Chapter Text
Willa left her suitcase by the front door. Every knot the masseuse had worked out the day before had reappeared on her drive home from the airport. Everything had changed, but driving up the lane to her house, everything was still the same. “Something smells good,” she called. It was true. Something smelled really good.
“I thought I would make you supper,” Jonathan said from the kitchen.
Willa’s forehead wrinkled as she made her way to the big kitchen in the old farmhouse. It had definitely seen better days but it was her favorite place in their home, with big windows that looked out over the fields and a huge sink and counters made out of butcher blocks. Jonathan was pulling a casserole dish out of the bigger of the two ovens on the antique stove he had fixed. “That smells like real mac and cheese.”
He set the dish to rest on one of the burners. “That’s because it is.”
Willa stopped in the middle of the floor and stared at her husband. His hair was still damp from the outdoor shower he used before he came in after a day in the fields, and his curls clung to the nape of his neck and his forehead. The light bounced off the hairs on the back of his arms and on his bare feet. She’d seen him like this so many times, in sun faded jeans and a t-shirt proclaiming Visualize Whirled Peas, that she had forgotten how handsome he could be and how much she loved his tall, lean body, muscled from spending all day every day in manual labor. “You made mac and cheese.”
“Yes, I did. Do you remember the Olveras?”
Willa shook her head.
“They have the organic, cruelty free dairy farm?”
She grimaced. “Sorry.” She hadn’t spent a Saturday working the farmer’s market with him since she had opened her bookstore.
“Well, they’ve started making cheese so I bought some of their Colby Jack and some of their whole milk and butter and I made you mac and cheese.”
Willa looked at the bubbling casserole dish with the toasted crumb topping. “It’s not my birthday. It’s not our anniversary.” Her back stiffened. “Did you buy that tractor we can’t afford?”
Jonathan sighed and ran his fingers through his hair. Willa could barely remember what it felt like to have those callouses rub against her skin, the roughness such a contrast to the smoothness of her own skin. “No. I just wanted to welcome you home. I know it’s been bad lately between us and this is my way of saying that I’m sorry.”
“So, are you still a vegan?” What she really wanted to know was if she was going to get to eat that whole dish by herself.
“Unless I’m eating with you. Then I’m a vegetarian. And I’ll eat gluten.”
Willa felt like the San Andreas Fault had just shifted under her feet. She actually grabbed the edge of the counter for support. “I…I don’t understand.”
Jonathan shook his head and walked across the kitchen to her. He cupped her face in both of his hands. Willa’s eyes sank shut as his fingertips stroked across her cheeks before burrowing into her hair. “I love you, Willa. You’ve given up so much for me and because of me; you shouldn’t have to give up cheese too.”
“That might be the most romantic thing you’ve ever said to me.”
Jonathan pulled her into his arms. “Can I get a kiss from my wife now?”
“Yes, you may.” She went up on her tip toes and wrapped her arms around him. He kissed her gently at first, but his hands slipped down to her ass and the kiss grew into something deeper and wild, flavored with desperation and regret. He pulled back first.
“Let’s eat before it gets cold.”
Willa didn’t really care about the food anymore–he hadn’t kissed her like that in months–but she didn’t want to reject his peace offering either. “Okay.”
Willa licked the final remnants of the melted cheese off of her fork before putting it down. “Dinner was delicious. The chives were a great addition.”
“Thank you.” He moved to refill her wine glass but she put her hand over the top of it. “I think I’ve had enough for tonight.”
“You’re not tired already are you?”
“I’m still on New York time, and I have to get up early in the morning. I missed a Tuesday, so you know it’s going to be insane tomorrow.”
“Right. You go to bed. I’ll clean up in here.”
“I was hoping you would come to bed with me.”
“I’ll be in soon.”
Willa took a quick shower and was sitting on their bed naked when Jonathan entered. Her laptop was open in front of her, incongruous against the hand pieced quilt that covered their bed.
“That’s a lovely sight.” He pulled off his t-shirt and tossed it towards the hamper. It landed perfectly on top of the other clothes piled there.
Willa shut her laptop and shoved it under the bed so she wouldn’t step on it in the morning. “Why don’t you join me?”
“I thought you were tired.”
“I’m not too tired for you.”
“Willa…” His hands paused on the buttons of his jeans.
“We can at least try. It might work this time.” She tried to keep the desperation hidden behind a hopeful smile.
“I gave you cheese. I can’t give you a baby.”
“This isn’t about a baby. I want to make love to my husband.”
