For the first time in quite a while, she felt alive. Inside her marriage, she felt like she’d been a caged animal, starving for the freedom of the wild. And with Mark’s kiss, she got a taste of that again. Of that freedom, that wildness.
That night at Starbucks, he’d apologized.
“I know you love Tom, Vanessa,” he’d said.
The smile that had played at the corner of her mouth from the conversation that had come before this statement quickly faded. It brought her back to the reason they’d come here in the first place.
“Of course I do,” she’d said.
Mark had taken a sip of his Americano and Vanessa her latte. They’d sat in silence for a few moments, their eyes chancing to meet only once. Finally, Mark spoke.
“Sometimes love isn’t enough, though, is it?” Mark had said.
And Vanessa knew, with that rhetorical question, that Mark wanted to have an affair with her. And she knew, because she’d come tonight at all, that she wanted the same thing.
They’d had sex in the back of Mark’s SUV that night.
Vanessa carried with her a feeling of nausea for the next week. She exchanged passionate messages with Mark on Facebook and on her phone. But the beginning of this was tainted with the fact that it was an affair. That neither of them had any business doing this.
And still, they kept on.
Mark was everything that Tom wasn’t. Considerate, kind, on time. And he kept promises. Vanessa felt painfully aware of the irony.
It wasn’t until the next party at the Wolsieffer household that Vanessa got a moment alone with him. Out beside the pool, she stood on the first step in, letting warm water shooting out of the jets behind her ankles help her acclimate to the chilly pool. She’d rolled her pants legs up, but not enough. Cold air whipped around her lower legs, making sure that this potential swimmer knew that winter was coming. Even at that, Vanessa would have gone swimming. The cool water in late fall never bothered her. She loved the way her skin pinked in splotches over her electrified muscle fibers, hopping while sheathed with skin. In moments of stillness, it was her body’s way of reminding her she was an athlete.
This night, she stood in the shallowest part of the shallowest end of the pool, the built-in hot tub whirring next to her as water circulated in little rapids over its surface, lit from beneath by green bulbs. She stooped and drug her hand over the little ripples, parting the water and letting it rush over her knuckles.
“Hey, you.”
She turned, wiping the warm water from the jacuzzi on her knit pants.
“Hey,” she said.
Mark stepped in closer and kicked off his footwear. Without rolling his pants up, he stepped into the pool and stood shoulder to shoulder with her.
Vanessa stood, looking over at the waterfall that Tom had installed the previous spring. The feature would add property value if they ever sold, he’d told her. She couldn’t imagine leaving this place. Not even with how things had become with Tom. She knew he was sleeping with one of his students—one, hell, maybe more—but she’d buried herself in her feelings for Mark, using them as a weighted blanket to calm her senses when things got too intense.
They’d kept their distance from each other for the past two weeks. Not out of any desire to end their affair, but because necessity dictated it.
Seeing him tonight felt like the magic of a drug shot right into her vein, dulling the ache that she felt in her chest every day.
Mark casually laced his fingers into hers, their joints finding each other’s’—the notches sitting together like they’d carved out each other’s grooves. Vanessa’s hand was swallowed by his. His palm was huge and warm and cradled the back of her hand like a bassinet.
He squeezed it and turned to look at Vanessa.
“Glad I came out here,” he said.
“Me too,” she said.
The two of them stood there for a few more moments. It didn’t matter to Vanessa that it was fall—that it was too cool to be standing in the end of a swimming pool—or that someone could have easily seen them there together, hands locked between them.
“Take off your clothes,” Mark whispered.
“What?” Vanessa laughed.
Mark dropped her hand and shrugged off his jacket. He stripped. Vanessa turned and looked over her shoulder, feeling suddenly like she was a student again and this house belonged to a professor who wasn’t also her husband. She smiled and began to take her clothes off.
The party roared inside and only spilled onto the patio when people came out to smoke. The chances of someone finding them were slim. Still, the slight chance that they might be found was exhilarating to her. There was a part of her that hoped Tom would walk right out and find them.
Vanessa couldn’t deny that there was a piece of her—however large—that wanted to rub Tom’s nose in the affair. She wanted him to know that she had found someone else, too. She wanted him to know that he wasn’t the only one capable of inflicting pain.
And there was a lot of pain that she’d have liked to inflict on Tom.
She and Tom had their struggles. But they had loved each other in the beginning, hadn’t they? The question hung in her mind, hovering over what she was about to do.
She slipped out of her pants and in just her underwear she watched as Mark, in just his boxer briefs, stepped backwards into the pool. The green water up to his abdomen, he reached out a hand, beckoning her to join him.
Vanessa wasted no time. She
