you fucking—Don’t fucking tell me you care about me!
Sloane moved back as though she’d been slapped. She nodded. There was a long and haunted quiet.
I believe you, Jenny said eventually. I believe that you care about me, that you feel bad about what you did. I have to tell you, this is the first time in a year that I haven’t wanted to kill you in your sleep. I fantasized about slitting your throat while you slept. And this is the first time I haven’t felt that.
Sloane thought of her children at school. She thought it was possible this woman could kill her right here in the car. She thought she might not fight back as much as she could, because she deserved it.
Why? Jenny suddenly cried. Her face was screwed in all directions. She placed her hand on the dashboard to steady herself. What in the fuck is wrong with you?
Sloane felt cold though the heat was on. She heard Jenny say some more things about sisterhood, about women not doing terrible things to one another. It made Sloane feel like a puff of dryer lint. She couldn’t say she didn’t initiate it. That it was Richard and Wes, always. That it wasn’t her desire, but mostly theirs, that she was serving.
She thought of her own fantasy in all this. She wished she could share it with Jenny but knew she couldn’t. In Sloane’s fantasy, she’s standing at her kitchen sink, wearing a butter-colored apron. Her hair is drawn back in a ponytail. The children are playing, quietly, at the table. The light is subdued and yellow. For dinner they have just eaten a roast chicken. The skin of the animal was crackling and underneath the flesh was moist. There were new potatoes and baby carrots from the farm down the road. The restaurant is making money. There is nothing to worry about, nothing to pay off. There is a mess in the kitchen, the kind a good dinner leaves behind. Her husband looks at her from across the room. The expression on his face is frank and wonderful. It’s an expression with bones of its own. He rises and crosses the room, several dishes in hand. The insinuation of his body is enough to move her body out of the way of the sink. He looks her up and down, and he smiles. Then he turns the faucet on, and he begins to wash the dishes. Without having been told.
Sloane couldn’t tell Jenny that she knows how to perform oral sex on a man as if it’s an Olympic sport, that she knows how to study a man’s breaths and adjust her mouth and her motion to match what he needs. She knows what to wear to every kind of dinner, a dress that is powerful, feminine, flowing, and formfitting at once because there is a prescription, there is an exact way to get dressed to get what you want. It’s not about being sexy. It’s about being everything before the man thinks of what he wants.
She could not tell Jenny how very much her own husband wanted her, because was there anything crueler than that? Than telling another woman that you are frankly more loved in the world? She could not say that every morning she wakes up and goes to the sink to brush her teeth. She looks in the mirror. This is the first and most important judgment of her day. If she feels she looks terrible, she blames herself for drinking the night before. You are not young enough, she tells her face, to get away with that. This is the price of being skinny at your age—your sunken, hollow eyes. If you hadn’t starved yourself for so long you would not have lost your cheeks, you superficial idiot.
Richard will come up behind her. He will know what she’s doing and interrupt her self-loathing. If she is holding a gray hair in her hand, he will run his finger along the strand and say that gray is sexy. He will mean it. In the afternoon he will be wearing the shoes she likes him to wear, and flaunt them, because she is more likely to want to have sex in the afternoon than in the morning or at night. He will then lick between her legs for half an hour because that is the only way she can come. He will then be hard enough to fuck her while she is still coming. Yes