Wounds of Time

by Stevie D. Parker

  “Ladies and gentleman, welcome. Please refrain from pictures and live videos. We ask that you take this time to silence your phones. Enjoy the show!”

  As if the seats in a Broadway theater weren’t tight enough already, being trapped here with my family felt like the walls were closing in on me. Sweat beaded across my forehead while I slouched in my chair, my face buried in my hand. Throughout the show, Samantha kept hitting me to pay attention. She was annoyed, to say the very least. But I remembered Sarah telling me once that she didn’t look at the crowd during her performances. Not until the very end, when the cast took their bows. That was my escape plan—when they came back on-stage after the encore, I would excuse myself to go to the bathroom.

  Perfect idea! Until the time came. Sarah emerged with Matt as the crowd stood for the standing ovation. I stayed seated.

  Samantha grabbed me by the arm and pulled me up. “What is wrong with you today?” she whispered loudly.

  “I have to pee,” I said, standing up slowly and trying to leave.

  “You can wait until they’re done clapping,” she said.

  As she hooked my arm with hers, essentially holding me in place while she reprimanded me, I looked up, and it happened. I made eye contact with Sarah. Her gaze went from me, to Samantha, and then back to me. Her smile faded for a second, but she was a professional. She put that smile right back on and kept waving to the crowd.

  I felt her pain, though. I felt her pain run through my heart like a Mack truck. Then, the actors descended, and the girls were finally ready to leave, all of them in really good spirits. They’d loved the show and now wanted to get something else to eat.

  “Why don’t you go find a restaurant and text me where you are? I’m going to pee and thank them again for the upgrades,” I said.

  The girls left, and I tried to make my way backstage as fast as I could. Joe led me to Sarah’s dressing room. When she opened the door, I saw an expression on her face that I’d never seen before. Anger, mixed with hurt, combined with jealousy—she looked like she was about to cry.

  “How could you do this? HOW could you do this, Vincent!?” she demanded, almost in tears.

  “I tried not to. It was an accident, I swear! She got the tickets. I didn’t know about them! I tried to get out of it but—”

  She cut me off. “And your wife? Your wife is gorgeous!”

  “I told you she was pretty,” I said.

  “Pretty? She’s stunning, how could you even cheat on her? Yeah, you guys have such a bad marriage…that’s why you’re out going to shows together,” she yelled. She turned her back to me, but I could still see her perfectly through the lit-up vanity mirror on the wall.

  “I don’t cheat on her. I don’t consider you as cheating. It’s different. And I never said I had a bad marriage—now you’re putting words in my mouth.” I made eye contact with her through the mirror.

  “Do you have any idea how I’m feeling?” she asked, turning back around to face me.

  I started to approach her, but she backed up like she didn’t want me to come any closer. “Yes, I do. I swear I do, because my biggest fear is running into you out with another man. I assume you date, and whether you do or don’t, please don’t specify because I can’t handle it. If you’re dating someone else, then lie to me until absolutely necessary. So yes, to answer your question, I know exactly what you feel, and I am so, so sorry this happened, but I can’t talk about this now. They’re waiting for me at a restaurant. Can I come by tomorrow before work? 6 a.m.? We’ll talk? I’m so sorry, but I really have to go.”

  “Sure, come at 6 a.m. I’ll be there when you’re able to fit me into your schedule.” She sat down at the mirror and started fixing her eye makeup.

  I walked out of that dressing room feeling like the biggest douchebag to ever walk the streets of New York City.

  That night, I couldn’t sleep at all. To begin with, my mother was in the guest room, so I had to sleep in bed with Samantha. The only time we slept together in the same bed was when we were on vacation, and she hated it. Plus, I couldn’t get Sarah’s face out of my head. How upset she’d been. I couldn’t wait to see her at 6 a.m. the next morning and explain.

  Finally, after what seemed like forty-eight hours, morning came. I threw on my clothes and hailed a taxi. It may have even been 5:59 a.m. when I showed up at her apartment.

