Chapter 20: Drinks and Confessions

We were both sitting in the car, totally silent. I had both hands on the wheel as we pulled out of our driveway and turned down the street headed to Ryan and Roxie’s. Sarah turned her head, looking out the window, lost in thought.

My stomach was still knotted from the night before, from everything I’d heard and seen and done nothing about. I thought back to a week before we moved into our house; Ryan and I had stayed late and gone out for drinks after work. The bar had been half-empty, the kind of place where the bartender knew Ryan’s order before he sat down. We’d been talking about nothing important—stock options, some bug in the latest build, the usual—until Ryan set his glass down and looked at me over the rim.

“So,” he said, “what about you and Sarah? You two done anything exciting lately?”

I snorted. It came out half laugh, half something uglier. “Exciting. Right. We’ve had sex once in the last month and a half. I’ve tried a couple times since then, but she’s not really into it. So no. Our intimacy issues are still very much continuing.”

Ryan nodded like he’d expected that. “Yeah. Like I told you before, Roxie and I went through something pretty similar after we’d been married about ten years. Got so bad I was starting to worry we might actually end up divorced.”

That landed heavier than I wanted it to. I took a drink and stared at the table. “That’s exactly what I’m worried about. I still love her as much as I ever have—maybe more. But we just ... we haven’t been able to get past the stuff that started after Michael was born—the depression, the hours, the fact that sex turned into something routine, always the same and uncommon. I don’t know how to fix it. What did you guys do?”

Ryan actually looked a little awkward for a second, which was rare. He was usually the guy who walked into a room as if he owned it.

“You’re going to think we’re crazy,” he said. “But we sat down and talked. Really talked. Not the surface stuff. We talked about what turned us on, what we loved about each other, and what we felt was holding us back. We talked about our kinks and fantasies—the stuff we’d never really said out loud to each other because we were both afraid it would change how the other person saw us. Turned out we had a lot more in common than either of us realized. We’d spent almost a decade going through the motions in bed, and then when we were alone we’d been imagining a lot of the same things and never telling each other.”

I raised an eyebrow. “Like what kind of things?”

He hesitated again, then shrugged. “I don’t want to get into everything. But one thing you already know about—we both really love the idea of doing stuff in public and being seen and risking getting caught. Having other people watch. That thrill is a big turn-on for both of us.”

I nodded slowly. It fit with everything I’d seen of them. “That makes sense for you two. I’m sure Sarah has some fantasies she’s never told me, but I seriously doubt exhibitionism is one of them. She’s still the woman who wants the lights off most of the time.”

Ryan laughed. “You never know until you ask. She might surprise you.” He took a drink, then kept going. “Another thing we found out was that she likes showing off and flirting. Which, yeah, obvious. But what you might not know is that she likes doing it in front of me. She loves teasing me and making me jealous. And believe me, I get jealous. I think that’s how a lot of the touching stuff started. She was always handsy, but after we talked, it got more deliberate. Now it’s just who she is. 99% of the time, she doesn’t even mean anything by it. She’s not trying to flirt. I’ve seen you and Sarah both get uncomfortable sometimes. I told her to tone it down a little, but half the time she doesn’t even realize she’s doing it.”