Have your parents pick up Donnie, I text Sean on the way home. I need to talk to you about something and it’s not good.
He texts back right away. Are you okay?
I don’t bother to lie. No, I’m not. I don’t want Donnie home to see this.
Sean doesn’t reply for several minutes. Then all he texts back is, OK.
By the time I arrive back home, the apartment is quiet, and I know Donnie is at Sean’s parents’. Even in my blind fury, I know it wouldn’t be good for him to overhear the fight Sean and I are about to have. He might be old enough to understand some of the accusations I’m going to make.
Sean is waiting for me in the living room. He stands up the moment I walk through the door and hurries toward me.
“Jazz? Are you okay?” But he stops before he reaches me. Something about the look on my face must tell him that I do not want to be comforted right now. I want to rage.
“I was fired.” The words sound heavy and flat as I say them. Sean’s eyes grow wide, but otherwise he doesn’t move. “I was fired, and they might be pressing charges as well.”
“Wh-what?” Sean’s mouth has fallen open. “What happened?”
“I had a fight with Julie.”
“A fight? Why might they bring charges?”
“I assaulted Julie,” I correct myself. Then I laugh, a littl manically.
Sean goes very pale. “Did she find out you slept with her husband? I told you not to do it, Jazz! I told you it could put your job and our financial security at risk!”
“She already knew. I didn’t have to tell her.”
Sean blinks. “So her husband told her. Still, it amounts to the same thing. You shouldn’t have done it. Jesus, Jazz, I don’t understand why you had to do something so foolish, just for your own gratification. Fuck!” He turns and throws a punch into the back of the sofa, then leans over it, hanging his head. “Fuck! What are we going to do? We have a baby on the way, and now just one income.”
“We’ve had one income for a long time, while you were unemployed,” I sneer.
Sean turns back around to face me. “You know that my income is half of yours. How are we supposed to survive on the salary of a bar manager alone? With two children? And this flat? We were looking at bigger houses, now we’re going to have to look at smaller ones.”
“Well maybe you should have thought about that before you put my job and our financial security at risk by sleeping with Julie.”
The silence that follows this is absolute. Sean stands, frozen, by the couch, staring at me. I’m not even sure what I want him to say. Do I want an apology? A denial? For him to fall on his knees in front of me and beg my forgiveness? Because if he does, I won’t give it. And that would be the most satisfying feeling of all; to deny forgiveness to the person who needs it most.
It’s a lot how I feel about myself these days: unable to forgive myself for all my mistakes.
“So she told you,” Sean says at last. “She promised me she wouldn’t.”
“You fucking asshole!” My scream reverberates around the room, and the next second I’ve grabbed a chair from the dining room table and flung it as hard as I can onto the ground. It smashes against the floor and breaks, the wood cracking and splintering. “You slept with the woman I hate most in the world! How could you do that to me? WHY would you do that to me? Do you secretly hate me too, Sean? Do you resent that I was the breadwinner, that your wife was the breadwinner, while you were unemployed? Did you want to feel like a real man again? Or do you just not care about my feelings AT ALL?”
Sean puts his head in his hands. For a moment, I think he’s crying. Then he looks back up, and there’s a desperation there that scares me deeply. “I was just trying to do what you wanted, Jazz!” He shouts. “You wanted to be in the Weekend Club! You wanted to sleep with other people. You wanted to spice up our marriage! I would have been happy just continuing on as we had been, being a happy, normal family.”
I take a threatening step toward my husband. “Don’t you dare put this on me!” I snarl. “You wanted this as well. You agreed to it. You were excited. Enthusiastic. Don’t you dare try to rewrite the narrative now, to make it suit you.”
“Well what was I supposed to say? My wife wanted to fuck other men!”
“You wanted to fuck other women too, you fucking hypocrite!”
Sean stares at me, incredulous. “I’m the hypocrite?! You’re the one who fucked Julie’s husband. But you’re angry at me for fucking her?! When you did it first?”
