Letting Him Stay

by Suzanne Readsmith



  LETTING HIM STAY

  By

  Suzanne Readsmith

  * * * * *

  PUBLISHED BY:

  Letting Him Stay

  Copyright © 2012 Suzanne Readsmith

  Thank you for downloading this story. You are welcome to share it with your friends. This story may be reproduced, copied and distributed for non-commercial purposes, provided the book remains in its complete original form, with the exception of quotes used in reviews. Other stories include ‘Caught on the Hop’, ‘Wistful Thinking’ and ‘The Girl with No Name’.

  Your support and respect for the property of this author is appreciated.

  This book is a work of fiction and any resemblance to persons, living or dead, or places, events or locales is purely coincidental. The characters are productions of the author’s imagination and used fictitiously.

  *****

  I take this opportunity to thank my husband Chris and my sister Sharon for their continued encouragement.

  *****

  His downward glance towards his mobile phone took just a fraction of a second; it was while I was talking to him. Often his attention wandered lately, or concentration, or interest. I had only grown alert to this last week, his focus on that inanimate slim piece of plastic, which now had the power to infiltrate and destroy my life. When I say inanimate, it isn’t, it lights up, vibrates and can give a shrill obscene tone. It, and anyone on the other end of it enjoys full immediate access to my husband’s attention. Once connected it pulls full rank over anything going on, and I mean anything. Today I questioned the plausibility of hating a ‘thing’ and I realised it wasn’t it I hated, but her.

  He’s agitated yet excited; he doesn’t know that I know she is in labour right now, in a private hospital only a few hundred 100 yards down the road. He is minutes away from being beside her while she gives birth to his child, yet he is here, why? All this information is new to me, fresh, still settling and not absorbed properly. Within a week or so no less than five people in full awareness of his 18-month affair have brought me fully up to speed about it. Five supposed good friends who knew more about my life than I did. No one seems to care that I feel like a hedgehog left flattened in the road wounded and split open.

  He leaves the room under the guise of making tea for two and I follow him like a ghost peeping through cracks in doors and listening intently to grains of conversations whispered in the shadowed corners of our home. I see him pressing the rubber pebbled key fonts of his mobile quickly and I marvel at his newly found typing skills. His face suddenly beams into a wide smile of sheer joy; it is similar to the smile he made when Joe was born twelve years ago, long lasting; unabashed. I feel so separate from him and left out. I feel bereaved. I am not part of his joy, not the life giver of his new child.

 

  I feel a pain in my chest so severe I stumble back to the sanctity of my chair. I madly guess it is a girl, bound to be, already she is giving him what I seemingly cannot. Why is he here? Why? He seems so cool, taking it in his stride, as though a mistress giving birth down the road is a normal part of life. Empathically I place myself in his shoes. If I were in love with someone else enough to have that kind of expression on my face I’d be past keeping up such a façade surely. I gathered my thoughts. That expression might be for the child not for her. Oh God, do emotions separate themselves like that? Have I been viewed by him as being separate to his children, his family, himself? I must have been. Have I been wrong seeing us joined together as one? Have I denied him his individuality and suppressed my own? Together as one we have created life four times. With another person, a stranger to me yet not to him, he has created a separate family. Our family is split now like an atom.

  I remember weeks ago talking so intimately with him about our sex life and I had expressed to him in particular how comfortable we both were talking so freely about it and in that way we were blessed. We knew sex hadn’t been good for me lately and together we had considered the pros and cons of me choosing to begin hormone replacement treatment. How foolish I had been to talk to my husband as though he was on a par with me, on the same wavelength when realistically he was on a level with someone fifteen years younger. Crazy thing is that I know how easily I relate to men much younger than me and now I feel like an old ‘Game Boy’ toy. I am unsure whether Tom has gone back to level one, or moved onto a newer more exciting and challenging level. Either way I seem to have been discarded.

  You’d think he could read from my body language that I know what is happening yet so obviously he hasn’t got a clue. He often misses the point yet nowadays he misses me full stop. He hasn’t looked at me properly or hungrily for a long time now. How did I miss that? I can’t have been looking at him. “Stop that!” I tell myself for I refuse to take the blame. “No way! I have always loved him, never stopped loving or looking at him.” The blue cashmere sweater he is wearing now I bought for him with such loving thoughts held about him. How it matched his midnight blue eyes and he wears it a lot. Had she touched it, sniffed it on him as I tend to do or much worse lifted it over his shoulders in eagerness to get closer still?

  Am I invisible to him? He’s inside a lovely bubble of joy protected and happy and I’m on the outside my face pressed against stretchy impenetrable film, which I sense as toughened glass. I can hear spirits around me whispering harshly that he has gone from me now and that he is no longer mine. It is as though he has died and it would be better if he had never been born. I chastise myself for thinking this way wishing the very conception and life force of our children uncreated. I crave release from the torturous pain traversing through me. It is tearing me apart and my mind is creating jealous sexual visualisations of them together in abandoned union, their moments private from me and precious, uninhibited by the tribulations of everyday life. Their sex practised freely and set gladly aside from worries about mortgage payments and threatened redundancy. I could envisage them a galaxy apart from me in some strange room or location. Some grassy bank or beach, some leather chair or soft woollen picnic blanket. Somewhere wild and sexy like a darkened cellar bar on an afternoon. I imagine it plays music for bohemian people who are all opened up with free spirits and living in parallel process, yet differently and oppositely to other structured souls such as I who remains all bound up and unmoving. These were my dreams and fantasies for us. He has not been ripped away from me in death, rather he has cantered away from me like a bronze gelding from his stable feeling full of life giving energy to give away to another, leaping away from my withered frame of mind.

  He joins me armed with two cups of tea. I turn to him quickly broken from my nightmarish revere. My movement makes him jump and he spills hot liquid over his hands. I ask him who he was Texting. He doesn’t falter in his response. He lies to me at least, very easily these days. Though I despise liars I understand how easy it is to slip into the trait when one remains unchallenged and so intrinsically trusted. He has survived moments of lying to me continually for the past 18-months now without having to give up or to lose anything or anyone. He has already experienced how easy it is to hold a separate love life and to keep a hold of an existing one like some sort of pension fund entitlement. Who lives with anything less after that? He has breathed and experienced excitements that throb their own new beat. Rushing exhilarating and life soaring highs that no illegal substance can give as intensively after the first hit. The dips and lows of life can go to hell! She can predict him thinking that. When one has crossed their own boundary lines, tested and cast aside personal belief systems and changed their values, they have chosen to ignore usual moral stances and to tread upon grounded principles. Tom had done this. He had ventured into
‘no mans land’ for the married man and travelled through well hidden dug outs being blithely bid by the master housed in the seat of his trousers; his conscience so obviously set aside to deal with later. He seems unnerved by my question about the text message and the cough he makes is a giveaway of his discomfort, his preparation to deflect and disarm me. He is smiling and I am offended. It may be a reflex reaction stemming from joy he is experiencing connected to the message he has received. Now every smile I have ever received from him in the past is negated to null and void status and I perceive that he is smiling now to pacify me. I feel patronised. He states that as usual Peter is sending him some dirty jokes too risqué to share with me. I suddenly wonder if it’s true that the smile I had seen him make in the kitchen was in response to a joke. Maybe it wasn’t joy that I saw him exhibiting maybe it was humour. I pressed ahead in my quest to confront him. I am