CHAPTER ONE
AINSLEY
My husband had a tell like no other. When he lied to me, his skin flushed bright red. Not the slightest blush red, but I’ve just run a marathon red. It was also the color he became when he was embarrassed.
It was that shade of red I was staring at that night across the dinner table as we discussed our new arrangement.
“So, no questions at all?” he asked, rubbing his thumb over his palm.
“None,” I agreed. “It’s the only way we can be sure it will work. We aren’t accountable to each other for what happens when we’re out. We’ll each have total freedom.”
“Okay.” He was breathless, doing everything he could to avoid meeting my eyes.
“But we should have some other rules.”
That piqued his curiosity. His gaze found mine.
“Other rules… Like what?”
I tapped my finger against my lips, though I already knew what rules I would require.
“First of all, you can only make connections for your given day. You have Thursdays, I’ll do Tuesdays. Every other day of the week, our life has to continue as normal. There are to be no connections made outside of the app at all. We won’t give out our phone numbers, no phone calls or texts, etc. And, whoever you’re with, whatever you do…protection is a must. We’ll each need to get tested after every encounter.”
“Of course,” he said, nodding in agreement.
“This is just for fun, so I think we should also make a rule that we shouldn’t see anyone we’re immensely attracted to. We don’t want either of us to start making genuine connections. It’s all physical.”
He nodded again, swallowing.
“Okay, yeah. Agreed.”
“And the kids can never know,” I said, lowering my voice. “As far as they’re concerned, nothing can change. You’ll be working late on Thursdays, I’ll be working late on Tuesdays. Simple as that.”
He ran his fingers across his lips.
“Are you sure we can do this?”
I looked down at the table as the sickly feeling washed over me—the one that had been ever-present since the arrangement was proposed a week ago.
“I don’t think we have any choice.”
“You know I love you, right?” he asked, the tremble in his voice more noticeable than ever.
“I love you too, Peter. This isn’t about that. We both agree that things aren’t working as they are, and we can either give up and walk away, or we can try something new.” I paused, watching his facial expression harden. “I’m trying here.”
“I know. I know you are… I don’t want to lose you. Okay,” he said, very matter-of-factly. “So when do we start?”
“We can both set up our profiles on the app tonight and start connecting right away.” I held up a finger, jaw dropping. “Oh, I almost forgot. I think we should use fake names. It will be easier to keep it all quiet that way. We don’t want anyone to find out who we are, or that we’re married, or where we work…”
“Yeah, you’re right. I like that idea,” he said, running his palm over his face.
“Okay, great, so I’ll be Annie Green?” I said. A version of my first name and a portion of our last name—Greenburg. “And you can be—”
“Pete Patterson,” he answered quickly. Apparently, he’d already given it some thought. “I’ve always wanted that last name. Like James.” He flushed red again as he mentioned his favorite author. I nodded.
“Okay. And we need to make sure we put that we’re only looking for something casual. I don’t want anyone to get hurt in this process—us or them.”
“We’re going to end up with a lot of married people doing the same thing, I’d say,” he said then laughed. “If only there was an option to just put that as your status.”
I didn’t laugh with him, because my mind was on whom I might know that may be doing something similar. Somehow, it brought me comfort to know we may not be alone. Maybe we weren’t so messed up after all. Maybe others had tried to do this outside of Hollywood movies; maybe they’d had better results than I’d seen depicted in the movies.
That was how the idea was first brought up. During an evening of Netflix last week, we watched the latest sitcom where the couples decided an open marriage was the answer to their problems. We’d seen it a hundred times in a hundred different films or shows, but this time, something sparked inside of me as I watched the wife go out with a stranger.
Peter said some people were crazy.
I said we should try it.
He laughed.
I did not.
And now, a week to the day later, here we were.
It wasn’t as if I were some sex-crazed maniac, like some may think. I was simply a woman who loved her husband very much, yet who had been driven to her breaking point. Long ago, sometime between the birth of our first child and the tenth birthday of our third, our marriage fizzled out.
We’d become the cliché couple that you see too often depicted in movies or books. We were boring, blah, never touching, rarely talking, both so consumed with work and kids and social media that we didn’t have the time or energy to seek out what needed to be fixed.
It wasn’t that we hadn’t tried. The year before, we’d committed to a date night per week, which was pushed back to a date night per month. It had been seven months at this point since our last one.
Date nights were hard to swing with children at home. Scheduling a sitter weekly added up, cut into family time, and even when we had tried to squeeze in alone time once the kids were asleep, one of us was always too tired or had too much to catch up on.
Two people dedicated to their demanding careers in a stifled marriage made it almost inevitable that problems would soon develop. And we were not immune—problems had arisen in every way.
In the end, I supposed, the cards were stacked against us from every direction. But I was determined not to give up. I was not going to get divorced. I was not going to break up my family and tell my children their father and I would be living apart. We couldn’t subject them to a new stepmother and stepfather and all the confusion that came with that. Peter and I had both grown up that way, and we’d agreed years ago to never let it get that bad. But it had.
It was too much. So, this was what we’d come to. This was where we were. Sitting across from each other at our family dinner table, preparing to desecrate our marriage via the wonderful world of online dating—er, I guessed in our case, online hooking up.
If I hadn’t felt so desperate, I would’ve been mortified, but it would do no good. I needed to fix this marriage like I fixed so much else in our house and lives, and I’d chosen to move it to the top of the list, above shopping for Maisy’s dress for the school dance and behind buying Dylan new cleats for soccer. Our marriage needed to be fixed. And what makes the heart grow fonder quicker than absence? Animal sex with strangers, I had to hope.
I tapped my phone screen, watching it light up. “So, we set up our profiles and arrange dates. And then next week, we start.”
He nodded, rubbing his lips together, his eyes wide. He thought I was trying to trick him, as he would never have expected me to suggest anything this extreme, but he knew me well enough to know I solved problems with an unyielding sword. I was a fixer. Straight to the source. And we needed to be fixed. We’d cut the issues out of our marriage with a few romps in the sack, and then things would be better than ever. I was going to make sure of it. I’d accept nothing less.
“Okay. Well, good luck to you, Annie Green,” he said, a small, sad smile playing on his lips as he picked up his phone.
“Good luck, Pete.” I reached for his hand, squeezing it as I used my other hand to press the download button on the app that would change our lives.
The app that would fix everything.
I just had to hope it wasn’t all a terrible mistake.
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