me, we've been... we've been trying to figure out how to say this to each other for months. How'd you two say it?"

"Ugly," I admitted. "In a Denny's parking lot. In Kansas."

That got a laugh out of everybody, which helped, because Lord knows this kind of talk needs a laugh to break it open.

"We do the same thing every time," Michele said. She'd gone quiet and honest, staring at her knees. "Same night, same order, and it's nice, Stanley's never been anything but sweet, but it's like we're both waiting for it to be over so we can say we did it. Does that make sense? I feel crazy saying it, because I love him."

"It makes total sense," I said, and my throat went tight. "That's exactly us. Exactly."

"How long has it been like that for you two?" Stanley asked us.

Trey and I looked at each other. "Year, maybe?" he said. "Year and a half?"

"Two for us," Stanley said. "Since I went to nights. I sleep half her life away."

And then it got real, is what happened. The four of us sat there under that bug light and just talked. Not small talk. Big talk, the kind you're not supposed to have with your neighbors at midnight. Michele said she missed being looked at. Not whistled at, she was real clear about that, she didn't want some creep at the diner, she wanted her own husband to look at her like she was the best thing he'd ever seen. Stanley said he missed being wanted, not just tolerated. Trey surprised me, because I thought he'd clam up, but he said, "I miss being nervous. Remember being nervous? First date, hands shaking?"

"Oh, I remember," I said, and I did. Twenty-four years old, sitting across from him in a truck stop booth, absolutely certain I was going to say something stupid. Best I'd felt in years, honestly.

"I miss that," Trey said. "The wanting to impress part."

"I want that," Michele said, real fast, like she'd been holding it in her chest. "God, I want that so bad. I don't want a new husband. I want my husband back. Does that make sense?"

"It makes perfect sense," I said.

And then Stanley said the thing that changed the whole night. He got quiet, turned his beer can in his big hands a couple times, and said, "You know what's funny? I've actually thought about what it'd take to get that back. Like, actually thought about it. And every idea I come up with is either boring or crazy."

"How crazy we talking?" Trey asked.

Stanley looked at Michele. Michele looked at Stanley. Then Michele looked at me and Trey with a face I couldn't read at all, somewhere between scared and excited, and said, "Well. Now that you ask..."

The bug light buzzed. Somebody's motorcycle went by. I sat there with my heart doing something stupid and thought, well, here we go, I guess.

Stanley took his time. He's not a slow talker because he's dumb, he's a slow talker because he's careful, and I was starting to respect the hell out of it.

"You want to know what my idea was? The boring one or the crazy one?" he said.

"Both," Trey said, fast, like we hadn't both been leaning forward already.

"The boring one is dates. Flowers, dancing, all that. And don't get me wrong, Michele deserves all that." He reached over and squeezed her knee, and she put her hand on top of his, and something about that little move made my chest hurt. "But the real thing, the thing I actually miss?" He rubbed his thumb along the beer can's edge, over and over. "I miss slow. I miss taking an hour to touch my wife. Not even with a goal. Just... learning her again. We haven't done that since before I went to nights. Everything now is quick and quiet so we don't wake nobody, like we're sneaking around in somebody else's house."

Michele made a sound that was half laugh and half something else. "And I feel like a piece of furniture," she said. "Like a nice couch he sits on when he's tired."

"You're not a couch," Stanley said, hurt coming right up through it.

"I know, baby, I know. But that's what it feels like. You come home, I've been up since four at the diner, you've been under a truck all night, and we fall into it because it's Tuesday and that's what Tuesdays are for." She looked at me. "You know what I mean, don't you?"

"Yeah," I said. "I know exactly what you mean."

And here's where it got weird, good weird, the kind you can't take back. Nobody said anything for a minute and the air changed. I can't explain it better than that. The air just got heavier, warmer, like right before a summer storm. All four of us sitting on a concrete patio in a Memphis backyard knowing we were all hungry for the same thing and not one of us knew what to do about it.

Trey's hand was on the arm of his lawn chair, close to mine, and he wasn't looking at me but I could tell he wanted to. So I did the thing I hadn't done in months without thinking about it first. I reached across and touched his cheek. Just that. Turned his face toward me with my fingertips.

"Hi," I said. "There you are."

"Hi, yourself," he said, and his voice cracked a little, and I swear to God my eyes stung.

And the other two watched us. Not rude, not gawking. Watching like two people standing outside a lit window on a cold night. Michele had her hand pressed flat against her sternum and Stanley's jaw had gone tight and I thought, oh. Oh, this is dangerous and wonderful and I don't want it to stop.

"You two want a minute?" Stanley asked, but he didn't move to leave, and nobody answered him.