Midnight Sommelier - Anne Malcom Page 0,42

but good things about David. Not while I was sitting in our home—our kids’ home. But she was right. It was hard having your husband die and not being able to say a bad word about him without feeling and looking like a deplorable person.

“Sometimes, I would look at him, and he’d catch me by surprise,” I said, swirling the last sip of my wine in the glass. “Like I’d see him, not as my husband, the father of my children, the man I’d been sleeping next to for the past twelve years, but as a stranger. Or he’d be making love to me and I’d stare up at him and scare myself. Like who was this man inside me? I felt like I’d picked someone off the street and dragged him into my life.” I took the last sip. “And it wasn’t in a good way. He hadn’t changed, of course. Men rarely do that. So why was it that he felt so foreign to me? It started to happen after a couple of years. Sporadically. Once or twice every few months at first. But leading up to his death, it was more like once a week.” I stared at her. “I don’t know why I’m saying all of this. Am I trying to justify the relationship I had with my husband in order to excuse what’s happening now?”

“What’s happening now?” she asked. No judgement. Of course not. That wasn’t her style.

“Nothing.” I said it quickly, too quickly. She spotted the lie.

“How was the sex?” Marley asked. “With David,” she added, with only a hint of knowing.

I raised my brow at her. “Isn’t it, I don’t know, a little passé to talk about my sex life with my now deceased husband?” It still hurt to say things like that, even with the year’s distance, even with the second bottle of wine as a buffer. There’s no buffer big or thick enough to numb the sting of referring to David as deceased.

My tone was light, though. I almost tricked myself.

But not Marley. She was far too perceptive for her own good.

“Well, plenty of wives talk about their current and ex-husband’s sexual prowess behind their backs. It’s a tale as old as time itself.”

I tried to glare at Marley, but, well, she had a point.

“Come on,” she urged. “You’re allowed to take him off that pedestal, you know. As the widow, it’s not your responsibility to turn him into the patron saint. You’re allowed to talk about his shortcomings.”

“How do you know the sex conversation would be talking about his shortcomings?” I challenged.

“Because you wouldn’t have reacted the way you did if the sex was good,” she shot back.

I sighed. “The sex was good,” I said. And it wasn’t a lie. “We even had times when it was great.” Without wanting to, my eyes crept over in the direction of the house next door before I forced them back. What was wrong with me? “David was a very introverted guy. Sensitive. Of course not on the surface. He still wanted to embody all of the traditional pillars of masculinity.” I laughed. “He was traditional that way. But he felt deeper than he let on. Struggled with the pressures of his job, expectations he thought the world had for him.” I sipped my wine. “He couldn’t just turn all that off. That’s not the kind of guy he was. And, well, if he couldn’t turn it off, he couldn’t fully focus on sex.”

My mind crept back to the darker corners of my memories. Things I’d been ashamed of. Needs I’d hidden because they didn’t match up with David’s.

“I know he wanted to be that crazy passionate man who would grab me, press me up against a wall, and take charge. But...” I trailed off. “That stuff isn’t really real, is it? There were times, before the kids most often, where we had it. But we were married. Parents. Had full-time jobs. And there’s a reality that comes with that. Sex and passion wears away. That’s never meant to be a forever thing. Love, commitment. Friendship. That’s what would’ve got us there.” I said all of this with a certainty that I couldn’t exactly feel.

If David had survived, who knew? Maybe things would’ve changed. I didn’t think so. But I knew we would’ve stayed together. Sex likely would’ve waned more. I’d learn to bury all those desires, tell myself they weren’t important. I’d read my romance novels, and when David was dead asleep,