Confessions from the Quilting Circle - Maisey Yates Page 0,41

to even feel the kind of joy that I used to feel when he looked at me. I tried to talk to him, but you can’t talk to someone who isn’t going to talk back. You can’t fix what someone else doesn’t think is broken. And I... I felt that thing again. When I met Michael.”

“Michael,” Rachel said. The word had a strange weight to it. Anna looked over at her sister and saw that the tips of her ears were red.

It reminded her that even though they were talking now, it didn’t mean everything was fine. It didn’t mean it was a smooth path.

“Yes. He made me feel beautiful, Rachel. And everything he did felt so good. And he hasn’t called me since Thomas walked in on us.”

“Thomas walked in on you?” Rachel’s movements stilled again.

It was Anna’s turn for her ears to turn red. “Not like that. But we were...just coming out of the bedroom. Thomas was looking for me...

“It was awful. But I can’t go back, and on some level that’s a relief. If I had taken it to the edge, or if it had happened in a different way, then I would have... It wouldn’t have gone this far. He would have wanted to fix it and I don’t know what I would have done. But now... There’s no choice, is there?”

“You said that you didn’t... That he didn’t...”

“Oh, are you talking about the sex?”

“Explain that to me,” Rachel said.

Anna shook her head. “I mean, I can. But there’s nothing really to explain. It became more and more infrequent, until...basically nothing. Not anymore. And I wanted to fix it, and he told me that I cared too much about the things of this world.” She huffed a breath and tried to do something about the shards of glass in her chest. “What does that say about me, Rachel? I would go to bible studies, and the women would all be giggling, and talking about their husbands wanting sex even though they were tired, and acting like it was the worst thing in the world that they wanted that from them. I knew that whatever Thomas was doing wasn’t some Christian, pious purity thing. I knew my sex drive wasn’t a sin. I knew it because I was surrounded by women in the church who had happy, healthy marriages with lots of sex. And I... Look, he never wanted it all that much. What I thought was restraint prior to marriage turned out to be...disinterest. But it became nothing. Nothing. Everybody is always going on and on about how much men want sex, and how much they need it. And if he doesn’t, then what’s wrong with me?”

She’d never told anyone else this. And the words felt like a rope thrown out to Rachel. And Anna could only hope she’d grab on, that she’d let it connect them.

“I... I don’t know what to say.”

Roll. Fold. Roll. Fold.

“I understand that me standing here and complaining to you about a lack of sex is... Maybe it’s not fair. Because I get that you had to make a marriage work without it.”

“It’s different,” Rachel said, and the vehemence in her voice told Anna she’d grabbed onto that rope. “It had nothing to do with the lack of care, or lack of interest in me. And I know that. It was medically difficult. And then...not happening. And, yeah, on a physical level I miss that. But I missed it from him. Because I missed the closeness that we had. The love that we have between us. It’s because we had intimacy that I miss it, and I don’t just miss it in a general sense.”

“Well, I wanted it. And when Michael showed up, and he started flirting with me... For the first time I thought maybe I wasn’t the problem.”

“Why didn’t you talk to any of your friends about this?”

“How?” She turned to face Rachel fully. “How do you talk to any of your friends from church about how their pastor won’t...? That I feel like he doesn’t love me. That I’m so lonely, and my entire heart feels like a dry desert. Michael showed up and it was like water refreshing me, reviving me. For the first time in so long.”

She turned away again, staring intently at the pastry dough. “I wanted to keep it to myself. I didn’t want to talk to anyone about it, because I knew that what I was doing was wrong. I knew if I