Page 72 of Bad Husband

I smile. I can’t help myself. “Maybe you have a Charlie horse.”

Rolling over, she faces me. My attempts to get her to move away from me backfire because now she’s facing me and breathing, no, snoring on my neck. How can she sleep with those noises emanating from her?

Lying there awake, I stare at the ceiling trying to think of all the ways to make her stop snoring just so I can get some sleep. Nothing comes to mind, short of suffocation. That’s permanent. Tossing and turning, violently I might add, I think if I move as much as she does, maybe she’ll wake up.

All my rolling around gets me a trip to the floor when I roll right off the bed to the hardwood floor.

Too bad it didn’t knock me out.

That’s when I decide to throw a pillow at her. At that point, I wish it’d knock her out. “Shut up!” I yell.

“What?” she asks, rubbing her head. “What happened?”

By now I’m so annoyed I go to sleep on the couch in the living room.

As I lie here awake, a faint glow of lights from the courtyard streaming through the curtains, I think about why we’re here and what I’m trying to mend. I can’t pinpoint any day specifically when I started working so much and ignoring everything else. It was a gradual progression as the business grew.

When you get married, you never assume you’re going to drift apart. I didn’t. I swore it wouldn’t happen. So when did it happen? When did we become this couple making decisions together but two people living separate lives linked by the two children we’ve created?

We used to be one person, one heart, and one soul fighting together. Now we’re struggling to find our way, lost in clouds of smoke with no visibility.

I need to make her see she still loves me regardless of anything around us. She needs to know it’s not just our boys tying us together. When you get married, something brought you together. Something made you say I do. So just because you’re having problems, or the rope between the two of you is fraying, it doesn’t mean the love is gone. You just have to remember what it was that tied the two of you together in the first place.

But how will I do that?

Let’s hope this couple counsoler knows what the fuck they’re doing because I sure as shit don’t.

You’re probably wondering what happens when you’re at a resort that specializes in couple’s therapy, right?

Me too.

I don’t actually know yet, but the brochure indicates you have skill building sessions, which is a fancy name for supervised arguing if you ask me. It’s like we’re being sent to the principal’s office to discuss our problems.

Saturday morning after getting very little sleep, thanks to Madison and her snoring, I’m not exactly in the best of moods. Making our way through the hotel lobby in search of coffee, Madison stops at the customer service desk. “Do you care if I get a massage? My lower back is hurting today.”

It’s probably because you wouldn’t stop moving last night.

I shrug. “Sure. Go ahead. I think our session’s at noon.”

Madison smiles and schedules herself for a massage in a half hour. I’m thinking in that half hour, after I get coffee, a blow job would be nice and put me in awaybetter mood, but Madison doesn’t see it that way and drags me inside the restaurant to the left of the hotel lobby for food.

“I’m starving!” she announces, eyeing their buffet spread. I have to admit it looks good, but buffets have never been appealing to me. Mostly because anybody could have touched the food you’re about to eat, or worse, sneezed on it.

As we stand there, those same couples I saw in the bar, now silently eating breakfast with one another, I can’t wrap my mind around anything aside fromwhywe’re here.

How’d it get this bad?

Maybe I’m just now coming to the realization that my marriage has the potential to be over, but it’s just like me to be obsessing over it. You probably know this by now.

Madison and I grab a table near the windows overlooking the vast burnt-orange canyons surrounding Sedona, Arizona. It’s beautiful here. Absolutely gorgeous and reminds me of the area around our new house in Cave Creek.

“I don’t know what to get,” Madison notes as we’re in the buffet line, trying to decide between oatmeal and a bagel.

Decisions aren’t her specialty.

“Get both and I’ll eat the bagel.” I chose the bagel because it’s in an enclosed bin, less likely to have been sneezed on, and the cream cheese is in a fridge to my right. “Then if you decide you want the bagel, you can have it.”

She nods, and reaches for the oatmeal.

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