Chapter 7: Sarah presses her body against Tyler's, her hands sliding down to the waistband of his jeans while Megan's lingering scent still clings to the sheets - the ultimate test of his crumbling willpower as two women's desires pull him in opposite directions.
The words hung in the air between them, simple and nuclear. Tyler felt them like a physical blow to the diaphragm. All the air left the room. The ghost of Megan’s scent, the memory of her throat, the weight of the choice she’d forced on him—it all crystallized into a cold, hard panic in his gut.
“You… what?” he managed, his voice thin.
Sarah pulled back slightly, searching his face. Her expression shifted from open affection to cautious confusion. “A baby,” she said, her tone softening, trying to coax out a smile. “LouLou’s almost five. She’d be an amazing big sister. And we’d… we’d be a family of four. Doesn’t that sound right?”
A family of four. The math was wrong. It would be a family of five, with his stepmother wedged irrevocably between them. He saw it all in a dizzying flash: prenatal appointments, Sarah’s swelling belly, the birth, a newborn depending on him—all while he carried the secret of where he’d really been, what he’d really done, just hours before this conversation.
“I thought…” he stammered, grasping for the old, safe arguments. “Your job. The late hours. The stress last time with the postpartum stuff. You said you weren’t sure you wanted to go through that again.”
“I’ve been thinking,” she said, her hands moving to rest on his forearms, a gentle plea. “I’m not that scared kid anymore. We’re more settled. And seeing you with LouLou… I want more of that. More of you.”
More of you. The phrase echoed with a terrible, ironic timbre. She wanted a version of him that no longer existed, a man who hadn’t yet been split in two by a floral sundress on a dewy lawn. The man who could be a father again.
He couldn’t look at her. His eyes darted to the ornate mirror above the dresser across the room. In its reflection, he saw them standing there—a perfect, pale snapshot of marital discussion. He looked like a stranger to himself, shoulders tense, face drawn.
“It’s a big thing, Sarah,” he said, the words hollow. “A huge thing. We can’t just… decide this over groceries.”
Her smile faded completely. “I’m not deciding. I’m telling you what I want. I thought you’d be happy. Or at least… open to talking about it.” She dropped her hands from his arms. The space between them grew cold. “You’re not.”
“It’s not that I’m not,” he rushed, the liar’s instinct taking over. He reached for her, but she took a half-step back. “It’s just a shock. You sprung it on me.”
“I didn’t ‘spring’ it. I’m telling my husband I want to have his child.” Her voice had an edge now, a brittle quality he rarely heard. “Why does that feel like I’ve accused you of something?”
Because you have, he thought wildly. You’ve accused me of being the man you think I am.
He needed space. He needed to not be surrounded by the smell of clean sheets and impending disaster. “Let’s just… table this, okay?” he said, moving past her toward the bedroom door. “Let’s have a normal night. LouLou’s at your mom’s. We can get dinner. Talk it through when it’s not…” He waved a hand, encompassing the room, the ghost, the strand of hair on the sill.
“When it’s not what, Tyler?” Her question stopped him in the doorway. He turned. She was still by the counter, arms crossed over her chest, her DDD breasts pushed up by the gesture. She looked formidable. Hurt. “When you’ve had time to come up with a list of reasons why it’s a bad idea?”
“That’s not fair.”
“What’s not fair is you shutting down.” A tear escaped, tracking quickly down her cheek. She swiped at it angrily. “For weeks, you’ve been… distant. Jumpy. And now this? I’m trying to reach for something good, something for us, and you’re looking at me like I suggested we set the house on fire.”
Guilt, hot and acidic, rose in his throat. He was the one holding the matches. He was the one who’d already set the spark.
“I’m not shutting down,” he lied again, the words ash in his mouth. “I’m being realistic. Another baby changes everything. Money. Sleep. Stress. Us.”
“Us is the point!” she cried, her composure breaking. “Don’t you want ‘us’ to grow? Or are you happy with just… this?” She gestured vaguely around the kitchen, at their quiet, child-free evening, at the life he was currently poisoning.
I can’t have a child with you, a monstrous voice inside him whispered. Not now. Not knowing what I’ve done. Not knowing Megan could be carrying my child right this second. The thought was an icepick to the skull. It was a biological possibility, a temporal horror. He felt sweat prickle at the small of his back.
He defaulted to the mundane, the practical, the only safe ground left. “Let’s get dinner,” he repeated, a broken record. “We’ll talk. Properly. I promise.”
