you're too young & eager to love

Here I go! Cracking my knuckles, blowing the heavy layer of dust off of the part of my brain that controls creativity, and it's once more unto the breach, dear friends.

P.S. I had trouble with my past tense vs. my past participle. Whatever.



“Blame no one but yourself for this.”
Robert Frost


1.


She’s supposed to be soft. She knows this. It’s what Kenny loved about her when she was younger - her warmth, the shy duck of her eyes, the careful way she moved her hands - and it’s what he tries to find in her now, when he bothers to look.

With her hands in soapy water, Margot stands in the kitchen, doing the after-lunch dishes, and contemplates loss of self. She doesn’t know when she started losing parts of her, the warm girlish part, or if she’s actually gone. Is it permanent? This change? This slipping? When did it start? Whose fault is it, where should she lay her blame? She feels culpable, guilty for the catalyst of her own transformation, but unable to pinpoint the exact moment it began.

She knows she isn’t fully stone, and she isn’t ice. She’s still capable of looking at her husband with affection, of brushing aside his hair before they slip between the sheets of their bed, of bristling with pride when he compliments her cooking. But every day, maybe each and every second, she’s aware of something chipping away inside of her. Breaking. Of how her days seem longer, less full, more empty. Of a deep void building in her chest, a darkness full of loneliness.

Had it been breaking even on her wedding day? Was this wreckage always linked to her husband, or had it started from birth? She doesn’t know, but she suspects the former.

Sometimes she thinks it would be nice to be one of those creatures capable of shedding their skin, leaving behind husks. Emerging new and beautiful into the world. Other times, Margot finds the idea terrifying. How can you leave yourself behind, she wonders, and not give even a moment of reflection, of mourning, to what has been lost? It’s similar to when she’s seen birds fly into glass windows, tricked by the clarity of the glass or the gleaming sun. They crumple afterwards, startled, and made flightless. Something inside of her breaks when she sees this. Their broken wings and lost feathers, their eyes full of dazed confusion and wet pain. Something about them, their unknowing self-imposed destruction, mirrors the tightness growing daily between her ribcage.

Kenny is watching football in the living room, the occasional bellowed expletive marking his presence in the house. He isn’t contemplating anything other than how Matt LaFleur can make such terrible calls from the sidelines.




2.


Kenneth had his first affair before she became pregnant. Margot doesn’t know this, but she knows about the second one, the one after they lost the baby. The miscarriage had gutted her, and then the affair had caused a cancer, a stone pit that continued to grow and calcify as the years passed.

When she confronted him, Kenneth had cried. He’d yelled and turned red-faced with anger and shame. She hadn’t cried, but she’d slammed the doors and broken a few dishes, all of her pain captured in shattering ceramic. After, he’d clutched at her as though he were afraid she might fly away and leave him in their empty nest of a home.

The affair, he’d claimed, was his way of mourning for what they had lost. Grief made men do horrible things. Unforgivable things.





3.

She had told her mother about the affair while clutching a cup of coffee between both hands hard enough to turn her knuckles white. She was surprised the mug didn’t crack.

Her mother had quit smoking ten years earlier, but she always looked as though she was about to take a deep drag then blow the smoke back into your face. Margot had never quite grown accustomed to that look, but she had been hoping to not see it then, to get, instead, some measure of sympathy or concern.

Instead, her mother had sighed as one does who is long-suffering. She sighed as though her daughter was, once again, too willful and stubborn, a child that never understood logic. “Men enjoy their discretions. You need to learn forgiveness. It is the Christian thing to do.”

“He wasn’t very discreet, mom. He didn’t even bother to hide the text messages.”

“He’s hurting, honey.”

“I’m hurting, but I’m not fucking someone barely legal-”

“Please don’t use that language. I don’t see why you have to be so contrary, Margot. So he had a momentary lapse in judgement. Is that worth losing your beautiful home for? Your security? He doesn’t hit you or speak ugly to you or-”

“No,” Margot said, interrupting her mother then. “He just doesn’t see me anymore.”

“Doesn’t see you? What does that even mean? That’s the problem with you writer types. You’re so fanciful, always living in a dream world, never thinking practically. What did you think, marriage would be easy?”

Not for the first time, Margot realized she’d never really known her mother. She stared at her and drank her coffee, unable to say anything.

