I hear Mark come in through the front door and I throw my phone onto the nightstand and feign sleep. Though this seems silly, as if I’m the one in trouble; also slightly like I’m still a kid living with my parents. If I want to stay up late playing sudoku in bed, I’m allowed! But I don’t reach for the phone and I keep my eyes shut. 

Mark walks in and I can smell the outdoors on him, and with my since-acquired Minnesotan senses, I can feel the cold pouring off of him. This surprises me as I had been preparing myself for the smell of booze or another man, I think, but part of my brain also knew one or both of those were very improbable. Despite my vivid imagination and frequent paranoia, trust is one thing Mark has earned enough of to mostly conquer these other thoughts. Though he wasn’t where he said he would be tonight, I also haven’t given him a chance to explain this yet. I’ll put away my torch and pitchfork for now. 

“I know you’re awake” he says, somewhere in front of me, “you’re furrowing your brow in thought. That… and your game of sudoku is still loaded and the timer says you’re three and a half minutes in.”

I scrunch up my mouth but keep my eyes closed. Play possum or give in?

“It’s actually just getting too easy to solve them with my eyes open,” I say in defeat. 

“Oh, I see.” he says, and sits on the bed in the crook of my body. The cold air coming off his jacket is giving me goosebumps through the sheet and blanket covering me. It’s the end of October and it’s already evident we’re about to get hit with a brutal seven months of winter. At this rate, all the children will be forced to dress as hockey players or Eskimos for Halloween. My mind drifts towards Wayne at Halloween, but Mark interrupts my thoughts before it all goes dark.

“So why are you pretending to sleep?” he asks, brushing the hair on my brow aside. The moment is intimate for us, it seems foreign on one level but welcomed on so many others.

“Guilt. I should have gone with you tonight.” 

The trap is set. 

“Oh, Ethan. You don’t have to worry about that. Really. If you’re done with it, you’re done with it.”

I calculate what I should say next in the game he doesn’t even know we’re playing (which is a good thing as he dominates me in strategy games). I picture him standing in the middle of a rope loop I’ve hidden in the leaves and I can’t understand how the tree hasn’t snapped back up and left him hanging by his ankles. The pause between us is too long. 

“Well, just because I’m questioning what I’m getting out of it doesn’t mean that I shouldn’t be by your side through it. We’re in it together.”

“I’m fine if you’re fine,” he said, “and I know we’re in it together no matter what.”

He kisses my forehead. 

I want to keep prying, to make him slip up and see if he mentions that he wasn’t there, but he’s being so sweet and it has been so long. I also think about telling him about Tommy’s cryptic visit, but I don’t want to ruin the moment. I just want to be cuddled and let everything fall where it needs to. I trust him and he’ll tell me if there is something to tell. And I haven’t told him about Tommy, which isn’t lying, just waiting, maybe he’s doing the same?

Mark changes, gets in bed, and cuddles up next to me. His arm is around my waist and I can feel his warm breath on my neck start to slow instantly as he is never the one that has issues sleeping. 

“How’d it go tonight?” I ask before my brain really knows what I’m going to do with the answer. 

“Wha?” he asks groggily. 

“How was group tonight?”

“Oh, it was the same ol’, same ol’. Sad stories and bad decaf coffee.”

He starts to snore almost immediately after finishing his sentence and I lay awake staring at the darkness until the sun comes up.

---

One week later and I’m forcing deja vu on Mark. Standing in my shorts, watching him tie his shoes, I announce he’ll be flying solo again. 

He looks up again, shattering the glitch in the matrix.

“I know?”

I stand with a hand on my hip which is one of my more confrontational stances, but Mark doesn’t seem to notice. I don’t think he’s noticed any of my mood shifts this week. I’ve worked hard to hide as much as I can, making sure he doesn’t have a clue that I know he’s hiding something, but my coldness and irrational anger likely seeped through the cracks at times; I might have dumped a jigsaw puzzle onto the floor at one point after he stepped into my office and connected a piece. 

“Well, I’m just reminding you.”

He stands up and kisses me on the cheek. Clueless. 

“In that case… thank you. I do appreciate you keeping me updated.”

He leaves and I quickly fumble into a pair of sweatpants I placed inside my coat’s hanger the night before. Already, my heart is racing with the espionage. I even have a story picked out if he pops back in; going to the store for rock salt for the stairs. Jesus Christ, Mark!

I’m in the car, reversing out of the driveway and I can see Mark’s car at the front of our neighborhood which means I’m going all about this way too fast. Or is Mark going slow to watch me? No, this isn’t a crime show; we’re not playing a deadly game of cat and mouse. It’s definitely my anxiety pushing me to follow faster than I intended. But Mark takes a right onto the main road and he’s gone, so I continue on. 

Enough cars have gone by before I reach the end of the road, Mark’s car is nowhere in sight. The plan is less to see where Mark goes, but instead to go to the support group and just see if Mark is there. If he’s not, then, well, I’m not entirely sure what. I want to say I leave him tonight, throw my wedding ring at him! But if I was being honest with myself, I more than likely just repeat this routine next week and follow him instead. I couldn’t leave him the same way I could never kill myself or any other dramatic threat one might see on a soap opera. I daydream about making these big proclamations, but in the end, I would soldier on through thick or thin. 

In my mind’s eye, I’m in the best shape of my life now that I’ve left Mark. I’m building things with my hands and wearing overalls without a shirt underneath, or maybe there’s a shirt and one side of the overalls is unbuttoned? I need my shirt to lift up and wipe the sweat off my brow and would you look at that, my washboard abs are showing just as the new stable boy (stable man?) shows up to get away from his troubled past and his abusive husband. And then I realize I’ve conjured the new farmhand to look a lot like Mark (though shirtless, his muscles very much match the ones I’ve given myself), but then back in the real world I pull into the church parking lot where his support group meets. 

And Mark’s car is nowhere to be found. 

I’m litteraly going to kill him.