told me some of this already, but hearing it again – all of the story this time – it’s so painful.”
Quinn is crying again but I can’t look at her, I can’t stare into her eyes, I can’t hold her hand. While I don’t know accurately how I feel, I just know that I don’t feel loved or respected. I feel numb like I did the day I found them together.
“Why didn’t you say something, anything?” I ask her evenly.
“I did,” she replies quietly. “You didn’t want to hear it. You were like talking to a wall. I told you over and over again.”
“Really?” I say sharply. “You told me that you were thinking of sleeping with Wade? I’m pretty sure I’d have remembered that conversation.”
I guess sarcasm is creeping back into my voice, but Grant lets it pass, for now. I don’t know why.
“It was too late by then. I’d have never told you what I was thinking, because I wasn’t thinking. I was confused. I was hurting. And you just weren’t listening.”
“That just sounds like an excuse.”
“It’s not. That’s how it was. I’m sorry, but that’s the truth. I was about to make the biggest mistake of my life, and you weren’t interested in stopping me.”
I hear her words and their meaning cuts me deep, but I know they’re true. Here I am sitting there, with thoughts exploding through my mind, too many to count or register and I have no idea how I feel about them.
“Judd,” Grant says, “you’re feeling something, but you’re not telling us about it.”
“I just told you how I feel: devastated.”
“No. Look at yourself. Your body is telling you something, telling you how you feel and you’re telling us that you’re devastated and it doesn’t match up.”
“What do you mean?”
“Look at yourself. Tell me what your body is saying to you.”
I take a deep breath. I do what I’m told. I don’t know how, but I try. My body is rigid, every muscle is tense. My hands are in tight balls. My face is hot. My breath is fast. My head pounds in time with my heart.
“How do you feel?”
“How should I feel?” I ask them all sharply. “I’ve just heard how my wife lied to me for a whole year, how she was with another man under my nose. I’m angry.”
“At last,” Grant says quietly, but I can barely hear him over Quinn’s sobbing. Mary is at her side, holding her.
“Is this what you want?” I go on, my voice getting gradually louder. “You want us to hurt each other again?”
“I want you to be true to yourself and Quinn. I want you to be honest about how you feel. When you do we can deal with it, all of us, together. Tell me something,” he says evenly, “how do you feel about Quinn’s honesty?”
“What?”
“She’s told you everything, Judd. She’s made herself vulnerable. She’s told you the whole story, even though she knows that you’ll be hurt and get angry, even though she’s afraid that this will be too much for you to bear and this will end you both. How do you feel about that?”
Quinn turns to me, her eyes red, leaking. I bow my head, because I’m suddenly so very ashamed.
“Tell her,” he says to me.
“Damn it,” I say back, looking at Quinn. “It’s brave, I admit that.”
“So honesty needs to be met with honesty.”
“I’m angry at her for doing this, for giving up on us.”
“Is that all? Think about what she said.”
I growl in frustration. “And I’m angry at me, most of all. Because I put us here.”
“Tell her,” Grant says again.
Quinn is still crying but she holds my gaze. I take a deep breath.
“I should have walked through that grief with you. Instead I tried to fix it, which I should have known would not have worked. And then, after all that, I let myself lose you, and that’s the hardest thing of all. I loved you, Quinn, even at that time. I loved you more than anything. But I was just so stupid to let you go. I can’t blame you for what you did, not really, when I think that it was my fault that you were pushed there. And I’m furious at myself for that. You say that you can’t forgive yourself for hurting me - well, I can’t forgive myself for what I did to you. I was the worst husband to you, and I don’t deserve your forgiveness, your love and your trust.”
Quinn pulls herself away from Mary and comes to me. Event though, in some part of my mind, I’m still angry and hurt by what she’s said, by the extent of her betrayal, I can’t deny her. I take her into my arms and she sobs into my chest again, like she did when I first came home. I told her that it was my fault then, but I had only an inkling of the depth of my guilt, but now I know. Now I know how much I had abandoned her, how much I had let her down. And in some ways that was worse than her abandoning me for another man, letting me down in the worst possible way.
“I’m so sorry, Quinn,” I tell her. “Can you ever forgive me?”