Finally, her mother had stood up from the table, shaking her head in apparent disappointment. She patted Margot’s arm on her way into the kitchen. “Go home, honey. Go home to your husband. Women have more fortitude than men, you’ll be fine.”

So Margot had gone home, but not until she’d cut her hair.





4.


“I’m thinking of teaching again,” she tells Kenneth over dinner.

He’s twirling spaghetti around his fork, glancing from the dining room table to the TV broadcasting the nightly news, but his attention returns to her once he’s processed the information. For a detective, she thinks he’s sometimes rather slow.

“Really?”

Margot shrugs one shoulder, curling her fingers around the stem of her wine glass. “Henderson says there’s an adjunct position available opening in the fall semester.”

“Hm. And the university will let you teach creative writing?”

She keeps her tone even, careful. “Is there a reason they shouldn’t?”

Kenneth hesitates before answering. “No, of course not. I think it’s a wonderful idea, but I’m not sure how well you’ve really thought this through.”

“That’s why I’m talking about it now, honey.”

“There’s a big difference between working full days again and folding laundry. Are you sure you want to give up suburbia for grading papers?”

“It’s only part time. Probably just one or two classes, mostly freshman composition.”

“Well, let’s think about it some more before we commit, okay?”

Margot makes herself smile. She nods. This time, Kenneth stabs the spaghetti, the fork scraping against the plate.

“This is really delicious,” he says, a bit of sauce smearing his mouth between words.





5.


“There are things you need that you don’t want to admit to.” Henderson tells her this when they meet for breakfast. She’s come with a book as a gift, as though this might somehow soften the rejection he will feel when she tells him she won’t take the adjunct position. It sits between them on the table as the silence thickens. His disappointment is palpable, but so is his judgement.

She clears her throat, a bit awkward, and tucks a piece of hair behind her ear. “You hardly need to be Freud to figure that out.” She’s trying to be funny, but Henderson doesn’t smile.





6.

She tries. She tries hurting her husband in the way that he has so often hurt her. She wants it to be about him, about some reckoning or long overdue payment for all the ways he’s managed to cut her, to diminish her, over the years. Big and small. It doesn’t matter. He’s made the life she lives absurd, a pretense. She looks in the mirror and doesn’t even recognize herself anymore.

It’s not all about him, though, it’s about her too, of discovering what she is capable of. Of punishing herself for her complacency.

It’s after they’ve accepted the understanding that there will not be any children in their life, after Margot packs the extra copies of her novel into a box that goes in the attic, after she spends more days writing grocery lists than character notes, after she finds lipstick on the collar of one of Kenneth’s shirts. She’d rubbed it with her finger, smearing it into the cotton, and pressed the shirt to her nose; it smelled like beer and old smoke. She’d thrown the shirt in the wash without saying anything and ironed it afterwards.

She wants to be calloused and clumsy like him. She wants to take their marriage for granted.





7.

Jasper is Henderson’s assistant, and she’s sure she must have seen him before, but it isn’t until Henderson officially introduced them after her guest lecture that she began paying attention. He’s nice, eager around the eyes but restrained and polite, much like a well-trained labrador, she surmises. She has to look up at him, he’s so tall, all slim height and brooding, expressive eyes. There’s still a bit of youth clinging to him, stubbornly refusing to let him grow into the man he’s trying to become. She can tell by the softness still in his cheeks and the smoothness of his skin.

They bump into one another, purely on accident, at a coffee shop on campus after she finished meeting with the staff for the creative writing fair they’re holding in a few months. It’s a brisk day, so she has a thick scarf wrapped around her neck, and her hair is disheveled from the wind, the soft curls sticking to her cheeks and tickling her jaw. She looks startled when he says hello, but not as startled as he does to see her.

“Miss Davis,” he says, grinning from ear to ear. She’s flattered someone his age remembers her name.

“Jasper, hello.” She shuffles her coffee to her left hand and shrugs the strap of her purse back onto her shoulder so that she can reach to shake his hand.

“It’s nice to see you again. Are you lecturing?”

“No, nothing so glamorous. Helping with the lineup for the guest speakers for the fair. And you? Are you keeping Henderson in line?”

“I think it’s more the other way around, really.”