“Fucking Mark was supposed to hurt Julie!” I scream. “Not the person I’m married to; not the person I’m supposed to love most in the world!” I take a deep, shuddering breath, and try to restore some equilibrium to my system. It doesn’t work. “You purposefully slept with someone I hated, someone you knew would hurt me. And you knew it! That’s why you asked her not to tell you!”
Sean throws his hands up into the air. “Well maybe I wanted to do something as selfish and stupid as you were doing! I mean, have you ever stopped to think about how your actions affect me? Sleeping with your boss’s husband, sleeping with your friends’ husbands… it could ruin our lives! It is ruining our lives!”
“You’re the one who ruined our lives,” I spit at him. “You’re the one who slept with the last person you knew I’d ever want you to. You betrayed me, Sean. In the worst way possible.”
“You’re unbelievable!” Sean shouts. His fist comes down now on the wall, and several picture frames on the mantle rattle. “Ever since we started the Weekend Club, you’ve disapepared! You haven’t been present in this family or in our marriage. You’ve completely taken me and Donnie for granted. You and I haven’t had sex until recently. I mean, come on Jazz! You think I betrayed you by sleeping with Julie? You betrayed me by checking out of our family so that you could run around the country having sex with random men. You’ve been so selfish, so preoccupied, and I’ve felt completely abandoned. So yeah, if I want to find a way to enjoy myself in all of this, I have the right to do that! Because you don’t seem to care about my feelings at all. Why should I care about yours?”
“And you think I don’t have reason to be selfish?” I explode, stamping my foot onto the ground with all my might. “I might have been checked out since the Weekend Club started, but you’ve been checked out for months before that! After you lost your job, you stopped trying at all. And you saddled me with all the financial pressure rof keeping our family afloat.”
“I was fired!” Sean yells. His face is turning bright red. “Have you ever thought about how depressed and humiliated I must have felt?”
“And yet you didn’t look for a new job!” I scream. “You just sat around the house being morose. Meanwhile, I’ve been putting up with a job I hate and a manager who bullies me, all without your help, because I’m the sole earner in the family. So yeah, maybe I did get a bit selfish with the Weekend Club. But I deserved it. I deserve a real man who is going to take care of things, who is going to support me, sweep me off my feet. A man like Jason.”
“Jason?” Sean scoffs. “What does that alcoholic tornado have to do with this?”
“Because I’ve been sleeping with him.”
There is a deafening silence as this news hits Sean. “Wh-what?” He stammers. “You’re having an affair?”
“No, I’m not having an affair,” I snap. “He’s part of the Weekend Club. We matched. And I spent my last two dates with him.”
“Wh--but you’re not supposed to do that! You’re supposed to go on different with different people. Not start dating your ex again!”
“Well Jason was the person I wanted to go on the dates with! He took me to Paris on my last date, for the whole weekend, and it was the most romantic experience of my entire life. He bought me an entirely new wardrobe--he’s rich now, a defense attorney--and took me to dinner in Montmarte and then to the Moulin Rouge. He did things for me that you never have, even when we were first dating. He made me feel seen and appreciated and not stressed out for the first time in months. Best of all? He made me feel like I didn’t have to be the responsible one, which was pretty nice, after months of feeling like I had two children, instead of a child and a husband.”
Sean is staring at me, open-mouthed. He doesn’t seem capable of speech. Finally, he manages to whisper, “I can’t believe you had sex with him. You knew I wouldn’t like it! Jason isn’t just some strange, or even friend’s husband, to show you something new and exciting. You loved him!”
“Well, he certainly showed me adventure. And the best sex of my life.” It’s a cruel thing to say, but I no longer seem to care if I hurt my husband. I want him to feel as much pain as I am currently feeling.
But that’s when the fight goes out of him. He stares at me, then he sinks slowly onto the couch. “The baby…” he mutters. “The baby is his, isn’t it?”
