Page 78 of Games We Play
The elevator doors opened. Sloan walked forward, but Sean stayed behind until Leah had also stepped out of the elevator.He’s not sitting in with us, is he?No. Sean disappeared into another room while Leah was led to a large set of double-doors around a corner.
“My chambers,” Sloan said. “I don’t often have people in here, come to think of it. Guess it’s my refuge.”
The room was dark, even in the middle of the brightly lit morning. When Sloan pulled back the curtains, sunlight streamed across the royal purple bedspread. Leah couldn’t help but enjoy the satisfaction of being right about Sloan’s favorite color.
“Have a seat wherever you like.” Sloan opened a closet. Inside was a shelf of mannequin heads, each one sporting a different wig, some of them unknown to Leah until that moment. Sloan removed the black hair from her scalp and softened it against a mannequin head in the middle of the shelf. “If you’d like, I can have drinks or other refreshments delivered.”
“No, thank you.” Leah helped herself to a couch at the foot of the bed. A large TV hung on the wall above the fireplace. It looked like it hadn’t been turned on in weeks.
Sloan sat in the chair adjacent to the couch. Her legs were crossed away from Leah. Here they were again, dividing their feelings and ignoring what was best for them.Whatever that is.Leah didn’t know. She also didn’t care anymore.
“I should hope it’s obvious,” Sloan began, “that I am estranged from my husband in the marital sense, and have no outstanding relationship with him. Like that. Anymore.”
Leah shuddered. “He’s still your husband. You’re still married… you never told me.”
“What was I supposed to say? ‘By the way, kitten, I’m married to my business partner. Long story, really, but I promise we’re not actually a couple anymore, so it’s only a little like cheating on him?’” Sloan laughed. “As if it’s cheating. I broke up with him a long time ago. We’re only married on paper.”
“Why didn’t you get a divorce, then?”
“Are you kidding me? Lose out on the tax breaks being married affords us?” She couldn’t keep up the façade of finding that hilarious. “Honestly… it’s a long story. One that I don’t like to tell people. Aaron and I… we did not have a healthy marriage.”
Leah leaned her elbow against the arm of the sofa and slapped her forehead upon her hand. “When did you plan on telling me? Before or after I saidI love you?”
Defeat crowned Sloan’s visage. “I don’t know. I never intended to get this far with someone.”
“Are you really gay?”
“Am I…” Always nice to know that someone like Leah could still shock someone like Sloan. “Am I really gay? Are you kidding me? Of course I am. Suppose you could call Aaron a… blip… in my history.”
“So you did love him at some point?”
“Honey…” Sloan shook her head. “He was my whole fucking world.”
***
Sloan insisted on summoning a drink before daring to continue. Liquid courage wasn’t the issue. Oral fixation was.If I don’t have something to preoccupy my mouth, I won’t know what to do with myself.She wasn’t a fan of leaving Leah hanging like this, but until the drink was in her hand, she’d stay silent on what troubled her the most about her marriage to Aaron Giles.
I was a kid. What the fuck did I know?Back then, though, twenty-five hardly felt like a child. Women got married and had babies at twenty-five all the fucking time, but Sloan? She hadn’t been ready for that kind of upheaval. She had been a grad student on the verge of receiving her degree. Her sheltered middle-class soul hadn’t been prepared for the man who came to speak to one of her classes one fateful spring day.
“It’s simple, I suppose,” Sloan said after explaining the first time she saw Aaron on a college campus. “Until the age of twenty-five, I had spent all of my adult life cavorting with women and dreaming of the day I’d finally settle down and marry one. Then by the time I was twenty-six, I was bisexual and wondering if this was what it was like to grow older.”
“What do you mean?”
“It’s not supposed to make sense anymore. I’m forty now. I can look back and call out my bullshit from my twenties. But back then, I was convinced that accepting my attraction for one man meant I had matured.” The drink wouldn’t be enough. Leah could look disgusted all she wanted, but Sloan was going to chain smoke her way through this conversation if it killed her. “You’re thirty. Surely, you must remember what it was like to enter the second half of your twenties and realize things had changed.”
Leah said nothing.
“There was an instant attraction between us. I eschewed his advances for a whole day before finally consenting to one drink, to sate my curiosity.”
Smoke tendrilled from the end of her first cigarette.The nicotine and alcohol can’t hit my system fast enough.This was the first time since getting a therapist that Sloan ever told this tale out loud. It had been bad enough to live it. Did she really need someone else to know about it?
Yes, apparently. If she were determined to make a girlfriend out of anyone, let alone someone like Leah, then she needed to reveal this part of herself. She could be divorced, finally, and she would still have to talk about that period of her life when she fell in love with a man. Hard enough to marry him within two years.
I was so stupid. Such a fool. A complete idiot.There were nights when Sloan called herself every derogatory name in the book. Not only the ones mocking her intelligence, either. Sometimes she couldn’t stop until she had called herself a whore a hundred times over. Her therapist said that was her brain processing the darker parts of her marriage. The times when she rationalized her husband’s behavior as normal, him having a bad day, and stressed out by the fast life they lived.
Another way she divorced her current life from that blip in her history was insisting on a separate name. Margaret was dead, a legality only on federal papers. “Maggie” was the wife of Aaron Giles. The day Sloan walked away from her marriage, she realized she had to divorce her given name as well. She was known only as Sloan from that day forward.
“I didn’t sleep with him on the first date,” she insisted, while Leah continued to look more uncomfortable than someone with food poisoning, “but I left the lounge that night with the feeling that he had changed my life. Back then, I didn’t recognize that look in his eyes for what it was. He counted on that. The bastard says the first thing that attracted him to me was myfeistiness.You know what that’s code for? ‘You looked like a woman worth breaking.’”