She stared at him for a long, silent moment. The hope drained from her face, replaced by a weary resignation he’d never seen before. It was worse than anger.
“Fine,” she said flatly. “Get dinner. I’m not hungry.”
She walked past him, not to the bedroom, but to the living room. He heard the click of the television, the canned laughter of a sitcom flooding the silence she left behind. It was a wall. He had built it, brick by brick, with every lie, every withheld truth, every inch he’d given to someone else.
He drove to a Thai place they liked, moving through the motions in a fugue state. He ordered her favorite, Drunken Noodles with tofu, extra spicy. He stared at his phone in the car, the screen dark. He thought about texting Megan. A question mark. A period. Anything. His thumb hovered over her name. He saw Sarah’s tear-streaked face and put the phone down.
When he returned, the noodles steaming in the bag, the sitcom was still on. She was curled on the couch, wrapped in a blanket, staring at the screen without seeing it.
“I got your noodles,” he said, setting the bag on the coffee table.
“Thanks,” she said, not moving.
He sat on the far end of the couch. The space between them felt continental. The laugh track was obscene.
“Sarah.”
“Don’t,” she said quietly, still looking at the TV. “Just… don’t right now. You don’t want to talk. So we won’t talk.”
They ate in silence, the food tasteless. He watched her pick at her noodles, the spicy sauce untouched. The physical gap on the couch was a chasm he no longer knew how to cross. The tattoo on his cock seemed to burn, a brand of his dual existence. Sarah’s name for Sarah’s eyes. But it was Megan’s mouth that had been on it last. Megan’s body that had accepted it all.
The box was not just open. It was spilling its contents all over his life, and he was standing there, holding the takeout bag, doing nothing to clean it up.
Later, in the muted elegance of their bedroom, the ritual felt funereal. They brushed their teeth side-by-side in silence, their eyes avoiding each other in the mirror. They undressed, turned off the lamps, slid beneath the cool, cream-colored linens. The king-sized bed felt vast and isolating.
He lay on his back, staring at the ceiling. He could feel her lying rigid beside him, awake. The specter of sex hung in the air—the obligation of it, the minefield it had become. The last time they’d tried, he’d thought of Megan to finish. Now, the idea of touching Sarah felt like a deeper betrayal than what he’d done in the grass.
Her voice cut the dark, small and raw. “Do you not want me anymore?”
The question was a gut punch. “Sarah, God, no. It’s not that.”
“Then what is it?” she whispered. “Is it the… the size thing? Are you… frustrated?”
Frustrated was such a small, domestic word for the cataclysm inside him. He thought of Megan’s gasped “It fits.”
“It has nothing to do with that,” he said, the truth for once. “Nothing.”
“Then talk to me.” She turned onto her side, facing him. In the dim light from the window, her eyes were wide and glistening. “Please. Just tell me what’s happening in your head. I’m your wife. I can handle it.”
He looked at her—the intelligent, supportive woman who knew about his stupid tattoo and had married him anyway. The mother of his child. The life he had built. She was offering him a rope, a way out of the box. All he had to do was confess, to vomit the ugly truth and let the pieces fall where they may.
He opened his mouth. He formed the first word in his mind: Megan.
And he saw it. The devastating collapse of her face. The shattering of LouLou’s world. The fury and heartbreak of his father. The scandal. The divorce. The loss of everything. Megan’s warning was a cold hand on his throat: “You live with it. Like adults.”
The word died unspoken. He chose the box. He chose the carry.
“I’m just… stress,” he whispered, the weakest of all possible lies. “Work. Money. The future. It all just hit me tonight. I’m sorry.”
"Maybe you could go off the pill, you know, till i get my shit together" he added, live an olive branch
The silence that followed was different. It wasn't just hurt. It was calculation. He could feel her parsing his words in the dark, each one found wanting.
"Get your shit together," she repeated, her voice flat. "That's your solution? Me stopping my medication, leaving my body to chance, while you… what? Think about work?"
"It's not just work," he said, but the defense was feeble.
"Then what, Tyler? Name it. Is it the mortgage? The car payment? Because we're fine. We've always been fine." She sat up, the sheets pooling around her waist. The pale light from the window cut across her shoulders. "This feels like an excuse. A placeholder."
He floundered. "It's pressure. The pressure of… another person. Forever."
"LouLou is forever. That pressure didn't break you." She turned, her eyes searching his shadowed face. "You were thrilled. You cried in the delivery room. You carved her name into that stupid, giant pumpkin even though the neighbors laughed."
