I Stopped Fighting For My Husband and He Panicked novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: Kiss!
At the company party Cassia joins the chant for her husband and his deputy to share a tequila shot, puts her ring in his empty glass, and at home he panics and offers, unasked, to end it with Monique tonight.
At nine forty, my coworkers started chanting for my husband to take a shot of tequila with his deputy.
"Kiss! Kiss! Kiss!"
It was the company's fortieth birthday party, in a hotel ballroom with a banner over the stage.
I was standing at the dessert table with a plate of tiny lemon tarts.
In the cab, on the way over, my husband had squeezed my knee and said, "Please don't do the face tonight, Cas."
"Nothing is going on," Cory had said. "You know I'd tell you."
I had said okay.
I had been saying okay to that sentence for a year.
Across the room, Monique laughed and covered her face with both hands.
She wore a green wrap dress, and she was the only person in the building who looked embarrassed.
Two men from sales pushed her toward Cory, and he lifted a shot glass in front of her.
My phone buzzed in my clutch.
It was the unknown number again.
It had sent me a photo every few weeks since last spring, never with a word, and I had never found out whose it was.
This one showed Cory and Monique at the bar, standing close, taken a few minutes ago.
I looked at the photo.
Then I looked up, and the real thing was thirty feet away, with better lighting.
Kat Brennan, who sat at the desk next to mine, stepped up beside me.
"Want me to hold the tarts?" she said. "So your hands are free."
Kat had been there in June, when I screamed at Monique in the break room loud enough for the whole floor to hear.
She had been the one to drag me out of it.
"Not tonight," I said.
I had also cried in the stairwell and shouted in the parking garage.
Every time, Cory had looked at me with great patience and said I was imagining it.
I waited now for the old feeling, the hot one that sent me across a room before the second chant.
It didn't come.
I looked at my husband, holding a shot glass and smiling at another woman, and nothing in me wanted to fight him for anything.
I had spent a year doing other people's paperwork, and every night I had fought for a man I no longer wanted.
I put down my plate.
"Kiss!" I yelled with the rest of them. "Kiss! Kiss!"
Kat's mouth fell open.
Cory stopped with the glass halfway to his chin.
He turned his head and found me over forty heads.
I smiled and clapped.
He waited for me to throw something, or to cry.
I clapped harder.
Monique took her shot, Cory took his, and half of his ran down the front of his shirt.
People cheered.
Monique laughed again, but Cory didn't.
He left her standing there and did not look back at her.
He crossed the ballroom with the glass still in his fingers, saying "Excuse me" to people who wanted to clap his back.
I was already at the coat check.
He caught up with me at the counter and took hold of my elbow.
"What was that?" he said.
"A toast."
"You never do that. You always, Cassia, you always..."
"I know."
"Say something," he said. "Yell at me. Say anything."
His voice had gone up, and the girl behind the counter stopped with my coat in her hands.
Kat arrived behind him and did not pretend to be anywhere else.
I took off my wedding ring.
It was loose now, because I had been losing weight all year without noticing.
He was still holding the shot glass, so I dropped the ring into it.
It made a small clink, and every person in the coat check line heard it.
"So I stopped," I said.
His face went white.
"Cassia, don't. Not here, okay? We can talk about this at home."
I took my coat from the girl and thanked her.
Kat took my arm, and I went out through the glass doors.
Cory caught the cab door before I could close it.
He rode home with me and didn't say a word until we were inside our apartment in Logan Square with the lights off.
Then he stood in the kitchen with his tie in one fist and my ring in the other, and his shoulders shook.
"Okay," he said. "Okay. I'll end it with Monique tonight. I'll call her right now. I'll block her. Just don't leave."
For a year I had begged for that sentence.
I had not said her name to him all night.
I had not asked him anything at all.
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