Mind Caviar Fiction: "Confession" by Violet Skye, Spring 2000

Violet Skye is, besides being a zine editor and writer, a really sassy cook, a rocket scientist, a sculptress and a natural blonde. She can often be found enjoying lounge music or indulging in decadent
cuisine. "Confession" is a story that took her many years to write. She is proud and relieved to finally get it done!

Correspond with Violet Skye

Confession
by Violet Skye

My husband had come home from work with another variation of his usual tirade against the corporation for which he worked. This time it was because he discovered a co-worker was being paid several thousand dollars more a year than him. Last time it was about the incompetence of his secretary. Sometimes it wasn’t even about work, and was just about the world, or New Orleans, or his parents. But there was always something for him to be unhappy about.

So after dinner I put on my least sexy flannel pajamas and retreated upstairs to read, hoping he would leave me alone. When I heard his footsteps on the stairs I quickly turned out the light and closed my eyes. I felt him get into bed with me, and then immediately reach for my breast. His idea of foreplay. I recoiled from his touch, and forcibly removed his hand from my body.

“Why are you always pushing me away?” he asked. It was too late to pretend to be asleep.

“I 'm just not in the mood tonight. I have a big day at work tomorrow, and I'm really tired,” I replied, hoping that he would just give up and go to sleep.

“You're never in the mood these days. Something's wrong, we have to talk about it.”

His voice was insistent and I knew that I'd never get to sleep that night if we began that talk. We had talked the topic to death, but nothing ever changed. If anything, the more he insisted the less I wanted him. I quickly weighed pros and cons of consenting.

“Oh, okay,” I said half-heartedly.

Sex without desire had become the price I was sometimes willing to pay for just being able to go to sleep. He undressed me quickly, before I could change my mind. He placed his lips on my breasts and began to kiss his way down my chest and my belly until his mouth was between my legs-- and what should have been a pleasurable sensation was more like repulsion. I couldn’t go through with it.

“No, I don’t want that,” I protested, “I just want you inside me.” I lied, hoping to get the whole thing over with more quickly that way.

He complied, happy to take whatever he could get, I suppose. And as he moved inside me I thought of all the things I had to do at work the next day and then when it was finished I rolled over to my side of the bed.

It seems unbelievable now, but I thought I loved my husband. I was busy with graduate school, and it was easy to explain away my lack of desire as a side-effect of the stress associated with that. I had a lovely house, money and security. I had convinced myself, and frequently told others, that I was happy, that I had a good husband who loved me. Wasn’t the fact that he still desired me adequate proof of his love? It never occurred to me to ask how it could be that this man who claimed to love me, who should know me more intimately than anyone, would still go through with having sex with me, and even seem to enjoy it, when it should have been clear to him that even though I gave consent, my heart and soul were not it.

It was only after graduation that my restlessness began. In a classic case of denial, I couldn’t figure out the cause. I thought I had everything I wanted. But then, one day, there he was, across the room where I was taking that tiresome bar review course, with his brown-blonde hair and his enticing green eyes and that square jaw. Lance was tall, too, six foot three, and he dressed with a careless style that compelled me to look at him. Here was a man who aroused me on sight. He made my blood run hot, my senses attuned to his every gesture.

I had never imagined myself the kind of woman who would cheat on her husband. I suppose no one does. But I remember looking at him before we had even exchanged a single word and thinking I had made a terrible mistake by marrying my husband four years before, and that here was the man I should have married.

“Why are you so quiet?” my husband would ask, in the days that followed, awakening me from one of my elaborate fantasies about Lance.

“Nothing, I'm just thinking about school,” my standard reply.

But I was not thinking about school. I was thinking about Lance and whether I was ever going to have him, and how much I wanted to have him, and deciding that I was going to have him.

It all began, as many romances do, with casual conversation.

“What's that book you're reading?” I asked one day. Other days we talked about our professors, or other topics that came up in class. “I'll read you your horoscope,” Lance said one day during one of our class breaks. “What sign are you?”

“Scorpio,” I replied, noting his raised eyebrow with delight. He looked down at the paper.
“Let another wooer woo you,” he read. What more of a sign did I need?

"Are you ever free for lunch?” he asked later that day, as class was ending and we were all getting ready to leave.

“Well, not this week, but definitely next,” I replied, my heart pounding. He walked out with me towards the elevator.

“That's a very pretty ring,” he said, looking down at my wedding band and engagement ring. I guessed this was his not so subtle way of letting me know that he was aware of my marital status. I had never wanted so badly not to be wearing it. Maybe I should have felt guilty, a married woman carrying on like a schoolgirl with another man, but what I really felt was regret that I had ever gotten married.

“Thanks,” I replied, “Maybe we can have lunch together on Wednesday?” And with that we exchanged phone numbers.

Lunch was a pleasant affair at a nearby pub. Over burgers and Abita Ambers we discussed how much we loved New Orleans, our work, and school. He asked about my husband, I asked about his girlfriends. We were becoming friends, I told myself. But the kind of excitement I felt when I was around him was a lot more than the warm glow of friendship. I couldn’t wait to see him again. So a few days later, on a sultry summer day in July, I made a special trip to the coffee house near his apartment to study. I sat for a while reading my notes, and then went to the public phone and dialed his phone number.

“Hi Lance,” I said when he answered, “I'm over here at PJ’s and I have that outline you wanted with me. Would you like to come get it, or have me drop it by?” It was such a frail pretense. I knew he knew it too.

