I smiled back and downed it.
It’s blurry after that. We moved toward each other at the bar and talked a little. About what, I couldn’t say. I remember at least two more shots and a beer, drunk in rapid succession. I can’t recall laughing. Or his name, if I ever learned it.
I remember it all in scenic flashes only. Leaving the barstools. Entering the bathroom, him ushering me along like I was a child. I don’t think I quite knew where we were going until I saw the toilet and heard the door lock. Him kissing me, hard and brief, in the bathroom. His rough stubble, which had looked sexy from afar, hurting my cheeks. That was the first time I said no. He responded by turning me around and shoving my head into the wall. I remember staring at my wedding ring as he entered me from behind and feeling momentarily nauseated. I was sure I’d throw up during sex. At least that will put an end to it, I thought. Who would want to have sex with someone who was puking? I felt myself floating outside of my body, looking down at myself, thinking, What is happening, Jenn? What the hell is this? But this was what I had wanted, wasn’t it? To be someone else for a little while. I’d accepted a drink from him, and another, hadn’t I? Pretending I was a character in a movie, right?
None of this felt like what I had wanted, though. I so badly wanted to scream for him to stop, but instead I only whispered it—once, maybe twice—my efforts feeble and futile. In truth, I felt like I had already let it go too far to shut it down. It was happening. The only thing left to do was see it through until the end.
It hurt. He wasn’t gentle. I was irrationally terrified that all my organs would fall out of my still-healing vagina. But he kept saying “You’re so tight,” which had to have been a lie. He also kept saying “You slut,” which, though I knew I deserved, still made tears fall from my eyes.
The encounter felt like it lasted hours, but in reality, it was probably a matter of a couple of minutes. He came quickly, pulling out and finishing himself off with a grunt. He said we probably shouldn’t leave the bathroom together and that he would leave first. When I followed a minute later, dazed and in shock at what had just happened, he wasn’t in the bar anymore. I already knew he wouldn’t be.
One minute I was in the bathroom with him breathing heavily behind me, my eyes shut tight, praying for it to be over. The next I was in a cab, heading home to my husband and baby, not sure of who the hell I was, in disbelief at what had just transpired. My underwear was in my pocket because it was ripped and I couldn’t wear it anymore. I called my mom’s voice mail from the back of the cab, to hear her voice, something I did more often than I should have. I closed my eyes and imagined myself curled up in her hug, on her bed, eating pizza. Pizza in bed had always been her solution to everything—a bad day at school, a fight with a friend, a broken heart. But no amount of pizza in bed could make me feel better about what had just happened. And then, for the briefest moment, I was relieved she was dead, because what would she think if she could see me now?
When I got home it wasn’t even that late, barely midnight, but so much had changed between when my friends left the bar and when I got home. I peeled off all my clothes and got into the shower, turning up the heat to an almost unbearable temperature. I deserved for it to hurt. My skin started to turn red. Good, I thought. I scrubbed my face, watching black mascara peel off in bits and fall into the drain. I knew tears were running down my face, too, but I was too disconnected from my body to really register that I was crying.
I could hear Clara whimpering when I got out of the shower. I pulled my robe on and walked into our room. Tim shifted in bed. “Hey, how was your night? You gonna feed her, or do you want me to?”
“It’s okay, I got her. Go back to sleep,” I told him, grateful that it was so dark that I couldn’t see his face and that he couldn’t see mine, either: the face of a lying, dirty, betraying wife.
While Clara’s cries usually made me feel a bit panicky, tonight, they offered me surprising relief. It was as if she were pulling me back to safety, back to my real life, where I had the crucial job of keeping this precious baby alive, and away from the deed I’d just committed, of screwing some random jerk in a filthy bar bathroom. The two people could not possibly be the same. And I was this one. Not the one in the bar. I chose this one. A million times over.
I was disgusted with myself. Yes, my husband was rather useless when it came to night feedings, and his sneezes were loud enough to wake a corpse, let alone a dozing baby. But he was a great guy who loved me and who’d done nothing but try his best to support me through both my mom’s death and new motherhood, and he deserved so much better than this. Better than me. He should have been with someone who could handle one baby without epically melting down every day and then acting out in this horrifically self-destructive way.