  Sarah opened the door. Her eyes were red and puffy, like she had been crying all night. I felt so bad, my heart actually hurt. I couldn’t see her like this, especially knowing that I was the person who caused her pain.

  “You look terrible,” I said, walking in.

  “Thanks, add salt to the wound.” There was almost no expression in her voice.

  “Look, last night was a complete accident. My wife, she always buys the Christmas gifts, I had no idea she got the tickets. I tried so hard to get out of it, I really did. Then when Joe saw me…”

  “Joe saw you?” she said, looking panicked. “He knows? He knows you’re married? Great, now he just thinks I’m your side piece. Damn it, Vincent! Joe’s got such a big mouth—he’s going to tell everyone! They’re all going to think I’m a slut. Even worse, this could ruin my career if it gets out!”

  Just when I thought she couldn’t be any more upset, I managed to get her there.

  “He told me he wouldn’t say anything. I mean, I don’t know him that well, but I believed him. Look, Sarah, I want to clarify some things for you,” I said. “I never said I was in a bad marriage. It’s not bad. It’s just more, well, it’s kind of more like a business arrangement. Like I’ve told you before, my wife got pregnant young, so we didn’t really know each other when we got married. We grew to love each other, but not like this. Not like us. Honestly, I didn’t even know what real love was until I met you. We don’t even sleep in the same room.”

  She seemed surprised when I said that. “You don’t sleep in the same room?” she repeated.

  “No—I mean, last night we did because my mother is in from California, but I typically sleep in the guest room.”

  “Do you still have sex with her?” she asked.

  I paused for a second. “Yes. Not a lot, not recently.”

  I tried to remember. I didn’t think we’d had sex since the Christmas party. Did we? No—not even in Aruba this year. “Now that I think about it, we haven’t in months, maybe even a year. And when we do, it’s not like it is with us. There’s no passion, no lust. It’s just sex. With you, it’s different. I know that sounds like a bunch of bullshit, but I swear on my kids it’s not. I never, ever swear on my kids. We do regular couple things. Go out to eat, have couple friends, regular public couple things. At home, we don’t really talk. We don’t really laugh. We’re barely in the same room with each other, especially with the kids away in college. We just….we just live,” I said.

  “Do you think she knows you cheat on her?” she asked.

  I took a deep breath and exhaled. “Knows, suspects, cares? I really don’t know,” I answered as honestly as I could.

  “You don’t think she’d care if you cheated on her?” she asked, apparently baffled.

  “She’s never said it, but as long as her perfect life doesn’t change, I’d say no, probably not,” I admitted. “I never realized how abnormal that sounds. Not until I just said it out loud. I guess I always thought that was just how marriage was.”

  She got very quiet, leaning against the kitchen counter. I walked over and wrapped my arms around her waist from behind. “I’ll leave. I’ll get a divorce. My kids are already in college. There’s no reason for us to keep this up.”

  “No!” she said, turning around to face me. “I will not be a homewrecker. I will not be the cause of your divorce!”

  Tears glistened in her eyes again. I could tell she wanted to be with me, but not like this. I pressed my forehead against hers and stared right into her eyes.

  “Sarah, I have never in my life felt this way about an
ybody, not the way I feel with you. I would never do anything intentionally to hurt you. I couldn’t sleep at all last night. I just kept wanting to come here and hold you. That was so fucked up, I know it was. I’m not denying it. Let me make it up to you, please.”

  “Make it up to me?” she asked. “How? By buying me something? Wrong girl—I don’t care about your money!”

  I backed away from her, frantically scrambling for ideas of how I could make this right. “Let’s do something; go away. Can you take a vacation? We can go somewhere close, maybe Puerto Rico. There’s a really nice hotel in Old San Juan on the beach. It’s not buying you something, it’s taking you somewhere. Let’s go somewhere where no one knows who we are, and we can do whatever we want, with no limitations.”

  I could tell she wanted to believe what I was saying. “Please,” I said, putting my arms around her waist again. “Go away with me.”

  “I need to put in notice to take a vacation, at least a couple of weeks. How are you going to get away?” she asked.