“You know I haven’t been able to do that–”
“Let’s try again.”
“So I can fail again? So I can feel like even less of a man than I already do?”
“You’re still a man. It’s not like you’re a stud animal. I want my husband. I need my husband.”
“And I can tell you that it won’t work. I look at you and I want to. I want to, Willa, but I can’t! I kissed you in the kitchen and nothing.”
“Could you with the busty Asian girls?”
“What?”
“You used my laptop to look at porn while I was gone. You’re not very good about cleaning up your search history.”
He looked at the floor.
“You could, couldn’t you?”
He ran his hand over his hair before he looked up at her. He still didn’t say anything.
“And the barely legal teens? Did that work for you as well?”
“Willa, please.”
“No, I want to know what besides me you can’t get off to. Did the gangbang do it for you?”
“It’s not about you. Just because I’m looking at porn doesn’t mean I don’t love you.”
“I wouldn’t care if you were jacking off to porn every day if at least you were fucking me too. But you can’t or you won’t and you don’t even care!”
“I care, Willa! God damnit, it’s fucking killing me how much I care. I don’t want to hurt you, but sex was about getting pregnant for so long and you got so sad every month, and it got worse every month and you got worse every month, and then when we found out that it was my fault, all I felt was that I could never make you happy.”
“You have to fix this!”
“What do you want me to do about it?” he yelled. “It’s not like I want to be impotent with you.”
“Go to a doctor. A physical doctor or a shrink or whatever you do, but I need my husband. I need all of my husband.”
He slumped down on the old rocking chair that sat in the corner of the room and held his head in his hands. “What if I’m just broken? Even more broken?”
Willa got off the bed and hugged him, holding his head against her stomach. “You have to go to a doctor, Jonathan. I can’t live like this anymore.”
He pulled away and looked up at her. “Are you giving me an ultimatum?
Willa sat down on the edge of the bed and wrapped her arms around herself. “I think I am,” she said softly.
“I go to a doctor or you’re what? You’re leaving me?”
“I can survive without a child if it means that much to you. But I refuse to give up my childand my husband.”
“I’m still your husband.”
“Not in all the ways I need you to be. I need to be…I need someone who…I need more than what you can give me right now.”
He stood up and started pacing, his long strides devouring the worn wooden planks under his feet. “So I’m supposed to go tell a doctor I can’t get it up with my wife,” he finally said.
“Yes.”
“Even though it would be humiliating,” he shot at her.
“Yes. Because lying next to a man each night who can’t get aroused by me is killing me by degrees.”
He paused and rolled his eyes at her. “Stop being overly dramatic, Willa.”
She launched off the bed and grabbed him by the belt loops. “I’m not. I’m not happy, Jonathan. The mac and cheese was delicious and thoughtful, but I would be a vegan for the rest of my life to make everything better between us.”
“I love you, Willa. You have to know that.”
“I know you do, but right now I need you to get over your embarrassment and do this for me, because you saying the words aren’t enough anymore. I need you to put my emotional wellbeing ahead of your own embarrassment.”
“And if I don’t?”
This time it was Willa who couldn’t say the hurtful words.
“If I don’t, you’re going to leave me.”
She let go of him and sat on the bed again, pulling her knees up to her chest. “I think I have to.”
“Can’t we give it more time? Just to see if it goes away?”
“No! You can get it up. It’s not a physical problem. You just can’t get it up with me. It’s psychological and those types of problems don’t go away on their own. You need to see a shrink!”
“You know how much I hate psychiatrists.” He went back to pacing.
“Well decide: do you hate psychiatrists more than you love your wife? Because that’s the choice you’re facing.”
It took a few minutes, a few minutes where Willa struggled to breath and every muscle in Jonathan’s shoulders tied themselves in unending knots. “Fine,” he finally said. “I’ll call around tomorrow and see if I can an appointment with a psychiatrist. Happy?”
“If you want, I can look up some names. Maybe find some that specialize in sexual stuff.”
“I can do it myself.” He grabbed his pillow off the bed and turned around.
“Where are you going?”
“I’m gonna sleep on the couch tonight.”
“Jonathan, don’t be like this.”
He paused in the doorway. “Sometimes, Willa, you make it really difficult to be around you.” He shut the door before she had time to respond.
Willa sat in her small cluttered office, going through the reports of what had happened while she had been in NYC. Her coffee was cold in its cup and she was only a quarter through her inbox, even though she had come in early. Jonathan had been gone before she left though, leaving a pile of neatly folded blankets and his pillow at the end of the couch. She wondered if he was planning to use them again tonight.