“Yes,” she tells me into my shirt that is becoming steadily wet with her tears. “If you can forgive me, for what I did to you, to our marriage.”
We cry together, grieving now, not for our lost boy, but for each other, for the wrongs and the pains that we have caused each other. We grieve for the two years lost and the future that we could have had if only we had stayed strong and true. Grant and Mary sit there quietly, not saying anything, just watching, just listening. Maybe just praying.
We drive back to the city and I’m turning over my thoughts. Quinn is looking out the window in her own space.
She speaks, but she keeps looking through the window: “You’re still angry at me.”
“No.”
“You are, I can tell. We’ve been together for a long time, Judd. I know when you’re angry with me.”
“It’s not with you.”
“Are you sure? After the things I said, I wouldn’t blame you.”
I shake my head but I can’t look at her. “You said what you needed to say. I can’t be angry at you for that.”
“I’m sorry,” she says softly.
“I know. But it still hurts, that’s all.”
“Can we talk about this?”
“Yes, but not now. I’m going to need some time to work all of this out in my head. And, to be honest, I’d rather talk about it when we’re with the Uptons. It’s safer that way.”
“Safer?”
“Grant is that voice that tells me when I’m going too far.”
She nods, looks down at her lap. “I’m just afraid that’s all.”
“About what?”
“I’m afraid that you won’t love me anymore, after what I did, after what I said. If we talk about it, maybe I’ll feel a little…” She stops. I know what she is thinking. Years together has given us both a little bit of sense for these things.
“I’m not going to leave you and our baby. I made a promise, Quinn, and I intend to keep it.” I sigh. I have to give her something to allay her fears. She’s afraid and vulnerable. “Look, when I came back I said that all of this was my fault.”
“I remember. Now, after what I said today, you must think differently.”
“The opposite. I feel that now more than I’ve ever felt it. I am to blame, Quinn. This terrible mess is my fault.”
“You didn’t sleep with someone else, in our bed.”
“No. But the Quinn I knew, the Quinn you are again, would not have done that. You changed, and I caused that. That Quinn was pushed toward Wade and I pushed her.”
“You think I’m back to where I was in the beginning, when we first fell in love?”
“Yeah. I do. Every day, more and more, I see that woman that I love. And she was brave, just like you’re brave now. Even though that was the hardest thing I’ve ever had to hear, I still love you for your honesty and bravery in saying it. I don’t know if I’d have done that.”
She smiles. “I don’t know, Judd. I think you’re braver than you think. It wouldn’t have been easy to come back to me after everything that I did to you.
And here you are.” She laughs. “Look at us,” she says proudly.
Grant had thanked me for bringing Wade and Chloe, which was strange, but I didn’t do it for him. He thanked me, he said, because Wade might not and he was doing the thanking in his place. I tell him about my return to our marital bed. We haven’t made love yet, but we will. I tell him I’ve been working through that as my own personal assignment this week. I tell him of our last date night and how I made it all about Quinn. He’s pleased that I’m learning about her and what she needs.
Then he stopped, thought for a moment.
“When a husband and wife are living together they get to know things about each other that no one else can know. That’s especially true when they are intimate, because that very word means that they are exclusive and open to each other, that they know each other, every part of each other better than any other person.”
“Wade knows Quinn,” I said with an edge of regret. “She knows him. They had a whole year to get to know each other.”
“True, but not like you know her and not like she knows you. Her memories of him will fade and so will his of her, but yours will only grow stronger.”
“Okay,” I said, but I couldn’t see how that could be.
“I want you to think about the difference between illicit lust, which is what she had with him, and deep love, caring, sacrificing, forgiving love, that you have with her. Does that change the way to you approach her, how you love her in your bed? Passionate love is great, and there is a place for it, believe me. But what about the long, slow, deep look in her eyes as you love her? He’ll never have that with her. Concentrate on that.”
She is quiet when we get home and I’ve come to know the not so subtle signs that she needs some space, so I give it to her. I go down to the market to restock the cupboards and the refrigerator while stays in our room and lies on the bed.
She’s still there when I get home and I give her all the space she needs. I don’t know what she’s thinking about, I guess it is about what we talked about in our session, but it may be deeper than that. I don’t ask her, I want her to tell me when she’s ready.
