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PROLOGUE
MATTIE
There comesa time in everyone’s life that they have to face facts. Right now, as I hear the unmistakable sounds of someone having sex in my own bedroom, I could feel acid burning in the bottom of my stomach. I felt sick because I knew those grunts and I knew that deep voice grunting out “yes” over and over again. I knew the sound the bed made when you lay in the middle and had sex.
My heart knew what my head didn’t want to accept. As I stepped closer, coming down our hallway, I pushed open the door and gazed upon the sight of a woman with long blonde hair riding my husband, his fingers gripping her waist tightly as she bucked back and forth, her hands in her own hair, and her head tilting back in pleasure.
My heart hammered in my chest as I watched my life slip away in that moment. The life I had built, sacrificing everything in the process, all for it to come to a head in this incredibly embarrassing moment. I’d loved Scott for what seemed like forever. We’d been childhood sweethearts, had married early but never truly fought or did that one little ‘break up before we knew we loved each other’ thing. We’d always been together.
And now, I stood here, watching the man I love, the only man I had ever loved, fuck another woman in our bed. A woman who was much sexier and from what I could tell skinnier than I was. I backed out of the room and walked down the hall again, taking a seat at the kitchen bench and waited for it to be over. My heart was beating fast, my stomach churning, the urge to throw up very real but I pushed it back because I didn’t want to lose control of this situation.
I had no idea what I was going to say to him or to her, but I didn’t know what else to do. Now that I had opened the door, I could hear the sounds coming down the hall and into my ears even clearer than I had when I came home.
Not only had I lost my job, but it appears that I would lose my marriage, my house, everything today.
Finally, the sound of them finishing flooded the apartment and I heard the springs of the bed bounce as they got off it.
“Did you leave the door open?” I heard Scott say. She must have mumbled something because that’s when I saw him head into the bathroom. He still hadn’t seen me.
Her blonde hair was being tied up and she was getting dressed. I could smell her perfume from here and suddenly I wondered why I hadn’t been able to smell that before, surely they had done this a million times while I’d been at work. I felt so foolish just sitting here, waiting to face the inevitable.
Scott finished up in the bathroom and I could hear them kissing in the hall. My heart crushed into a million pieces. Did I for some reason want it to be just fucking or was it worse that he was kissing her like he loved her afterward?
Slowly, I heard her heels clicking on my floorboards and she came through to the living area first, followed by him. I sat up on my kitchen stool and her eyes flicked up to me, the smile disappearing as she saw me sitting there. Scott looked up and saw me, his face changing from one of happiness to one of confusion.
“You’re home?”
“Yes, I am. If you say this isn’t what it looks like, I will stab you.”
He put his hands on his hips, unsure of what to say to me. She tried to edge away from the situation until my eyes left Scott and caught her. She stopped in her tracks.
“Look, I’m not the enemy here. You need to sort this out with you two.”
“You’re not the enemy?” I repeated. “You were quite literally the one causing the issue.”
She sighed, rolling her eyes as if this was the last thing she needed to be doing today. “Look, I didn’t sign up for this drama, so I’ll be going.”
She took one last look at me, an odd moment passed between us, her confident smile disappearing for a brief instant before she slid out the door without another word as I rounded on Scott. “How could you do this?”
“I didn’t think you’d find out.”
“And that makes it okay to cheat?”
He ran his hand through his hair, frustrated. “Why are you home anyway?”
“I’m not the one that needs to answer right now, Scott. Why are you cheating on me? I’ve given you everything.”
He sat down at the dinner table, crossing his leg over the other, and looking every bit the calm man I knew him to be. “Not everything.”
“What are you talking about?”
“You can’t give me kids, can you?” he shot off, surprising me. I couldn’t believe he was making his indiscretions about that. The diagnosis had left me in tatters, and he’d picked me back up and told me it didn’t matter about not having kids if we had each other. “A man needs to be a father, Matts.”
I couldn’t speak. I had no words for the first time in my life. He’d really just used that against me? Suddenly, I had the familiar unworthy feeling creep up on me again, the one he had fought to battle in the months after the surgery to save my life. I’d always been told a woman without a child was no woman at all, but in the last year or so, I knew that wasn’t true, yet here, right now, in this situation, I felt like the bad person and not him. The pain ripping through my chest was enough to make me scream.
“And so you sleep with that woman? She’s not the mothering type, Scott.”
“You wouldn’t know, would you?” he shot back. “Look, we can stay married, Matts, I just need to have kids.”
