Chapter 2: Bill.confessed
The question hung in the kitchen like smoke. Bill didn’t wait for her to finish. He pushed away from the sink and walked past her, his shoulder brushing the doorframe as he headed for the stairs. His footsteps were heavy on the first few steps, then lighter as he climbed, until they disappeared into the upper hallway.
Rose stayed at the table. The cat jumped onto her lap and she stroked it absently, her fingers moving through the fur without feeling. Her phone buzzed in her pocket. She didn’t check it. She already knew who it was.
Upstairs, Bill paced.
The bedroom was bathed in the sickly amber of a single lamp on the nightstand. Its light pooled over the rumpled sheets—the sheets she’d made that morning, the way she made them every morning, hospital corners and all. Her phone lay on the duvet where she’d left it before rushing out the door. The screen was dark now, but he could see it in his mind—the last message she’d sent to Sarah, timestamped just after the conference. He hadn’t seen the message. He’d only seen her face when she typed it.
He moved to the window. Back to the bed. To the dresser where their wedding photo sat in a silver frame. Ten years ago. She’d worn ivory. He’d worn navy. They’d danced to a song he couldn’t remember now.
He picked up the frame and studied her face. She looked so young. So certain. He set it down face-first on the wood.
What was he looking for? He didn’t know. Something. Anything. A clue, a sign, a moment he’d missed. He opened her closet and stared at the row of blouses, the heels lined up like soldiers, the scarf she’d bought in Chicago—was it from Chicago? He couldn’t remember. He pulled open her dresser drawers. Underwear, neatly folded. Socks. A stack of old T-shirts she slept in. Nothing.
Nothing.
He closed the drawer and stood in the middle of the room, breathing hard. The perfume she wore—that faint, floral thing—still hung in the air. Or maybe it was something else. Something sharper. He couldn’t tell anymore.
He walked back down the stairs. Each step creaked. Rose was still at the kitchen table, the cat in her lap, her face pale under the overhead light.
“Rose,” he said from the doorway.
She looked up.
“I asked you a question.”
“I know.”
“You never answered.”
She set the cat on the floor and stood. Her hands were trembling. She shoved them into her pockets.
“I don’t know,” she said.
“You don’t know what?”
“If I want to stay married.”
Bill nodded. His face was unreadable. He walked past her into the living room, stood in front of the bookshelf they’d built together, the one with the uneven shelves because he’d measured wrong and she’d said it gave the room character.
“I don’t know,” she said again, her voice drifting in from the kitchen. “I don’t know if I want to stay. I don’t know if I want to leave. I don’t know if I love her. I don’t know if I love you.”
“That’s a lot of not knowing,” he said to the bookshelf.
“I know.”
“You’re a lawyer. You deal in facts. Yes or no. Guilty or innocent. You tell juries what to believe.”
“This isn’t a courtroom.”
“No.” He turned around. “It’s worse.”
She appeared in the doorway, her arms wrapped around herself. She looked small. He hated that he noticed.
“I don’t know,” she said again. “That’s all I have. I don’t know.”
Bill laughed. It wasn’t a good laugh. It was the sound of something breaking.
“You don’t know,” he repeated. “That’s your answer. After ten years. After everything. You don’t know.”
“Don’t do that.”
“Don’t do what?”
“Don’t make me the villain. You asked. I answered.”
“I asked if you wanted to stay married to me, and you said you don’t know. What am I supposed to do with that?”
She didn’t answer. She couldn’t. The truth was a wall she kept hitting, over and over, and every time she hit it, the same words fell out.
Bill walked toward her. For a moment, she thought he might reach for her, pull her close, tell her it would be all right. But he stopped three feet away. The distance felt geological.
“I have not been honest with you about something,” he said.
The words landed like stones in still water. Rose’s eyes narrowed.
“What?”
“I deceived you.”
She stared at him. The lamp in the living room cast half his face in shadow. He looked like someone she didn’t recognize.
“About what?”
“You remember the conference? Chicago? The one you almost didn’t go to?”
“Of course I remember.”
“I told you to go.” His voice was flat. “I pushed you. I said it would be good for your career. I said you needed a break.”
“You were being supportive.”
“I was being calculating.”
She took a step back. Her spine hit the doorframe. I deceived you I became a man who could not say what should have been shared and like yourself For a year I kept saying I don't know hoping you would never find out And look elsewhere
“What are you talking about?”
While you were. At the conference I went to my urologist for the results of my blood work and they changed my life and possibly our marriage. He explained that I have cancer my blood work found it and he called it prostrate cancer the old meme cancer
The word hung in the air between them like a dead thing. Rose's mouth opened. Closed. Opened again. The kitchen clock ticked. The refrigerator hummed. Somewhere outside, a car door slammed.