There are changes happening all around me now. Small changes, almost unnoticeable if you are not looking. I am though, because I’ve missed a lot in the last two years, things that I should have seen if I’d had my eyes opened. They’re open now – seeing Quinn and Wade in my bed opened them for good.
Later we’re ready for bed and I’m about to climb in next to her when she looks at me like she’s got something to say so I stop and listen.
“Do you mind...” She takes a deep breath. “Do you mind if I sleep alone tonight?”
“No,” I say quietly.
“I know it seems like a step back, but it isn’t.”
“Okay.”
“I’m sorry. I just have something on my mind and I need to think it through.”
“Is it anything I need to worry about?” And I am worried because she’s asked me to stay out of our bed like I’m in some sort of trouble.
She shakes her head.
“And you’re not ready to share it with me?”
“No. Sorry. It’s my thing though. It’s not you. You have to know that.”
I nod and lean down and kiss her. She kisses me back and I know she’s talking truth to me. Quinn never kissed me that way in the last year of our marriage because she was lying to me, but now is different.
So I go to the spare room and lay down in the dark, starring at the ceiling and hope that we’ll get through this. Sometimes I’m not sure, but most of the time I know it with every fibre of my being. It seems like a contradiction, but then it’s complicated. My life is complicated.
In the next episode of Twenty Four Weeks…
An on-air fight threatens everything Judd has worked for… Quinn makes an unexpected request…
“Don’t be a wuss,” Wade says, adding his catch phrase. “You gotta be a man. And the man calls the shots. You wanna drink like a man, smoke and bet like a man then don’t let your woman tell you how you should live.”
He’s not saying anything new and normally I wouldn’t be worried, but I know where he’s been. The listeners don’t.
“Take my friend. Now he takes me to some marriage thing...”
I’m going cold and red in the face all at once.
“They’re telling me how to make my woman happy and it’s all about emasculating yourself. I mean, damn...”
My finger is on the mute button and it’s shaking.
“My friend, he lets his woman call the shots. You gotta go to this thing, you gotta change for me. And he just goes there and listens like the little girl he is and hands over all his power...”
Wade doesn’t get to say anything else. He’s cut short as I push him hard across the room. His head phones are still on and the cord snaps taught and pulls his head sideways. He gets up in a second but I’m on him.
“What the hell, Wade!” I yell.
…
“What happened?” I ask Marcie, perhaps a little sharply.
“He neglected to tell us he’d consumed alcohol last night and he was quite dehydrated this morning.”
“That sounds like him.”
“Judd,” Wade says dreamily. “Thanks, man.”
“Why did you give them my number?” I ask him.
“Chloe’s not talking to me, and I can’t call Quinn.”
“So you get the guy that put you here pick you up?”
“If you put it that way, I does sound stupid.”
…
“So what was it you were doing?” I ask her.
“I can’t tell you. But you’ll find out soon enough.”
“So I just trust you then?”
“I know I haven’t given you much reason to in the past, but yes.”
...
“So, what do you want to do? If you think you’re going to leave Chloe then you should do it sooner than later before she gets hurt too much. Don’t leave it a year and then surprise her like you and Quinn surprised me.”
“You’re not going to let that go, are you?”
“Eventually I will. It was a horrible thing you two did to me, and there’s no getting around it. But, buddy, I’ve forgiven Quinn and I’ve forgiven you. I’m not wasting my time being angry anymore.”
“But I don’t want to leave Chloe and I don’t want to sleep around.”
“Then don’t.”
“But I know I will. Eventually.”
…
“You’re going to have a little more alone time for a while,” Grant points out, “and it’s easy to see that as being a step backwards, but if approached correctly it can be a real opportunity to learn and grow.”
I read the back of the book he has handed me. “You’re not trying to turn me into a monk, are you?”
Download regularly the Episode Guide for updates on this series. Additionally there is an Adult version (contains adult themes, coarse language, sexual references, high-level sex scenes and some violence) and downloadable audio books of these episodes (adult version).
Twenty Four Weeks - Episode 11 - "Twenty Two" (PG) Page 6