She smiles, amused, but already ready to say goodbye when he asks if he can buy her a cup of coffee.

“Too late for that,” she says, motioning to the styrofoam to-go cup in her hand.

Jasper looks embarrassed and rolls his eyes at himself. Something about his body language shifts; he seems to shrink into himself, an otherwise impossible feat. She’s reminded of dogs again, of a boy who wants his belly rubbed by everyone he encounters. It makes her smile more.

Margot hesitates, then tilts her head towards the bakery and its display. “But I’ll take one of those blueberry muffins.”





8.

“You have very intense eyes,” Margot tells him, settling back into her seat with the muffin torn to bits on the plate between them. She accidentally knocks his foot beneath the table, but he doesn’t react. “You could be a character in my book.”

He laughs, but his gaze brightens in a way that immediately charms her. His enthusiasm is catching. “So you’re writing then?”

“Always,” she lies.





9.

She had tried.

She’d worn a dress that had been shoved into the back of her closet for at least five years, a clingy, flattering, deeply cut dress from a lifetime ago. Margot had been surprised when it still fit, when it looked good even.

She’d made it to the bar, had allowed a man to buy her a martini, and let this stranger place his hand, cold and dry, on the top of her leg. She’d been very aware of the way his thumb has skirted across the fabric of her dress, rubbing it into her skin, slowly and steadily with determination.

She hadn’t even been able to finish her drink. She’d paid the bill in a hurry, muttering apologies the man didn’t deserve, and all but raced home.

Kenneth had been asleep, snoring softly, half-buried beneath their down comforter. She couldn’t sleep after crawling into bed beside him. She’d laid there, listening to him dream. His breathing had been slow; hers was off pace. Even in this, she had trouble matching him.

He had shifted, turned closer, and then his breath was hers, and hers was his. It had bothered Margot - this mingling - the warmth and sour-sleep smell gently washing over her face. It had bothered her that she cared.

She had wondered then: if they were more in love, would she accept this? His breath becoming hers, sourness and all? Or did love not matter? Was this more, like everything else between them, about compliance?




10.

“It’s okay, you know, to be discontent.” Jasper tells her this after they’re in bed together the second time, his mouth wet on her shoulder, her back to his chest and the blankets pooled in their laps.

Margot sighs, not unkindly, and leans more into him. “You’re too young to even know what that word means.”

“Maybe, but-”

“It’s not discontent,” she interrupts, turning her face so she can see him better. “It’s regret. All those choices, all those years, and I somehow picked wrong. Every time.”

He’s silent for a moment, contemplating, rubbing her hip beneath the blankets. “Always?”

“Yes.”

“And this? Is this the wrong choice too?” He means to be coy, dragging his mouth to the back of her neck, to the spot that, thus far, never fails to make her shiver.

“Yes,” she gasps, not even hesitating while her body arches up and she curls her short nails into his leg. She can feel him harden behind her, his own body already responding to hers.

“Turn around,” he says.

She does, almost before he’s done speaking, shifting so that she can straddle his waist, her legs folding around his hips, her hand between them to guide him into her. She’s sore from earlier but wet and eager all the same, biting down on his shoulder to stifle a cry. His hands are everywhere, memorizing the length of her spine, cradling the back of her head, tangling into her hair, holding her waist. When she tilts her neck back, struggling to breathe through her misguided shame and the heat blossoming inside of her, he cups her face in his hands. One of his thumbs brushes where her mouth is trembling.

Jasper looks at her as though she’s a piece of art. It’s worshipful, the weight of his gaze, the intensity of it. It hurts too, makes her want to turn away. After so much time being in the periphery, she’s not accustomed to such focus.

She drapes her arms around his shoulders, locking her wrists behind his head, bowing her head so that their foreheads touch. She closes her eyes, anchoring herself to the feel of him, to every drag and pull and burn from her body and muscles.

“Don’t,” he murmurs, wet sounding. “I want to see.”

She lets her eyes flutter open, slow, with some pain. All she can see is him, his hazel eyes, and his dark hair. Margot feels his hands on her lower back, holding her, helping her. So close together, her hips rocking, his rolling up to meet her, they must be blurred into one. Behind his neck, her fingers curl, scratching, and the noise she makes when she comes is almost tortuous.