"Prostate cancer," she repeated. The words felt foreign in her mouth, like a language she'd never learned. "You have prostate cancer."
"I have prostate cancer." Bill's voice was flat. Clinical. The voice he used when he was delivering a lecture on Romantic poetry to a room full of undergraduates who didn't want to be there. "Diagnosed three months ago. Same week you were in Chicago."
She stepped backward. Her hip caught the corner of the counter and she winced, but she didn't move away from it. The pain was something to hold onto.
"Three months."
"Yes."
"You've known for three months."
"Yes."
"And you didn't tell me."
"No."
She pressed her palm flat against the counter. The granite was cold. Real. Solid. She needed something solid.
"Why?"
Bill walked past her into the kitchen. He opened the cabinet above the sink—the one where they kept the good bourbon, the bottle they'd bought for their fifth anniversary and never opened. He pulled it down, twisted the cap, and poured two fingers into a coffee mug that said World's Okayest Professor.
"I was going to tell you," he said. "The night you got back from Chicago. I had it all planned. I was going to make dinner. I was going to sit you down and—" He took a drink. Winced. "And then you came home and you were different."
"Different how?"
"Quiet. Distracted. You looked at me like you were seeing me through glass." He took another drink. "I thought maybe you were just tired. Case overload. You get like that sometimes. But then you kept getting like that. And then you stopped sleeping. And then you started leaving your phone face-down on the table."
Rose felt the blood drain from her face. She hadn't realized. She hadn't realized any of it.
"I was going to tell you," he said again. "Every night. Every goddamn night for three months. But every night I looked at you and I thought—she's already gone. She's already somewhere else. And if I tell her about the cancer, she'll stay out of pity. And I couldn't—" His voice cracked. He set the mug down hard on the counter. "I couldn't stand the thought of you staying because you felt sorry for me."
"That's not—"
"Don't." He held up a hand. "Don't tell me what it's not. I've spent three months imagining this conversation and I've heard every version of what it's not. Just—let me finish."
She closed her mouth.
"The doctor said it's early. Stage two. Contained.And then he gave me choices on how we can treat it one just continue blood testing hoping it never get to the number 20 that the cancer is moving,2 radiation therapy 9 weeks,5days A week radiation it lowers,the test rest but destroyed all sexual.desires and sem and production and the final options the one that offered me a longer life but no sexual desires and feeling permanent lying and then I would havevto.tell my beautiful wife that I can no.longer desire to hold her and roll.on top.of her as a husband should,its called chemical castration
The words landed like a diagnosis of their own. Rose felt her lungs constrict, felt the kitchen tilt sideways, felt the cold granite pressing into her spine like a spine of its own. Chemical castration. The phrase sat in the air between them, clinical and obscene, a medical term that sounded like something from a history book about eunuchs and kingdoms.
"Say that again," she whispered.
"You heard me."
"Say it again anyway."
Bill picked up the mug and drained it. His throat worked as he swallowed. When he set it down, his hand was steady in a way that frightened her more than shaking would have.
"Chemical castration. Lupron injections. Every three months. It shuts down testosterone production. Kills the cancer's food supply." He paused. "Also kills everything else."
Rose pushed away from the counter. Her legs felt like they belonged to someone else. She walked to the kitchen table and sat down heavily, her palms flat on the wood.
"Everything else."
"Desire. Function. The ability to—" He stopped. Started again. "The ability to get hard. To want. To fuck."
The word hit her like a slap. Bill never said fuck. Bill said make love, or he said nothing at all, just touched her shoulder in bed and waited for her to turn toward him.
"How long?"
"Nine weeks of radiation first. Then the injections start. Then—" He shrugged. "Then I'm a eunuch with a pulse."
"Don't."
"Don't what?"
"Don't make jokes about it."
"I'm not joking." He walked to the table and sat across from her, the same chair he'd sat in an hour ago when she'd told him about Sarah. The symmetry made her stomach turn. "I'm telling you the truth. You wanted honesty, Rose. Here it is. I'm going to become a man who can't fuck his wife. I'm going to become a man who can't fuck anyone. I'm going to become a man who doesn't want to."
She stared at him. The lamp in the living room flickered, buzzed, steadied. The cat meowed from somewhere in the house.
"When did you find out?"
"The day before you left for Chicago."
"Before."
"Yes."
"And you didn't tell me."
"I was going to. Like I said. But then you came home and you were—" He gestured vaguely. "You were already gone."
"I wasn't gone. I was—"
"You were different. I told you. You were quiet. Distracted. You looked at me like I was a piece of furniture."