  “I don’t know. I’ll say I have a business trip or something, I’ll figure it out. We can go Monday through Thursday. Then you only have to take a few shows off. End of January? Weather will be real nice there, much better than here.”

  She agreed. She even half-smiled.

  “Great!” I said. “Let me know the exact dates, and I will make all the arrangements. Wow, I can’t wait to be alone with you for four days straight!” Suddenly, I was really excited.

  I went out with Jimmy for drinks after work. There was a bar not far from the office that a lot of the brokers went to for happy hour. They knew us well there. Older businessmen sat at the bar with laptops out and talking on cell phones. The younger ones played games that were set up on the tables: checkers, some sort of manual robot-fighting machine. After the bartender handed us our drinks, I pointed at a table off to the side.

  “Let’s go sit in the corner. I need to talk to you.” I hurried to the table to avoid being seen by anyone we knew.

  As we sat down, Jimmy said, “Look, if this is about the Justin thing, I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have lost my shit with him.”

  I looked at him, confused. “What are you talking about?” I asked.

  “Justin fucked up big time today, so I went off on him, and he reported me to HR. I spent an hour in there justifying myself and apologizing. Is that what this is about?”

  “No,” I said. “I didn’t even know about that, and this isn’t about work. I’m not out with you as your boss, I’m out with you as my best friend. On that note, though, I will say—as your boss—you need to calm the fuck down. The workplace isn’t what it used to be. You can’t yell at people anymore, or you’ll get us sued. Have you been going to the harassment classes?”

  He put his head down. “Yes, yes. I read the memos, and I know they’re mandatory. Okay, I’m sorry. I’ll work on the yelling, but honestly though, this whole new generation thinks they can do whatever they want with no repercussions. They don’t have business ethics. They want to come to work, do a half-ass job, take five breaks during the day to ‘meditate’ and get a six-figure salary! They don’t want to earn money anymore, they think they are entitled to it.”

  I didn’t answer; Jimmy wasn’t entirely wrong. He had a hard job dealing with all the employees daily. I was relieved that they reported into him. He and my assistant were the only direct reports I had, which meant I didn’t have to deal with that kind of stuff.

  “What did you want to talk about?” he asked.

  I took a deep breath. “I need your help, and you cannot under any circumstances tell anyone, especially Lisa,” I began. “I’m going on vacation at the end of January. I need you to cover me at work, and if anyone asks—Lisa in particular—I’m on a business trip.”

  Jimmy looked up from his glass. “Where are you going?” he asked.

  “Puerto Rico.”

  “And with whom are we going to Puerto Rico with?” he slowly asked, realizing it was not my wife.

  I downed a gulp of my drink. “Not Samantha,” I answered.

  “You’re going with a girl? Who is she? Is she hot?”

  I knew he was going to ask a ton of questions. “Yes, very. You’ve seen her before, a few years ago. At the Christmas party at the strip club. The blonde in the Christmas show, the one who was dancing on me.”

  Now he was really impressed. “You’re fucking a stripper! Good for you, man! My boy is blossoming!”

  He held up his hand to high five me.

  “She doesn’t do that anymore. She’s a Broadway actress.”

  “Wait,” he said, as realization dawned. “That was years ago; how long have you been seeing her for?”

  “Well, I hung out with her that same night, but we really didn’t start dating until the following year, so two years now,” I answered.

  “Two years? You’ve been fucking a girl for two years, and I am just finding out about this now? I tell you about all the girls I sleep with!” He slammed his glass on the table.

  “I’m not just fucking her. It’s different. Those Monday ‘yoga’ classes I go to during lunch, I’m really with her.”

  “This is great!” he said, signaling to the waitress for another round. “You can finally be my wingman when we go out!”

  “No, I am not going to be your wingman. I am not going to cheat on her,” I said.

  Now he got serious. “Cheat on her? Let me get this straight: you will cheat on Samantha, but not on this girl?”

  I took another sip of my drink. “Jimmy, I’m in love with her.” I was afraid to look up at him.

