by Liz Madrid
Maybe I should have one, too, Esme muses, placing her purse on the couch and looking around. She frowns, wondering where everyone is. Usually at this time, around seven in the evening, fifteen-year-old Kieran and his younger sister Meghan, would be sitting at the dining table. Kieran would have probably said something to his sister to make her make a face at him, and say, Mom! He’s making fun of me again! Even though all Kieran probably did was say something about her love of One Direction. And Meghan was probably right - Kieran would be poking fun at her. Was it Harry Styles her daughter liked? Esme can’t remember. She does remember how stricken Meghan had been when one of the members—she can’t remember who now — suddenly left the band in the middle of some Asian tour.
And then there would be Evan, her husband, reminding Kieran to be nice to his younger sister, and to eat his vegetables. Or maybe tell him that tomorrow there was an early morning tennis practice at the country club though it wasn’t necessary. Kieran knew his schedule like his powerful backhand and had already won a few low-level pro events, one of them taking him and his father to Tarbes, France while Esme and Meghan stayed home. It would have been wonderful to have gone as a family, but Evan told her that Kieran didn’t want the added distraction to his game. Her son had been too ashamed to tell her. But bless him, the added distraction of two screaming females, one of them his mother and the other, his annoying (at least to him) sister, would have probably prevented him from winning the games he’d won then.
But the dining table is empty of family members and dishes of food that Evan would have prepared, maybe pot roast with Brussels sprouts on the side, or Thai chicken curry. She hates to admit it, but Evan is a better cook than she is. She’s burned toast for breakfast every Father’s Day that it’s become a tradition though no one in the family can match Esme’s ice-cream making skills.
Esme frowns and glances at her watch as if it would tell her where they are. Then she remembers that the kids are staying at Evans’ parents’ house for part of the weekend before they’d be dropped off on Sunday morning, just in time for Mother’s Day. There was brunch planned, reservations already made at a famous restaurant to save anyone the trouble to clean up afterward. It was to be her day, Evan had told the kids. Mother’s Day.
Still, as Esme slips off the watch she wears only for work, she wonders if that’s all she’d become. Just the kids’ mother. What had become of being his wife? Her thoughts drift back to Marina and the tryst she’d just witnessed, evident by Marina’s disheveled hair and the intern’s pants down to his ankles as he sat on the back seat of the Land Rover. Esme can’t help but imagine how Marina must have felt to have the young man’s hands all over her body. But she pushes the thoughts away. Good grief, I know Greg, her husband, of all people.
She heads up the stairs to the master bedroom, wondering if she should prepare herself a bath, and maybe drizzle some rose oil she’d purchased at Neiman Marcus to soak off the stresses of her work day. Three twelve-hour shifts a week is hard enough. Working the same shifts at another hospital on her days off is madness, but she has to do it, or, at least, that’s what Esme tells herself if only to get Kieran all the training he needs, the private sessions with a former tennis pro, now retired from the circuit. The sessions aren’t cheap, but judging from the tournaments Kieran had been winning of late, they’re worth. Maybe one day he’ll make it to the US Open, Esme smiles as she opens the door to the master bedroom.
Soft music and the trail of pink petals on the carpet surprise her, though the battery-powered LED pillar candles make her smile. So like Evan to always put safety first, especially since he is nowhere in sight. She follows the path of petals and candles that lead to the master bathroom and sees a note on the side of the jacuzzi tub.
My Esme,
If you’re seeing this note instead of me, then I’m probably stuck in traffic on the way home from dropping the kids off at Mom and Dad’s. I hope you don’t mind starting the bath without me.
Love, Evan
Esme chuckles as she sets the note on the counter, not wanting to get it wet as she turns on the tap for the hot water. She’ll save his note in her diary, one of the many notes she’s kept since she first met Evan that one hot summer she spent in New Jersey. She’d felt so out of place then, missing the California sun and her friends even though she and her mom were staying just three blocks from the boardwalk where one had to watch out for clams hurled down by seagulls to crack them open. She also hadn’t been used to the grayness of the Atlantic Ocean, so different from the dark blue of the Pacific Ocean as it rolled towards the Malibu coastline.
