The big bang

Clara's POV 

I heard them before I even got the front door fully open.

"Ride me, baby... yeah, just like that, that's good…"

I stood still on the threshold, my keys still in my hand, the evening air still cool on my back. My brain did what it always does when confronted with something unbearable… it stalled. 

I tried to find another explanation for the sounds. A television left on. A phone call. Anything.

"Ahhh ….. just like that…."

The moan that followed was low, guttural and thick with pleasure. It was my husband's voice, drenched in desire, a desire he had never, not once in four years of marriage, directed at me.

I closed the front door quietly behind me and stood in the hallway of the home I had helped decorate, the home I had filled with throw pillows and scented candles and fresh flowers every Sunday, trying to convince myself it was a home. My heels were silent on the marble floor as I moved toward the staircase.

"You've got such a slick tongue, yes….ah, just like that, yes, just like that…good girl"

What the fuck!

I pressed a hand flat against the wall to steady myself. 

I told myself to turn around, you know, walk back out the door. To get in my car and drive somewhere and not think about what was happening on the other side of that bedroom door.

But I didn't, instead I climbed the stairs. The sounds grew louder and more explicit. His breathing was ragged, punctuated by low grunts of pleasure. 

 I had spent four years aching for sounds like that from him and receiving nothing but silence and the cold press of his back turned toward me in bed.

I reached the top of the stairs. The bedroom door was slightly ajar, a sliver of warm lamplight spilling into the hall.

"Oh baby, you make me go crazy…"

His voice was hard with desire, breathless and hungry. I pushed the door open, the scene hit me like a physical blow.

The bitch was bent forward over my dresser…. my dresser, with my perfume bottles and my jewelry box and the framed photo of my late mother — her palms flat on the surface, her hair fanned across the mirror. Her dress was bunched around her waist, and she was looking at her own reflection with half-lidded satisfaction while my husband of four years stood behind her, his hands gripping her hips, driving into her with slow, deliberate force.

He was still in his suit trousers, his shirt was open at the collar. He looked more present in that moment than I had seen him in years.

He pumped into her steadily, each thrust punctuated by a low grunt, his fingers tightening on her waist as he pulled her back against him. She arched, tilted her hips, and moaned his name and he rewarded her with a rough, satisfied groan that I felt like a knife between my ribs.

He didn't look up, never sensed me standing in the doorway of our bedroom, watching my marriage disintegrate in real time. He just kept going — pumping and grinding and losing himself inside a woman who wasn't his wife — while I stood there holding my handbag like a fool.

I stepped back and walked back downstairs in a fog. I sat on the bottom step and stared at the front door without seeing it.

This wasn't the first time. The tabloids had been whispering about Joe Pritchett for years, the college girls, the business trips that ran too long, the faint smear of lipstick I'd once found on his collar that he'd explained away with a single cold look. I had chosen to believe him every time because the alternative was too painful to hold.

But this? In our house, in our bedroom, on my dresser. This was too much.

I thought about the girl I had been when I first met Joe, twenty-two years old, both my parents were freshly buried after dying in a car crash. The grief was so raw it had left me hollow and Joe had found me in that hollowness and filled it with beautiful things. 

An apartment in the city, designer clothes, security. He was older, successful and then I thought he adored me. I had mistaken his attention for love and mistaken his possessiveness for passion. I had married a man who saw me as furniture.

My phone buzzed on the step beside me, it was Emma, my best friend calling.

I almost let it ring. But Emma had a radar for my pain that defied all logic, and if I didn't pick up, she would be at my door in twenty minutes with a bottle of wine and murder in her eyes.

"Hello." My voice came out wrong, it was too thin.

"Whoa, whoa, whoa." Emma's voice dropped. "Hold on, Clara. Have you been crying? Don't you dare say no, I can hear it. Is it that son of a bitch? What the hell has he done this time….you know what, I'm coming over right now. I'm going to walk into that house and punch the crap out of him, I swear to God…."

Despite everything, despite the wreckage sitting quietly above me in my own bedroom, I almost smiled. Emma had been furious on my behalf for years. She had never once hidden what she thought of Joe.

"Emma." I kept my voice steady. "I'm fine. Don't come over."

"You are the world's worst liar and we both know it."

"Is Bryan's game still on tonight?" I asked, changing the subject.

“Yeah. Seven o'clock. Why? You're not thinking of missing it, right?"

"I wouldn't miss it." Bryan, Emma's son, my godson, the twelve-year-old who had appointed himself my personal cheerleader, would never forgive me if I skipped his game. 

"Clara." Emma's voice went soft. "Whatever he did, you don't have to protect him, okay? You don't have to protect any of this."

I didn't answer that. "I'll meet you there at seven."

I hung up before she could say anything else.

I stood up, smoothed my skirt and picked up my handbag.

I wasn't going to cry. Tonight I was going to watch my godson tear up that court, drink something cold with my best friend, and spend a few hours not being Mrs. Joe Pritchett.