The memory was a physical ache. He’d been present then. Whole.
"I was younger," he mumbled.
"You're thirty-two." A beat passed. "This is about me, isn't it?"
The word landed in the quiet room like a stone. His entire body went still. "What?"
“What?” he said, the word too sharp, too fast. A guilty man’s reflex.
“This distance. This… refusal.” Her voice was low, analytical now, dissecting him in the dark. “It started before tonight. Weeks ago. You flinch when I touch you. You’re miles away during dinner. You think I haven’t felt it?” She drew her knees up, wrapping her arms around them. “Is it my body? After LouLou, and the weight? Be honest.”
“No,” he said, but it was a weak breath of sound. His mind flashed to Megan’s full, pale curves in the sunlight, the forbidden swell of her. The comparison was a betrayal all its own.
“Then prove it.” The challenge was quiet, absolute. “Make me believe it’s not me. Right now.”
She was offering him a test, a way to paper over the cracks with physical intimacy. It was the oldest, most desperate marital script. His skin felt too tight. The idea of performing, of summoning a desire currently buried under layers of panic and shame, made his stomach turn.
“Sarah, come on. Not like this. Not because you’re doubting—”
“Yes, like this.” She shifted, the sheets whispering, and moved over him. Her weight settled on his hips, a familiar warmth. He could see the outline of her face, the seriousness in her eyes. “This used to be how we fixed things. How we talked without words. Before you checked out.”
Her hands found his chest, palms flat. Her touch, usually a comfort, felt like an interrogation. He was hyper-aware of his own stillness, the lack of response in his body. The part of him that should have been reacting was locked away, haunted by the memory of dewy grass and a different, older set of hands.
“See?” she whispered, the hurt flooding back into her voice. “You’re just… lying there.”
“I’m tired,” he protested, the excuse pathetic even to his own ears.
“You’re not tired. You’re gone.” She leaned down, her lips brushing his, a soft, seeking kiss. He forced himself to kiss back, his movements mechanical. He brought his hands to her hips, the curve he knew so well, and tried to lose himself in it. He smelled her shampoo, the faint floral of their laundry detergent.
All he could smell was summer air and sunscreen.
His body refused the script. A deep, humiliating inertia had taken hold. Sarah froze above him, her kiss slowing, then stopping. She pulled back an inch. The realization dawned in the dark, a devastating sunrise.
“Oh,” she said. The single syllable held a universe of pain.
“Baby, wait, it’s just pressure—” he started, scrambling.
“Don’t.” She pushed herself off him, rolling back to her side of the bed with a finality that choked the air from the room. The space between them turned to tundra. “Just… don’t say another word.”
They lay in the crushing silence for an eternity. The faint glow from the digital clock on his nightstand painted the room in sickly blue. 1:17 AM. He stared at the numbers until they blurred. He could hear her breathing, a controlled, deliberate rhythm meant to steady herself. He wanted to touch her shoulder, to bridge the frozen mile, but his arm was a lead weight.
His phone, charging on the nightstand, vibrated with a soft buzz. A text. The screen lit up the ceiling for a second.
Both of them saw it. Neither moved.
The buzzing came again. Another text. The light was an accusation.
“Aren’t you going to get that?” Her voice was arctic. “Might be important.”
“It’s nothing,” he mumbled. “Probably a spam thing.”
“At one in the morning?” She let out a short, humorless sound. “Must be a very dedicated robot.”
The phone buzzed a third time. A call this time. The screen cast a frantic, dancing light. He didn’t recognize the number, but a jagged bolt of fear shot through him. Megan. His father. Something had happened.
He grabbed it, fumbling to silence the ringtone. “Hello?” he hissed, turning away from Sarah.
“Tyler? It’s Dad.” The voice was his father’s, thick and slurry. The background noise was a roar of music and shouting. A bar.
“Dad? What’s wrong? It’s the middle of the night.”
“Nothing’s wrong! Can’t a man call his son?” His father’s words sloshed together. “Just thinkin’. About family. You’re my boy. You and your mom are… you’re all I got.”
The mention of Megan’s name, in his father’s drunken, sentimental voice, was a physical shock. Tyler’s throat closed. He was acutely aware of Sarah listening to every muffled word.
“Dad, you’re drunk. Where are you? Are you driving?”
“Taxi!” Doug declared proudly. “Responsible. Thinkin’ about responsibility. You gotta… you gotta protect what’s yours. You hear me? Keep your circle tight.”
The irony was a knife twisting. “Yeah. I hear you.”