She was sixteen then, and Evan eighteen. A natural jock, he’d already received offers from university recruiters until a car accident involving a drunk driver left him with a limp, the recruiters who’d been pounding on his door just weeks earlier leaving him, too. While his friends all went to Ivy League universities on scholarships, he opted for a private liberal arts university in Pennsylvania where he majored in Business Administration and then to law school.
She brushes her teeth and washes her face, removing every trace of make-up from her face and trying to remember when the last time was since he or she had done anything like this. A shiver of excitement shoots through her, settling into her bones.
Still, it’s been awhile since Evan’s done anything like this. Heck, it’s been awhile, period. When did their alone-time disappear, taken over by the stresses of two jobs for her and the rearing of perfect children for him? After work, she barely has enough energy left to spend time with Kieran and Meghan, much less Evan. And he, needing to be in bed early to get Kieran to practice at five thirty almost everyday for private tennis sessions at the country club, was usually asleep by the time she crawled into bed.
She can’t even remember when they’d last had sex. She’s stopped calling it making love, for what else could she call those hurried acts in the dark? Sometimes there was no time even for foreplay. Just fucking was more like it, the rush in part of Esme’s fear of Meghan bursting into the room complaining to her daddy of yet another boy band drama. Then when it was over, Evan would fall asleep while she’d find herself wide awake, and wishing they could at least talk.
But Marina had told her that men don’t talk after sex, not that they could — not with all the blood that had been up in their brains now gone into their dicks with not much left for thinking coherently. Fuck, Esme, what’s there to talk about after a good fuck anyway—what went on at the PTA meeting where he’s the only man who attends? The house-husband? Oh, excuse me, the hot house-husband and home-schooler? Stop complaining, girl, and be glad he’s still tapping that ass of yours. Would you rather he fuck some other girl, like my Greg? Did you know I found a lipstick stain on his fucking boxers?
But there’s more to sex than just a good fucking, Esme tells herself as she undresses, the water in the tub just warm enough for the rose oil to disperse and fill the bathroom with its heady scent. Minutes later, she turns off the tap and slips into the warm tub, a sigh escaping her lips as the water laps against her skin. She’s put her hair up with a hair clip, though later, she plans to let it down and get it wet at least. Get the sterile and not-so-sterile smells of the hospital out of her hair, and enjoy the rest of her evening without thinking about work.
She hears the front door open and close, the sound of footsteps hurrying up the stairs as Evan calls her name. Esme turns her head, seeing him just as he stops by the door, a shy grin on his face.
Twenty years from the day they uttered their vows, Evan seems to have been caught in a time warp. He’s still as lean and muscled as when she first met the eighteen-year-old version of him, playing volleyball with friends on the beach in Ocean City. She’d been hanging out with East Coast cousins who felt sorry for her and her mother for having to move back to the East Coast, even if it was supposed to be only for that summer. She ended up staying there much longer, for there was nothing left for them in Malibu, not when her father had filed for divorce and had m
oved his secretary into the home he once shared with them, Esme’s bedroom now occupied by a stepsister she’d never get a chance to meet. It was as if her father had simply erased them from his memory banks and other than the child support payments his office sent religiously, it was like she and her mother never existed for him.
But Evan had made that first summer bearable, and every year after that. He was a handsome man, with dark blonde hair and soulful hazel eyes that seemed to take in whatever color surrounded him, from blue to green to gray, and thick lashes that made her melt. He had a grin that lit up a room, and was as goofy as hell, his laugh making her knees melt, though he was serious, too. He had three older sisters, and having spent the first eighteen years of his life growing up around their fights over Barbies and boys and then having to navigate through their collective moodiness during their periods, he’d somehow developed a sensitivity to what women wanted in a man—someone to listen to them.
