Reluctant Cuckold by David McManus Page B

anyone?
     
    Then I considered saying, “well, you see, I have this friend, and my friend was at this party, and I was just asking, you know, for the sake of my friend.”
     
    “David,” I imagined the reply, “I think you’re going to have to seek help for your—ahem— friend elsewhere.”
     
    Therapy would be worthless if I wasn’t honest.
     
    I can table this for now, I thought. It’s still an option, but I don’t have to figure it out today. Besides, this might be a temporary reaction. It might just recede on its own. I can give it a week and see how I feel.
     
****
     
    Ashley called me that afternoon, saying she wanted to cancel our dinner plans with another couple. “I’m just not feeling it tonight,” she said, “and I thought we could have dinner on the roof, just the two of us, and talk.”
     
    “Sure,” I said, “it should be really nice up there tonight. I can pick things up on the way home. You going to the gym beforehand?”
     
    “I was planning to. Is that OK?”
     
    “Yeah, of course,” I said, “you OK, Ash? How’s your workday going?”
     
    “Not great, I’m fine, we can talk when I see you.”
     
    “Sure,” I said.
     
    “Oh, and Dave?”
     
    “Yeah?” I asked, hanging onto her next words.
     
    “Can you get that wine from the place on Columbus?”
     
****
     
    I was a little uneasy after hanging up the phone. Ashley’s generally not all zippity-doo-dah on Mondays, so that wasn’t unusual, but cancelling on her friend at the eleventh hour was. And she wouldn’t say ‘just the two of us’ unless there was something she wanted to talk to me about.
     
    Perhaps she’d felt blindsided Saturday night when I brought up Jim Murta, or had since had time to reflect. Perhaps she felt bad for not really apologizing or realized how flippant, ‘just bigger OK’ came across.
     
    I decided to be gracious about any apology she might give.
     
    But back at the apartment, fixing a dinner platter, another possibility began to scare me.
     
    “Dave,” I imagined her saying, “I didn’t want to tell you the other night, but this isn’t working for me. I’m going to move in with Tamara for a while. It’s not an easy or snap decision,” she’d continue, “but I think we made a mistake getting married, or at least I made a mistake. I’ve given this a lot of thought, and I kept it all in, but it manifested itself that night at the party. I’m beginning to think seriously of divorce.”
     
    And what would I say back to that?
     
    “Let’s not be rash Ashley, I’m open to counseling, anything to make this work … I love you so much, I can’t imagine you not in my life, I’ll stop getting caught up in my job, I’ll be a better listener, we’ll get over this speed-bump, this relationship hiccup, just please don’t leave me Ashley.”
     
    I braced myself for anything.
     
****
     
    “To the workday being over,” I said as we clicked our wine glasses and she reached for the cheese platter.
     
    “Amen to that.”
     
    “Do you want to talk about it? What happened?”
     
    “Just our CFO tearing into my boss in front of the higher-ups. And me running around like an ambassador to his finance underlings.”
     
    “What was he going off about this time?”
     
    “The fall convention, nitpicking the budget, why clients who’ve done no business with us were invited.”
     
    “Well, he’s got a board to report to,” I replied. “Cutting costs is how he earns his bonus.”
     
    “Well how is Sales going to drum up new business if we shut the door on new business prospects? And he didn’t have to chew out my boss in public like that.”
     
    I thought about Ashley’s boss when she went down to the bathroom. My one memorable conversation with him had been when we were at his house in Connecticut for his sixtieth birthday. He’d been married for thirty-two years and as he was putting down the scotch, he told me that he loved his wife now more than