Thursday Night Distraction

I want to start by saying I'm twenty-eight years old, I've been married for five years, and I spend my weekdays telling other couples how to fix their marriages, which is the kind of irony that would be funny if it didn't keep me up at night. My name is Sheila, I live on Maple Street in Denver, and last Thursday I did something I'm still not sure I regret. My husband Jacob is twenty-nine and works IT for a hospital downtown, which means late shifts three nights a week, and those nights used to feel cozy and are now just long. I work from home as a couples therapist, which means my living room is my office, which means the worn gray sofa where I sat that Thursday has heard more honest conversation than I've ever given my own husband.

The video call ended at six forty, some couple named Rory and Maria arguing about money for the fourth session in a row, and I closed the laptop and sat there in the quiet with my wine getting warm. Nothing dramatic had happened that day, no fight with Jacob, no big anniversary coming up, nothing you could point at and say there, that's why. It was just the sameness of it, the same dinner at seven, the same show at eight, the same routine that I could recite like a script, and I'd been feeling it for months as a gradual deflation. I finished the wine and poured another and looked out the window at the driveway next door, where Ivan's truck sat gleaming under the porch light.

Ivan is twenty-six, he moved in two years ago, and he's the kind of athletic that comes from actually working, a landscaper with forearms and a laugh you can hear through the walls. He's single, he's brought us cookies at Christmas, and he's never once been anything but friendly, so when I picked up my phone on a whim and typed hey neighbor, you doing anything tonight, I told myself it was just boredom talking. I stared at the message for a full minute before I sent it, and then I stared at the ceiling and waited, like someone passing a note in class, which is a comparison I'd be embarrassed to make out loud.

Three dots appeared almost right away. "Not a thing, actually. Why, you need something moved?" I typed back, no heavy lifting, just bored. And he wrote, "say no more, I've got beer," and I sat there holding my phone against my chest like a girl in a movie, telling myself we were just going to drink a beer and talk about the weather.

* * *

He knocked at seven fifteen with a six-pack of the cheap kind I actually like, wearing a flannel shirt with the sleeves pushed up, and I noticed right away that I'd changed out of my work sweater into the soft gray one Jacob always says looks good on me, and I noticed that I'd noticed, which should have been a warning. "Evening, Mrs. Therapist," he said, holding up the six-pack, and I laughed and told him if he called me that again I was charging him a session rate. "Deal, I'll pay in beer," he said, and stepped past me into the living room, smelling like cut grass and the cold outside air.

We ended up on the couch with the laptop pushed aside, and we did not talk about anything interesting, we talked about his truck brakes, my terrible neighbors on the other side, the Nuggets game, the way the HOA keeps sending letters about his lawn. But the whole time there was this low current running under the small talk, the kind of thing I professionally recognize and personally had never felt, where every accidental brush of his knee against mine took up all the space in my head. He sat close, closer than the couch required, and I didn't move away, and he had to notice that I didn't move away.

"Jacob working late again?" he asked, around his third beer, and I said till at least eleven, Thursday's his long night, and I heard my own voice come out lighter than I meant it to. "Must get lonely, big house, one lady," he said, looking at me, really looking, the way clients look at the wall behind me when they're working up to a confession. "I manage," I said, and took a sip of beer to have something to do with my mouth. "I bet you do," he said, and his knee was against mine again, and this time I was pretty sure it wasn't an accident.

I could feel the exact shape of the decision I was making, the way you can feel a stair in the dark under your foot before you commit your weight to it. Jacob trusted me. I had a ring on my finger I'd said vows over five years ago. And I was sitting here with a twenty-six-year-old neighbor whose beer was going warm on the coffee table, and my whole frame was leaning toward him like he was a fire on a cold night, and I was not one bit confused about what was happening. I was just deciding whether to do it anyway.

"Sheila," he said, and my name in his mouth sounded different than it does in Jacob's, lower and slower. "Tell me to go home and I'll go home. I mean that. I'll finish my beer on the porch and I'll go." I will be honest, which is a thing I never say in here, but for one second I thought about the sofa and the laptop and the ring and the eleven o'clock headlights in the driveway, all of it in one flash. Then I thought about the tire leak, the slow hiss of the last two years, and I turned toward him on the couch.

"I don't want you to go home," I said, and my voice came out steadier than I had any right to expect. "Not yet anyway."