So he listened when she talked about her mother’s drinking, which was getting worse each day. She learned all this from old friends still living in Malibu about what her husband — or rather, soon-to-be ex-husband—was doing, whether it was taking Esme’s soon-to-be stepmother to the country club and introducing her to the members of the board, or what gallery opening they were cutting the ribbon for. Soon, her friends stopped calling, and Esme would come home to see her mother passed out in front of the TV, old tapes of her once-perfect family still playing in the VCR.
Esme remembers how she threw them all away, sick and tired of seeing her mother fall apart every day. She had to learn how to balance her mother’s checkbook, asking Evan to drive her to the store to do the shopping even though she’d never really done grocery shopping before. Her parents had house managers to handle that, cooks who served their meals by the course, and chauffeurs who drove her everywhere. In Ocean City, NJ, there were only her grandparents, both in their sixties who couldn’t understand their daughter’s inability to cope with the major life change divorce often wrought upon those left behind, and of their granddaughter’s food sensitivities. That’s why Esme had to do her shopping in a small town that didn’t have much to offer her then as far as gluten-free choices were concerned. But Evan drove her wherever she needed to go, his old beat up Chevy rattling noisily on the highway as he blasted Phish and Red Hot Chili Peppers from the speakers and she’d laugh and forget about her mother’s drinking and her father who had conveniently forgotten about them.
Twenty-three years since she’d first laid eyes on him on that beach, Evan still looks as good as he did then. Too good that women like Marina were bold enough to tell other nurses in the employee room—when they thought Esme wasn’t near enough to hear—that they’d “hook up with that piece of ass in a New York minute.” Since then, she’s asked Evan not to show up at work on Valentine’s Day or whatever holiday, delivering her gifts in person. Chocolates, flowers, including Krispy Creme donuts that the employees love and remember him for.
Marina once told her that a man like Evan could easily fool around. He’s got those great eyes, Esme, and that body. Are you sure he’s not fooling around on you with some PTA president or something? I’d keep my eye on him if I were you.
That’s when Esme stopped hanging out with Marina in the employee break room though it didn’t stop the woman from talking to her at the nurses’ station. Esme learned to keep her doubts to herself and not blurt them out like she used to, for somehow, the spoken words seemed to leave their marks all over the places where they’d been uttered, like graffiti that could never be erased.
“Sorry I’m late, Es,” Evan says, thrusting his hands in his jeans pockets as he leans against the door. “I was hoping to surprise you. Instead, here you are, forced to go all DIY on me.”
“That’s all right. It’s not all that hard to turn on the tap. But the path of rose petals and LED candles were perfect,” she says as he saunters into the bathroom and sits on the edge of the tub. Esme touches his hand, removing it a little too quickly. It has been awhile, she thinks. She feels like she’s eighteen all of a sudden, the night of her birthday spent in an Atlantic City hotel. For, after all, he had waited.
“Thank you,” she says, feeling shy.
“You’re welcome,” he says, moving towards her and kissing her gently on the lips before drawing away. “Would you like some company?”
“I would, yes,” she smiles.
She watches him undress from the corner of her eye, feeling her body blush all the way from her chest up to her neck, the heat creeping towards her face as he peels off his t-shirt and slips out of his jeans and boxer briefs. He’s always worked out for as long as she’s known him, still runs every day during Kieran’s private training sessions that they pay a fortune for. There’s a home gym that he uses more than she does though he knows well enough to leave her alone when she does her Pilates sessions in the bedroom, having memorized a routine streamed from her iPad. She needs to get out more, but she’s too exhausted to do anything but come home and try her best to stay awake and listen to how her children’s day went, dreading the day they’d be old enough to leave home and wondering if by then, she and Evan would still have something to say to each other that didn’t involve the kids.
