Filled with pizza and drowsy with fatigue, my eyes pinned to the TV… seeing, but not really seeing… I don’t even notice Moira walk into the living room until she’s two feet away.
It happens more often than not, but that first moment when I see my wife after not having seen her for more than a few hours, I get a jolt of supreme awareness of her beauty. Early on in our relationship, that was because visually… she was utter perfection. Sinful red hair, jungle-green eyes, and a body that was the sexiest thing I’d ever seen or will ever see in my life. Over time, it’s morphed. She still has all that and a bag of tricks, but she’s even more ethereally beautiful because she bore me two beautiful children, loves me even though I often don’t put her first, and still loves to swallow when she sucks my cock.
“Hey baby,” I say, my voice going down an octave when I look over and see Randall has drifted off on the couch. I hold my hand out to her, and she crawls onto my lap. She squirms a little, settling in and tucking her face into the crook of my neck.
“Hey,” she says softly, punctuating it with a yawn. “The kids go down okay?”
“Yup. Stuffed them with pizza and a shot of bourbon. They were out like a light.”
She gives a fatigued chuckle and burrows in closer.
“How’d the interviews go?” I ask quietly, my hand stroking her back.
“Great,” she mumbles, her voice sounding so tired. “I hired a really smart guy. Name’s Josh. He’s from Boston.”
“Josh from Boston,” I say in acknowledgment that I’m listening. “Got it.”
She doesn’t reply, so I give her a slight squeeze. I don’t get one back.
“Moira?” I whisper.
Nothing.
I tilt my head to the side, angling my eyes sharply down and to the left so I can see her face.
She’s sleeping. Dead asleep in mid-conversation.
My beautiful, exhausted wife can’t even give me five minutes to hold a conversation, and I can do nothing but chuckle internally, because now it seems I know exactly how she’s been feeling when I come home at night with the weight of my work pressing me down so hard that I can’t do anything but succumb it.
Chapter 7
Three weeks later…
Moira
A cold, rainy day.
An opportune meeting with a colleague I have to attend in downtown Atlanta, only four blocks from Cannon’s headquarters.
An equally opportune lunch hour freed up when my meeting got cut short because my colleague’s wife went into labor.
A quick stop into the restroom that sits just off the lobby of Cannon’s, and I am ready to surprise my husband.
I open the heavy, glass door with the word Cannon’s etched in big, bold letters, and the receptionist looks up.
“Hello, Mrs. Easton,” she says in a sweet, southern voice. “This is a nice surprise.”
“Hi Gloria,” I say with a smile, cinching the belt of my trench coat a little tighter around me. I’m feeling unbearably vulnerable since I stripped off my dress and shoved it in my purse while in the bathroom, intent on reveling in the look of surprise on Zach’s face when he offers to take my coat for me. “Just thought I’d see if my husband has time for a quick lunch.”
Or a quick something, I think to myself with an inner grin beaming.
My decision to try to seduce my husband at work wasn’t taken lightly. I have so much work to do when I get home that I feel like I’m drowning, and even as good as Josh the Intern is, I’m still feeling the pressure. I’m doubting myself and my abilities, thinking it would be a piece of cake to handle this position.
What I didn’t count on was an employer who says, “Yes, this is a part-time job,” and then crams sixty hours a week of work on me. If they hadn’t given me an intern, I would have had to quit within the first week, but I’m hoping things will start to settle down now that we are entering into the recruitment phase of the project.
So yeah… I should get my ass home and take advantage of the fact I have a sitter for the entire day. I should sit my ass down at my computer and review resumes while Josh sits at my kitchen table and works on obtaining government permits. That would be the responsible thing to do.
But still, I’m here and I am actually aching with the need to have a few spontaneous and uninhibited moments with Zach. We have seemingly set into a survival pattern now, both of us being driven by work and kid demands. I don’t think I really appreciated just how exhausting it all could be from Zach’s perspective until I went back into the workforce, and I fully understand now how life will just slip by.