She flinched. The accusation was accurate in a way she hadn't expected. She had looked at him like furniture. Not because she didn't love him. Because she was carrying something too heavy to see past.
"I was guilty," she said. "About Sarah. I was drowning in it. I couldn't look at you because every time I did, I saw what I was doing to us."
"And I was drowning in the cancer. Couldn't tell you because every time I thought about it, I saw you leaving."
The silence that followed was thick, almost solid. Rose could hear her own heartbeat. She could hear Bill breathing through his nose, slow and deliberate, the way he breathed when he was trying not to cry.
"So we've both been lying," she said.
"Looks that way."
"For three months."
"Yes."
"I was fucking my boss and you were dying."
"I'm not dying. Not yet. The treatment might work." He paused. "Or it might not."
She put her head in her hands. The wood of the table was cool against her forehead. She wanted to scream. She wanted to laugh. She wanted to run upstairs and pack a bag and drive until the city disappeared in her rearview mirror.
"You should have told me," she said into the table.
"You should have told me."
"I did tell you."
"Three months late."
"You're three months late too."
He didn't have a response for that. She lifted her head and looked at him. His eyes were wet. His jaw was tight. He looked like a man who had been holding a boulder for three months and had just set it down.
"What do we do?" she asked.
"I don't know."
"Now you know how it feels."
"Don't be cruel."
"I'm not being cruel. I'm being honest. You asked me if I wanted to stay married and I said I don't know. Now you're telling me you're about to become someone who can't—" She stopped. Swallowed. "Someone who can't be my husband in that way. And I still don't know. So we're even."
"We're not even. We're broken."
"Same thing."
He reached across the table. His hand hovered over hers, not touching, just waiting. She looked at his fingers. The nails were clean. The knuckles were dry. She remembered those fingers inside her, years ago, when they were first dating and couldn't keep their hands off each other. She remembered them on her hips, on her breasts, between her legs.
She pulled her hand away.
"Don't," she said.
"Why?"
"Because if you touch me I'll cry and I don't want to cry anymore tonight."
He withdrew his hand. Nodded. Stood up and walked to the sink, where he stood with his back to her, the same position he'd been in when she'd walked through the door three hours ago.
"I want to ask you something," he said.
"Ask."
"When you were with her. When you fucked her." He gripped the edge of the counter. His knuckles went white. "Was it better than me?"
She closed her eyes. The question was a knife and he knew it. He was asking because he needed to know. He was asking because the cancer was going to take something from him and he wanted to know if she'd already found a replacement.
"It was different," she said.
"That's not an answer."
"It's the only answer I have."
He turned around. The kitchen light caught his face, carved shadows under his eyes and along his jaw. He looked older than forty-two. He looked like a man who had aged three months in three hours.
"Different how?"
"I don't—"
"I need to know, Rose. I need to know what I'm competing with. Because I'm about to become a man who can't compete at all. So tell me. Different how?"
She stood up. Her chair scraped against the tile, same sound as before, same awful screech. She walked toward him, stopping two feet away. Close enough to touch. Far enough to run.
"She was rough," she said. "She didn't ask. She took. She pushed me against the wall of the hotel room and put her hand between my legs and I came before she even got my pants off."
Bill's breath caught. His eyes widened. She watched the words hit him like a fist.
"She kissed me like she was starving. She bit my lip until it bled. She fucked me with her fingers first, three of them, so deep I couldn't breathe. Then she went down on me. Her mouth. Her tongue. For an hour. I came so many times I lost count."
She paused. Bill's face was pale, almost gray. But he didn't look away.
"And you?" he asked. His voice was hoarse. "What did you do to her?"
"I ate her out in the bathtub. I licked her until she begged me to stop. Then I fucked her with a strap-on while she called me names. While she told me I was hers. While she told me I was the best thing she'd ever had."
The room was silent. Bill's hands were shaking at his sides. She could see the bulge in his jeans, unmistakable, betraying him. He was hard. The man who was about to lose his ability to get hard was hard, right now, listening to his wife describe fucking another woman.
"You're hard," she said.
"I know."
"You're turned on."
"I know."
"Does that make you sick?"
"Yes." He touched himself through his jeans, just once, a brief press of his palm against the bulge. "But not sick enough to stop."
She stared at him. Everything was wrong. Everything was surreal. She was telling her dying husband about the best sex of her life and he was getting hard and she was getting wet, she could feel it, the slickness between her thighs that shouldn't be there, that had no right to be there.
"What do you want?" she asked.
"I want to fuck you."
"You can't. Not after—"
"I can now. The injections haven't started yet. I can still get hard. I can still come." He unbuckled his belt. "I want to fuck you while I still can."
She should have said no. She should have walked away. She should have told him this was wrong, that grief and betrayal and cancer made a poison cocktail, that fucking him now would only complicate everything.