He set his bottle down on the coffee table, deliberate, like he was putting a period at the end of something, and then he reached up and touched my jaw with two fingers, gentle, giving me one last inch of room to pull back, and I didn't take it. He kissed me, soft at first, and I felt it go through me as the first swallow of a drink on an empty stomach would, and I kissed him back before I'd even decided to, my hand finding the front of that flannel shirt and holding on. He tasted like cheap beer and he kissed like he had all night, unhurried, and my carefully stacked reasons were sliding off the shelf one by one and I watched them go without reaching for a single one.

We broke apart long enough to breathe and he looked at me with his forehead still close to mine. "Last chance to kick me out," he said, and I could feel him grinning. "Get over here," I said, and pulled him back in, and his hand slid up into my hair, and somewhere in the back of my head a small professional voice noted that I was going to have to think about this eventually, but that voice could wait, because Jacob wasn't due home until eleven, and it was barely eight.

* * *

We came up for air around eight-forty, and by then my sweater was half off already, one shoulder bare where he'd pushed the collar down, and his flannel was unbuttoned to the third button because my hands had been busy without any authorization from me. The lamp was still on. Some part of my brain kept ticking over that, the lamp being on, the curtains open, the whole lit-up living room of it, and the bigger part of my brain did not care one bit.

"Come here," I said, and I took his hand, and I put it on my breast, my own hand over his, pressing it there through the last bit of the sweater, because I wanted it done, wanted it plainly, no guessing games. He made a low sound against my neck and his thumb moved, finding me through the fabric, and my back arched into it before I could even pretend to be cool about anything.

"God, Sheila," he said, against my ear, and pulled the sweater up and over, and there I was in my bra on my own worn gray couch with a man I'd only ever waved at over the fence, and my heart was loud but it wasn't fear, it was the other thing, the thing I'd been missing.

I got the rest of his buttons. The flannel came off his shoulders and underneath he was all warm skin and the flat hard plane of a guy who hauls mulch bags for a living, and I ran my hands over his chest like I was checking the work, and it checked out fine. He reached behind me and had the bra unhooked in one try, which, honestly, better than Jacob managed on a good night, and then his mouth was at my neck and his hand was full of me and I was making noises I'd have been embarrassed about if I'd had the spare attention.

"That's, yes, like that," I heard myself say, when his mouth found my nipple, and he laughed low against my skin, not mean, just pleased, and kept on doing exactly that while I held the back of his head. Two years of my body humming at half volume and now this, a young man's warm mouth and his free hand working my other breast, and I thought, wildly, unprofessionally, that I should prescribe this to about half my caseload.

* * *

At some point his hand slid down my stomach and rested at the waistband of my jeans, fingers curled under but not going further, waiting, and that little bit of patience undid me more than anything so far.

"You can," I said. "Yes!"

He worked the jeans down my hips and I kicked them off onto the floor next to his dropped flannel, and then there was nothing much left between us except a pair of underwear and a decision I'd already made, and he kissed me again, slower now, and I felt him hard against my thigh through his khakis, big enough that I noticed, and I noticed that I noticed.

"Take these off," I told him, tugging at his belt, and he stood up right there in my living room and did it, pushing everything down, and he was thick and ready and standing in my lamplight like he had no shame about it at all, which he didn't, and I sat there on the couch looking up at him feeling like the cat that got into the cream and the canary both.

"Come sit down," I said, and he did, back on the couch beside me, and I put my hand around him, and he was hot and heavy in my palm, and I watched his head tip back against the cushions.

"Christ," he said, breath coming out of him slow. "You don't have to..."

"I know I don't have to," I said, and slid off the couch onto my knees between his legs. "I want to. That's the difference."

And here is the part I have thought about every day since, the part that surprised me more than anything else that night, which is that I was eager. I went down on him on my own living room floor with the curtains open and my husband's headlights three hours away, and I was not doing it out of obligation or payback or any of the grim reasons women in my office describe, I was doing it because I wanted to, badly, had apparently been wanting to for years without knowing it, and my mouth was on him and my hand was working what my mouth couldn't, and I was enjoying myself like it was dessert.

"Oh my god," Ivan said, and his hand came down to my hair, not pushing, just resting there, holding it back off my face, considerate even now. "Sheila, holy, you're so..."

He didn't finish it. I didn't need him to. I took him deeper and heard him groan, a real groan, the kind you can't fake, and something in me lit up like a struck match, because I have not been told I was good at