  He sat there, stunned. “In love with her? Are you insane? I feel like I’m talking to a chick. Only you would fuck a stripper then fall in love with her—do you even have a dick? You have a wife. What are you going to do? Leave Samantha?”

  I looked down again and he winced.

  “Vince, you cannot leave Samantha. She’ll take you for everything, especially over infidelity. Nothing is worse than a woman scorned. You love this girl enough to lose everything? To be broke?” he asked, now getting very serious. “How old is this girl? Is she in love with you too?”

  I knew he’d have something to say about that. “Yeah, I think she is. She hasn’t said it, but I’m pretty sure she loves me back. She’s twenty-eight.”

  “Twenty-eight? Vince, let me tell you a story about these young girls. They’re fucking nuts. I fucked this girl a few months ago, the one from the Hamptons,” he began.

  “The hot tub girl?” I asked.

  “Yes, exactly, her. Young, real young—twenty-three. She got obsessed with me after only one night. She made a fake social media page with my information. A fake profile, Vince! Who does that? I don’t even know how she got my picture. She found Lisa on there, told her. Put some crazy shit on this page.”

  I was in shock. I had never heard anything like that. “A fake profile? I like how you tell me the details of the act but not the drama that happens after. What did Lisa say?”

  The waitress came over with fresh drinks.

  “Thanks honey,” he said, smiling at her, and then went right back to his stern tone. “She was pissed! Not so much that I slept with the girl, but now it was blasted all over the Internet. She just wanted the page down. Made me swear not to tell you. She was too embarrassed for Samantha to find out. We went to the cops. Do you know what it is? Freedom of fucking speech! They couldn’t do anything. What would you have done?”

  I picked up the new glass and took a rather large gulp. “I have no idea. I can’t even comprehend that. Maybe send a cease and desist?”

  He looked at me like that was the stupidest thing I could have said. “A cease and desist?” he repeated.

  “Yeah, okay, maybe it’s freedom of speech, but there’s also slander, defamation of character—”

  He cut me off. “Vince she was twenty-three years old, what the fuck was I going to sue her for?”

  �
��I don’t know, what did she do for a living?” I asked.

  He took another sip of his drink and gave me a sarcastic smile. “I don’t know, it didn’t occur to me to ask for her resume as she was sucking my dick.”

  “So, what did you do?” I asked.

  “I paid her.”

  “You gave her money?”

  “Yes, Lisa just wanted it to go away. I had no choice. Twenty-five thousand dollars. Most expensive blowjob I ever got,” he said, shaking his head in disgust. “I’m just telling you to be careful. These young girls are truly crazy.”

  “She’s not like that. She would never do that,” I argued.

  He shook his head again and put his hand up to motion me to stop talking. Then he laughed. “Leave it to you, can’t even cheat right, falls in love with the girl. She must be one good lay if she has you so pussy whipped. What am I going to do with you, Vince? I’m not telling you to stop seeing her, but be smart about it, please,” he said firmly.

  Jimmy’s story shook me. It was a scary story. Crazy, in fact. But Sarah would never do that to me. She did love me, I was sure of it—and, even if she didn’t, she was too mature for that.

  SARAH

  “How do you think he’s going to get away with coming home with a suntan?” I asked Isabel as we were eating Chinese food at my place that night.

  She stopped pushing around her fried rice with her fork and looked up at me. “Bianca, I think it’s time we had a serious talk about Vincent. I understand your attraction to him, I really do. He’s rich, charming, sexy, and judging by the way you glow after he leaves here, I’m guessing a hell of a fuck. Any woman would be attracted to that. But, he’s MARRIED—to someone else. You saw her this weekend and you said it yourself, she’s gorgeous. He ain’t leaving her.”

  “He said he would if I wanted him to, but I didn’t want him to—”

  She threw her hand up in the air and interrupted me. “I’m sure he did say that and would have said anything he needed to at that point after what happened, but saying he’s leaving his wife and actually leaving his wife are two very different things.”