She scoots forward so Evan can slip into the tub behind her just as Phish comes on the speakers. As the song begins playing, Esme finds herself smiling as she feels Evan’s warm body behind her, his arms enfolding her. He nuzzles the back of her neck, still wet after she’d sunk her body down up to her chin just minutes earlier.
The song, Show of Life, is one of their favorites. Years ago, they’d left the kids with his parents for the weekend so they could see the band in concert. Esme remembers how the years faded from their faces then, replaced by smiles, giggles and laughter that made them feel so young again.
After the concert, they made love till the sun came up, and she remembers how it felt just like that first night they spent in Atlantic City when he was her first — and since then, her only. But it’s not like Esme thinks she’s missing anything, not even after hearing Marina’s stories of her exploits before marriage—and after—as well as other nurses’ stories, sometimes just to pass the time. But Esme knows better than to tell them the truth, not that it’s anyone’s business but hers and Evan’s.
Then she wonders if he’ll always be the only one for her. Would she have someone else, and if she did, would that mean that Evan would have left her for someone else, the way her father had done to her mother? No explanations, no apologies. It is what it is, babe. I found someone else.
“Penny for your thoughts?” Evan asks her as she rests her head on his shoulder. He’s grabbed the sponge and is lathering her arm, his hand moving up to her shoulder and back down. Her other hand is stroking his thigh, feeling the muscles tense beneath her touch, his erection hard against her back.
“It’s been awhile,” she says, thinking it best just to get it out. “We’ve been so busy with work and the kids-“
Esme stops herself, realizing that she’s brought up the very things that he’s made sure to get out of the way, even if it was just for part of the weekend.
“Sorry-“
“Don’t apologize,” he murmurs. “It has been awhile. But tonight and tomorrow, it’s just going to be us. Will that be alright?”
“No talk of anything but us?” she asks, looking up at him. She loves the way his nose ends into a defined sharp angle at the tip, one that someone once said was the nose granted by the gods. A Roman nose. He could have been a model, she thinks, but he’d chosen to become a father instead.
“Just us,” he whispers, setting the sponge aside and taking the shampoo from the side of the tub. “Why don’t you let me wash your hair?”
And with those words, Evan shuts out the rest of the world, his hands spreading the shampoo onto her long dark hair that’s spent way too much time being tied into a bun, his fingers massaging her scalp. It gives her goosebumps the way he does it, that she finds her
self sighing and almost purring like a cat, relaxing her head and neck so that he can maneuver her head gently forward and back, according to the movement of his fingers. She forgets that she’s gripping his thigh, her fingers digging into his skin as his fingers slide behind her ear, the nerve endings in turmoil over the sensations that engulf them.
Evan rinses her hair slowly, still taking his time as her breathing becomes shallower, faster. There’s something building inside her, one that starts from the pit of her belly, spreading upwards as if seeking release that only he can let loose. When his hand drifts lower to dip between her legs, Esme knows she’s lost. Her breathing comes out ragged as he strokes her, his fingers slipping along her sensitive folds, his mouth gently sucking the skin between her shoulder and neck. She doesn’t care that he leaves a mark that her coworkers can see.
Let them see it, she thinks as his mouth moves to another spot just behind her ear and she trembles. Soon, she knows she’s there, his touch driving her mad for her release though she knows it’s only the beginning.
When she lets go minutes later, it’s a choked cry that echoes throughout the room, his name leaving her lips as her fingers grip the back of his legs on either side of her, her right hand deserting his thigh to seek him, hard and hot against her back. Her hand grips him, stroking him. He feels like hot silk against her fingers, burning through her skin.
Evan holds back, allowing this moment to be hers only, even as waves of her orgasm leave her trembling against him.
“That was amazing. What about you?” she whispers again minutes later, her entire being longing to be one with him. She feels his lips leaving light kisses on her shoulder and neck, inhaling the scent of rose clinging to her skin.
“Don’t worry about me,” he says. “Why don’t we get out of the tub at least? The water’s getting cold and you’re starting to shiver.”