“Good boy. Meg sends her love. She’s right here, tell her hi—”
There was a fumbling sound, a muffled protest that might have been Megan, and then the line went dead.
Tyler lowered the phone. His palm was slick with sweat. The darkened bedroom felt like it was spinning.
“Your dad,” he said, his voice gravel. “Drunk. Wanted to talk about family.”
Sarah didn’t respond for a full minute. When she did, her words were measured, each one placed like a stone on a grave. “Meg sends her love.”
“He was just rambling.”
“He’s always rambling. He never calls this late.” She turned her head on the pillow. He could feel her looking at his profile in the dark. “Why was your stepmother at a bar with him on a Tuesday night?”
“I don’t know, Sarah. They’re adults.”
"Yeah, what ever" she said before rolling over and going to sleep
The silence after her words was total, a heavy wool blanket smothering the room. Tyler lay motionless, listening to the false calm of her breathing. It was too even, too controlled. She was playing possum, and he was trapped in the open, every nerve screaming.
He watched the digital clock march from 1:24 to 2:07, then 3:16. Each minute was a grain of sand piling onto his chest. The memory of Megan on her knees, the shocking wet heat of her mouth in the cool morning, played on a loop behind his eyes. It was tangled now with the devastated look on Sarah’s face, the two women blurring into a single, unbearable accusation.
A thin, grey light eventually bled around the edges of the blackout curtains. The room gained shape, revealing the mess of his discarded jeans on the floor, the neat stack of her books on the nightstand. Two worlds, impossibly contained in one space. He slid out of bed just after five, his body aching as if he’d been in a fight.
The kitchen was a chill, silent tomb. He made coffee, the grinding of the beans obscenely loud. He stared at the pot as it gurgled, seeing not coffee but the dark soil of the backyard, the imprint of Megan’s knees in the damp grass.
He heard the soft pad of Sarah’s footsteps. She entered wearing his old college sweatshirt, the hem brushing her thighs. She didn’t look at him. She went to the fridge, got the orange juice, and poured a glass. The ordinary sounds were deafening.
“We should talk,” he said, the words cracking in the dry morning air.
She took a slow sip of juice, placing the glass on the counter with a precise click. “Okay.” Her gaze was on the backyard, visible through the sliding glass door. “Talk.”
He had rehearsed a dozen speeches in the night. They all disintegrated. “I’m… I’m messed up right now. It’s not you. I swear on my life, it is not you.”
“What is it, then?” She turned, finally, her eyes hollow from lack of sleep. “Give me a noun. A thing I can understand. Is it depression? Did someone at work die? Are you sick? Give me something to hold onto, Tyler, because I’m sliding right off this cliff.”
He opened his mouth. The confession was a solid mass, lodged in his windpipe. He pictured his father’s face, the bewildered betrayal. He pictured LouLou’s small hand in Sarah’s as they walked away from him. The word—“Megan”—would be a detonation that would sculpt those images into reality.
"Jesus Tyler, Nothing... Okay then I'll make you a deal, you go over to my moms today, spend all day with her, make peace, sort out what ever is the problem, then tonight, come home and prove to me that I am still the one... otherwise" she just shook her head and headed ack up stairs
The silence after she left was different from the night’s. It was surgical, a clean cut. He stood in the kitchen, the weight of her ultimatum settling into his bones. Prove to me that I am still the one. The task was a mountain. The path up was littered with the landmines he himself had buried.
He drove to her mother’s house in a daze. The suburban streets blurred. Every blond woman in yoga pants at a crosswalk made his heart stutter. He parked in the familiar driveway, the neat bungalow with its aggressive flower beds a monument to normalcy.
“Tyler! This is a surprise.” Karen opened the door, wiping her hands on a checked dish towel. Her smile was warm, then quickly tempered by the look on his face. “Everything okay? Where’s my girl?”
“At home. I’m… I’m the project today.” He forced a smile that felt like a cracked plate. “Sarah’s orders.”
Karen’s eyes, the same light brown as her daughter’s, narrowed perceptively. She stepped back to let him in. The house smelled of lemon polish and simmering soup. “Project, huh? You two have a fight?”
“Not a fight,” he said, hovering in the foyer. “Just… a rough patch.”
“Rough patches need traffic cones and a flag guy,” Karen said, waving him toward the kitchen. “Come on. I’m bottling tomatoes. You can be manual labor. Manual labor is good for thinking.”
He was put to work at the counter, coring blushed Roma tomatoes while Janet boiled jars. The rhythmic, mundane task was a relief. The sharp scent of the fruit, the steam fogging the window over the sink, it grounded him.