Her cell phone rang and she picked it up and answered it, even though it was an unknown number. This was the number on her business cards so it could be anyone. “Hello, Copper & Company Booksellers. How can I help you today?”
“Willa?”
She knew who it was immediately and swung her door the rest of the way shut. “Yes.”
“This is Chris,” he said unnecessarily. “Do you have a minute we can talk?”
“Ummm,” she surveyed the disaster of her desk, “Sure. I can spare a minute or two.”
“We might have a small problem.”
She slumped back in her chair. “We?” There was a we now?
“Well, it could be more of a problem for you actually, but it involves both of us.”
“What’s going on, Christopher?” Her stomach couldn’t take any more unsettledness than it was already dealing with.
“There’s a picture of us together.”
Willa couldn’t think. “A picture,” she repeated back dumbly.
“Of us on the plane. Someone posted it online. It’s obvious who I am, but your chair was reclined enough that no one would recognize you, except if they know your hair.”
“So Jonathan.”
“Right.”
“Other than him hating you even more than before, I don’t see how this is a problem for you. You’re sitting next to someone on a plane. Big deal.”
“We’re holding hands in the picture. And your wedding ring is evident.”
That changed things. “So the most eligible bachelor is suddenly off the market to an unknown woman.”
“Right.”
He didn’t sound nearly as worried about this as she thought he would be under the circumstances. “So what are you going to do about it?”
“What can I do?”
“Can’t you make them take it down or something?” He had to have a plan. He always had a plan.
“On what grounds? We were in a public place, there was no expectation of privacy. It may be rude but it’s not illegal.”
“But you could like write a program or hack something and take it down, couldn’t you?”
“Real life doesn’t work like the movies.” There was a hint of laughter in his voice. “It’s on multiple sites. If I take it down, it’s just going to arouse more curiosity.”
“So buy the rights to it and make him take it down because he’s violating copyright.” She might not understand the intricacies of the internet but she understood copyright law.
“And give it the Barbara Streisand effect?”
Willa rummaged around in her junk yard of a brain for a moment but came up empty. “What’s that?”
“You know Google Earth?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, Streisand got pissed that you could see details of her compound on it and sued Google to take down the pictures and it hit the news and drove traffic to Google Earth because all these people who had no idea it was there now heard of it and wanted to see it.”
“So you’re not going to do anything.”
“It’s the smartest way of handling something like this.”
She took a deep breath and noisily blew it out. “And if people ask you about it?”
“No comment.”
She reached for her hair but it wasn’t there. She was going to have to come up with another nervous habit. “And if people ask me if that’s me in the picture?”
“I can’t tell you how to handle this, Willa.”
“So you’re hanging me out to dry on this.”
“I’m not hanging you out to dry. I don’t have a right to tell you how to run your life. Even if we were in a relationship, the most I could do was offer advice.”
“And what’s your advice, Chris? What happens if I tell someone that I had a one-night stand with you?”
“Well, it depends on the person.”
Her fingernails dug into the armrest of her chair for a moment. “What happens to you if it publicly comes out that you had an affair with a married woman?”
“The reputation gets a bit tarnished, but as long as I keep coming up with brilliant new programs, in the overall picture it won’t matter.”
Willa let her head fall back against the chair and closed her eyes.“It must be nice to be such a genius that you can do whatever you want with no consequences.”
“There’s consequences. My parents will be disappointed in me. Your parents will be hurt. People we both know will talk. But I’m not married Willa. I don’t have as many consequences as you do because I’m alone.”
“Being married doesn’t mean you’re not alone,” she shot back before she could stop herself.
Chris hesitated. “How did things go last night?” he asked gently.
She sat up straight in her chair. “He made me real mac and cheese. It was his way of apologizing.”
“That’s great.”
“It was delicious.”
They listened to each other in silence for almost a minute. Willa finally spoke. “I have to go. Things are busy here. I’ll let you know if any press types show up sniffing around.”
“Willa, I’m sorry.”
Willa rubbed her hand over her eyes to fight back the bitter tears that were threatening to emerge. She could feel his apology in her body. How did he know how to hug her with his voice? “It’s not your fault. I made my bed. I get to lay in it.”
“I’m still sorry.”
“Bye, Chris.” She ended the call and put her phone back on her desk and then slumped over, resting her forehead against the stack of upcoming release notices. She got to lay in it, alright. She got to lay in it alone.