She didn't say any of that.
"Bedroom," she said.
They didn't make it to the bedroom. Bill pushed her against the kitchen wall, the one next to the refrigerator, the one with the crayon marks from when they'd first moved in and the previous owners' kids had drawn on it. His mouth was on hers, desperate, sloppy, tasting like bourbon and grief.
She yanked at his belt. He yanked at hers. Their clothes came off in a tangle of frustration and need—his jeans around his ankles, her blouse torn at the shoulder, her bra straps sliding down her arms.
His cock was in her hand. Thick. Hard. Warm. The way it had always been. She stroked it once, twice, felt the pulse jump beneath her palm. He groaned into her neck.
"Fuck me," she said. "Fuck me now."
He lifted her. She wrapped her legs around his waist. He positioned himself at her entrance and pushed inside, one brutal stroke, and she cried out—not pain, not pleasure, something between the two.
"You're wet," he said.
"I know."
"You're wet for me."
"I'm wet for the story. Don't read into it."
He pulled out and slammed back in. The refrigerator rattled. She dug her nails into his shoulders. He fucked her against the wall like he was trying to erase something, carve something, leave a mark that would last past the cancer and the betrayal and the three months of lies.
"You want to know what I did to her?" she said, breathless.
"Tell me."
"I sucked her tits. She had beautiful tits. Small. Perfect nipples."
He fucked her harder.
"I put my fingers inside her ass while I did it. She came on my hand. Called me a dirty girl."
His rhythm stuttered. He was close. She could feel it in the way his thighs tensed, the way his breath came in short, sharp bursts.
"Is that what you want?" he asked. "To be a dirty girl?"
"I don't know."
"You keep saying that."
"I know."
He pulled out. Set her down. Spun her around and bent her over the kitchen table, her cheek pressed against the wood, her ass in the air. He pushed inside her again, from behind this time, and she gasped.
"You're thinking about her," he said.
"Yes."
"While I'm inside you."
"Yes."
"Good." He grabbed her hips. Pounded into her. "Think about her. Think about her tits. Think about her mouth on your cunt. Think about your fingers in her ass."
She moaned. The table scraped against the floor. The cat ran from the room.
"Now think about this," he said. "Think about my cock. Think about how it feels. Think about how it's going to feel when it's gone. When it doesn't work. When I can't get hard and I can't fuck you and you have to fuck yourself while I watch."
Tears were streaming down her face. She didn't know when they'd started. She didn't care.
"Harder," she said.
"I can't get harder."
"Then faster."
He fucked her faster. The table banged against the wall. She moaned, loud, shameless, the kind of moan she hadn't made with him in years.
"I'm going to come," he said.
"Inside me."
"Are you sure?"
"Yes."
He came with a shout, burying himself deep, his hands gripping her hips so hard she knew there would be bruises. She felt him pulse inside her, felt the heat spread, and she clenched around him, trying to milk every last second before it was gone.
When he pulled out, she stayed bent over the table. She couldn't move. She couldn't speak.
He walked to the sink and turned on the water. Let it run over his hands. Stood there for a long time.
"That was," she started.
"Yeah," he said.
"I don't know."
"You don't know." He turned off the water. Turned around. His face was wet, but she couldn't tell if it was tears or sink water. "That's your answer. That's always your answer."
"Bill."
"I'm going to sleep in the guest room."
"Bill."
"Don't."
She pushed herself up from the table. Her legs were shaking. Her ass was sore. The wetness between her legs was starting to cool.
"I'm sorry," she said.
"Don't say that."
"I don't know what else to say."
"Then say nothing." He pulled up his jeans. Didn't bother with his belt. "I'll call my doctor tomorrow. Start the radiation. Maybe—" He stopped. "Maybe by the time it's done, you'll know what you want. Maybe by then I won't care."
He walked out of the kitchen. His footsteps creaked on the stairs. The guest room door closed with a soft click.
Rose stood naked in the kitchen. Her blouse was torn. Her jeans were on the floor. Her husband was upstairs, dying by inches. Her lover was somewhere in the city, probably asleep next to her husband, probably dreaming of her.
She picked up her phone from the counter. Two messages. One from Bill, sent hours ago: I'm on my way home. One from Sarah, sent twenty minutes ago: I need to see you. Tomorrow.
She stared at Sarah's message. Her thumb hovered over the keyboard. The house was silent. The lamp in the living room flickered. The cat crept back into the kitchen and looked at her like she was a stranger.
She typed: I'll be there.
She pressed send.
Then she gathered her clothes, walked upstairs, and lay down on the floor of the guest room hallway, listening to Bill cry through the door.