“She loves you, you know,” Karen said, not looking up from her pot. “Even when she calls me crying at ten p.m., she loves you.”
The coring knife slipped, nicking his thumb. A bead of blood welled, bright against the red pulp. “She called? Last night?”
“She didn’t say what about. Just that you were being a stubborn mule.” Janet passed him a paper towel without missing a beat. “Said you didn’t want another baby.”
So that was the public version. The sanitized crime. Relief, sick and immediate, washed through him. The deeper truth was still contained. He pressed the towel to his thumb. “It’s not that I don’t want one. It’s the timing.”
“There’s never a right time, sweetheart. There’s just time you waste.” She started packing the sterilized jars with tomatoes. “When Sarah told me she was pregnant with LouLou, I asked if you were ready. You know what she said?”
He shook his head, watching the blood seep through the towel.
“She said, ‘He’s scared to death, and he’s building the crib anyway.’” Janet smiled at the memory. “That’s the stuff. The building anyway. That’s what she needs to see from you now. Not whether you’re ready, but that you’re building.”
He thought of the crib, assembled at three a.m. in the nursery, instructions strewn, him weeping with frustration and awe. That man felt like someone he’d read about.
“What if I don’t know what to build?” The question came out smaller than he intended.
Karen paused, a tomato in her hand. She looked at him, really looked, and her expression softened from brisk assessment to something nearer to pity. “Then you start with the foundation. You show up. You answer the hard questions. You look her in the eye and you don’t flinch.” She tapped the jar in her hand. “This seals the deal. Keeps things from spoiling. You two need to seal the deal, Tyler. On something.”
He spent the afternoon doing odd jobs—fixing a sticky screen door, hauling a bag of garden waste to the curb. Each chore was a penance. Karen's words circled in his head. Show up. Don’t flinch. He drove home as the sun was dipping, painting the sky in tired oranges and purples. He rehearsed speeches. He would beg for time. He would propose counseling. He would try, he would really try, to be present.
His phone buzzed in the cup holder. A single text from Megan.
Thought about you today. A lot.
Three lines on a screen. They unraveled every resolution. They were a siren call back to the grass, to the simplicity of a transaction where the only thing asked of him was his physical presence. He didn’t reply. He didn’t delete it. He let it sit there, a glowing coal in the twilight of the car.
Sarah was in the living room when he got back, on the floor with LouLou, building a fantastical castle from multicolored blocks. The scene was a dagger. Normalcy as a performance.
“Daddy!” LouLou launched herself at his legs. He scooped her up, burying his face in her hair, smelling crayons and child-sweat. A lifeline.
“How was Grandma’s?” Sarah asked. Her voice was neutral, carefully stripped of expectation.
“Good. Fixed the door. She says hi.” He put LouLou down. “Smells amazing in here.”
“I made the lasagna. Your favorite.” She didn’t say it was a peace offering, but it hung in the air. The rest of the evening was a masterpiece of strained civility. Bath time, story time, the routines they had built as a fortress. He performed his parts with exaggerated care. He made LouLou giggle with a silly voice. He watched Sarah from the doorway, her silhouette against the nightlight as she tucked their daughter in.
They ate at the dining table, not on the couch. The lasagna was rich, the cheese perfectly browned. It sat in his stomach like clay.
“Mom said you talked,” Sarah said, twirling her fork.
“We did.”
“And?”
“And she’s wise. Thinks I’m a mule.” He attempted a smile. “She’s not wrong.”
A faint, reluctant smile touched Sarah’s lips. “She loves you too, you know.”
“I know.” He put his fork down. The moment stretched, thin and taut. “Sarah, about last night… about the baby. I’m scared. But I’m not saying no. I’m saying I need to get my head right. For you. For us. I want to try.”
Her eyes searched his. She was looking for the man who built the crib. “How?”
“I’ll make an appointment. For therapy. For me. And if you want, for us.” The words felt foreign but surprisingly solid once they were out. A real step. A concrete thing to build.
The hope that flickered in her eyes was almost too painful to witness. “Really?”
“Really.” He reached across the table. She let him take her hand. Her fingers were cool. “And tonight… I want to be with you. Not to prove anything. Just to be with you.”
It wasn’t entirely a lie. In that moment, he wanted it to be true. He wanted the feeling of Megan’s mouth banished by the reality of his wife’s skin.
He stood up, picked her up out if the chair, and carried her up the stairs to their bedroom.