“Well, I was about to make breakfast, why don’t you come over and join me and I can get the outline from you then?”

This was far better than I could have hoped for. Seeing him, having him cook for me, being in his apartment alone with him, it was too exciting.

“I'll be there in a few minutes.” I quickly gathered my things and went to the ladies room to fix my lipstick.

When I got to his apartment he answered the door looking handsomely and irresistibly disheveled, as if he had not been awake very long. “I'm making my famous breakfast burritos,” he announced, as he showed me back to his kitchen. He poured me an iced coffee while he made breakfast, and I remember how cold the glass felt in my hands, the hint of vanilla.

His famous breakfast burritos consisted of eggs, black beans, and rice, all rolled up in a warm flour tortilla. They were delicious, although I can’t say I was in the most objective frame of mind to critique his cuisine, as I was already imagining making love with him. After we ate breakfast and had talked for a while I began to get ready to leave, relieved yet disappointed that I had tempted fate once again without consequence. But then Lance sat on the bed behind me as I fumbled with my bag for the outline I had brought for him. He put his hands on my shoulders, massaging them gently, and then let his hands slide down to rest on the curve where my hips begin with a touch that spoke of desire and lust and longing. He held his hands there for what seemed like a long time. My heart was beating fast, my breathing shallow. His touch was fire. I felt myself getting all warm and wet inside. But he suddenly stood up and walked away from me. Unable to help myself, I followed, responding to his call even as he tried to revoke it. I went into his arms, I lifted my lips up to his, and he kissed me.

“Are you sure this is what you want?” I remember him asking as we slow danced to whatever was playing on the radio, “You have a lot to lose, your marriage, your house, your life that you’ve built with your husband.”

To this day I don’t recall my reply, but I know that I was more aroused than I had ever been in my life, and that there was nothing I had ever wanted more than to be in this man’s bed and to let him run his hands and lips and tongue all over my body in the way I could no longer bear to be touched by my husband.

We fell onto his bed. He slowly unbuttoned the front of my dress as I kissed him hungrily. I removed his shirt, my eyes eating up the sight of him, bare-chested and golden and mine. I pressed my hips up against his, feeling him hard against my belly. His hand strayed down between my legs.

“You are so wet for me,” he whispered as he stroked the inside of my lips gently in small circles.

I moaned with delight. The warm feeling inside of me intensified with each caress until it finally cascaded into a waterfall of pleasure that spread over my entire body. And as the warm waves of my climax still rolled over me, he, in one masterful movement, entered me completely. I surrounded him like a glove, loving the feeling of holding him inside me, relishing the feeling of being filled with him. As we made love that day, ferociously and hungrily, the tension of weeks of lunches and small talk and trying to pretend that we weren’t attracted to each other was finally released. Then the strange mixture of passion and pleasure, guilt and disbelief at the twists of fate that had brought me to his bed, that had been swirling around in my head, was suddenly quiet and I felt something like bliss.

After that day, the very sound of his voice on the phone thrilled me. How could I not want him, when he made me feel so alive, when the hours that I spent with him were the only times that I ever felt truly happy? I was awake in my life again, alive and present and engaged. How could I give that up once I found it? Of course, I should have left my husband sooner, I should have been honest with him about not loving him anymore, I should have done many things differently. But this story is not about regret, because meeting Lance was the best thing that ever happened to me.

Whenever Lance called me at the office I would make an excuse and leave for a long lunch. Driving to his apartment, my heart pounded in my chest the entire way. I would go to his door and he would let me in. I would fall into his arms and it would be off with the shoes and the stockings and the jacket and the skirt, the black lace panties, the matching bra, the vows, the ring, and, finally, the guilt, until I was free of everything but desire.

He would sometimes draw a bath for me after we made love. And while I cherished the tenderness of his gesture, I hated that I had to wash him away from me. I longed to carry his scent back home with me, to keep him on my skin until the next time I could get away to see him. When I saw him in the evenings, if there was time, he would go pick up dinner for us while I bathed, and after my bath I would slip into his bathrobe.

“You look delicious,” he would say to me as we nibbled on fried ravioli and sun-dried tomato pizza. I would absorb his presence hungrily, knowing that it would have to sustain me for days or weeks or months until I could see him again, until one day I just couldn’t do it anymore.

“We have to talk,” I told my husband one night after dinner.

“I know,” he said, “You've been so distant lately. What's going on?”

My heart was about to jump right out of my chest. I was terrified of how he would take it, but I had to tell him. “I don’t think I love you any more, and I want to move out,” I got it out in one breath. He looked shocked, destroyed. The guilt suddenly flooded me and I started to lose my nerve. I tried to soften the blow, “I'm not sure I want a divorce, but I'm confused, and I think at the very least we need to live apart for a few months.”

“Is there someone else?” he asked. I considered lying, then thought better of it. There had already been too many lies.

“Yes, but that's not the reason I'm leaving. I am leaving because I don’t think this marriage can work anymore,” I answered. In his face and saw nothing but rage.

“Who is he?” he asked furiously.

I refused to say. “It doesn’t matter who it is. This is not about him. It's about me not wanting to live with you anymore.”

The adrenaline was pumping in my veins; I watched carefully for his reaction to my words, ready to fight or flee if necessary. But he simply announced that he needed to be alone, stood up, and went out the front door. And in the silence that filled the house after he left, I made my decision. I booked a room for the night at The Columns, packed some things, and left the house and the furniture and all the things that at one time had seemed so important to my happiness.

And I never went back.