I guess I was that way too. I wanted Cleo to stay home with Derek, but that wasn’t her personality. She wanted more out of life. I had to respect that instead of trying to change her. Her independence was one of the things I admired about her in the first place. “I get it.”
“So…” He stared at his beer for a while before he looked at me. “You think Cleo would stay home if you had more kids?”
I shrugged. “I doubt it. I can’t see her giving up her job.”
He nodded slowly. “You ever talk about that? You know, having kids…soon?”
I shook my head. “We aren’t there. She’s told me she wants to have kids, and if that’s how it has to be, I’ll do it. But right now, our lives are so perfect—I don’t want to change anything. Derek just started going to school. Having another baby would be a nightmare at this point.” I barely had enough time with her as it was.
He nodded again. “Yeah…maybe in a few years.”
I drank my beer. “She says she wants to have kids, but she’s so ambitious that I think she’ll realize being a mother is just not a lifestyle she wants. She’ll try to do both, keep her job and raise a family, but she just can’t. She’ll have to choose. And at the end of the day, I don’t think she’ll walk away from her job. So, it may never happen anyway.” Cleo loved her job, just got a raise, and it wouldn’t make sense for her to ever leave it. And she wouldn’t want Patricia to raise them all day either.
“Yeah,” Tucker said quietly. “Maybe…”
Derek talked about his day over dinner, hijacking the conversation by talking about his friends, his assignments, the next field trip, and the other ins and outs of a six-year-old.
Instead of being annoyed by it, I engaged with him, knowing he wouldn’t always want to tell me about his day. He would get older, realize I wasn’t that cool, and go into his room to text his friends.
Cleo was quiet, pushing her food around and not eating much.
When Derek was finished, he asked to be excused. “Can I go back to working on my rocket?”
“Sure.”
Derek left and went into his room.
Cleo didn’t even seem to notice he’d left. Her eyes were on her plate, cutting into the fillet without placing it in her mouth. Her greens were mostly eaten, but very little of the salmon.
I wondered if she was upset about Dr. Hawthorne, if maybe it still bothered her. “Today was Dr. Hawthorne’s last day.” I decided not to tell her about the conversation we’d had because it didn’t matter.
Cleo looked up. “Oh? I thought she was already gone.”
“No. She packed up her stuff and left. I guess she got a job with the Mayo Clinic.”
“Oh…good for her.” She turned back to her plate.
“Something wrong with the salmon?”
She raised her head again. “Oh, no,” she said quickly. “I guess I’m just getting tired of fish.” She set her plate to the side even though she didn’t eat much.
“I can make you something else.”
“You know, I just don’t have an appetite anyway.” She looked out the window, her eyes already taking her mind elsewhere.
First, Tucker had been weird. Now, she was weird. “Cleo?”
“Hmm?”
“Everything alright?” She’d been off for a few days, and every time I asked her if something was wrong, her answer was always the same.
“Yeah. I’m just…stressed. Got a lot of stuff going on downstairs.”
I was quiet and withdrawn when I was stressed too, so I took her word for it. I gathered the plates and the bottle of wine and carried them into the kitchen. I rinsed off the plates, put the wine in the fridge, and then glanced at her.
She looked miserable.
The only time she seemed to be herself was when we made love. She was passionate, fiery, affectionate, genuine. Her eyes were on mine, and her lips quivered with pleasure. She rocked into me like my pace was enough for her. She was anxious, pulling me into her, clawing my back, yanking on my hair.
I liked it.
With my fists against the mattress, my forearms pinning her knees back, I pumped into her until I came, filling her with another load that spilled all over the place when I pulled out. It streaked down her ass and to the sheets below.
That seemed to happen every night, but we slept in it anyway, knowing the sheets would be changed in the morning.
I rolled over and lay there, grabbing the tissue box on my nightstand to clean up a bit. The housekeeper put those there, probably because she knew we were too lazy to get up and clean off in the bathroom, so we let the sheets absorb it.
Cleo turned the other way and pulled the sheets to her shoulder.