I don’t answer. All the air seems to have gone out of my lungs. Sean seems to take this as assent. He lowers his head into his hands. For a long time, he sits there, and I am pretty sure he’s crying. I can’t move; can’t think; can’t say anything to comfort him.
At last, Sean looks up. “I’m such a fool,” he says. “Months of no sex, then suddenly you want to try for a baby. I should have known right away. But I trusted you. That’s the thing about love. It makes you blind.”
He stands up, crosses the sitting room, and pushes past me.
“Where are you going?” I ask, as I turn and watch him grabbing his wallet and keys from the ceramic bowl on the hall table where he always keeps them. These familiar gestures; are they all that is left of love?
“I don’t know,” he says. His voice sounds hollow and emotionless. “Out. To think.”
“Please, please don’t go,” I hear myself saying. I grab at Sean’s shirt, to try to keep him with me, but he wrenches it out of my grasp. “Please, Sean, I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry, I didn’t know what to do. I’ve made a terrible mistake, and everything in my life fell apart because of it, I just didn’t want to hurt you, I couldn’t bear the thought of hurting you. Please, please don’t leave. Please don’t go.” I am crying, I realise. All the anger and fear are leaking out of me in the form of tears, and suddenly I am filled with shame and guilt like I never have been. I can’t believe I assaulted Julie. I can’t believe I got fired. And all because of this terrible secret I’d been carrying inside myself. All because of my own shame and self-loathing.
“Let me go, Jazz,” Sean says, backing away from me. He fumbles with the door handle, then opens it, and practically falls out into the hallway. Before I can follow him, he slams the door behind him.
Slowly, I sink to my knees. My tears have become racking sobs, and for long minutes, I kneel on the floor of our apartment, rocking back and forth, sobbing. Everything is lost. My job. My reputation. My moral compass. My husband. My marriage. Maybe even my child, if Sean decides to divorce me and take full custody.
Everything is lost, and it’s all my fault. I have no one else to blame. Not Julie. Not Sean. Not even Jason. It’s all me. I’m the one who made these terrible decisions and ended up here, having hurt the person I love most in the world.
Sometime later--I’m not sure how long--I drag myself off the bed and to the sofa. There, I lay in a fetal position, and wait for Sean to return. The tears have stopped, and the saltwater leaves crusted stains on my cheeks. I don’t bother to wipe them away or wash them off. The sky slowly turns from bright to softer and warmer, and I guess it is now mid-afternoon. Sean has been gone for several hours.
I’m just starting to drift off when I hear a sharp knock at the door. It jolts me awake, and I sit bolt upright. For a moment, I think it’s Sean. Then I remember he has his keys. I make my way to the door and am about to answer it when I freeze. What if it’s Jason? The thought turns my stomach. Maybe he’s stalking me, waiting for when my husband is gone, and now is going to try to force himself on me?
As quietly as I can, I check through the peephole. It isn’t Jason. It’s two police officers, grim expression on their faces.
My heart sinks. Julie, or perhaps Steve, is pressing charges. They’ve come to arrest me. I could pretend I’m not here, but then they’ll come back, maybe when Donnie here, and he’ll have to watch his mother getting arrested. It’s better to answer now, to get this over with.
With a heavy heart, I pull open the door.
“Hello?” I say, rather tentatively. “How can I help you?”
Both officers are male. The taller one, who is blonde, clears his throat. “Are you Jazz Jones?”
“Yes, that’s me,” I force myself to say. My heart is pounding in my throat, and I feel like I might be sick.
“Mrs. Jones, we have some bad news. About an hour ago, your husband Sean Jones was killed in a hit-and-run about three blocks from here. We’re going to need you to come with us, so that you can identify the body.”
I almost laugh. Is this a joke? Has Julie devised this as a way to punish me even further, before the cops arrest me? But as I stare between the two cops, who are both gazing at me with pitiful expression, I realise, with a sickening jolt, that this is not a joke.
My husband is dead. And this, too, is my fault.
