“Just a Tuesday”

“JUST A TUESDAY”
A Short Story by
Jeff DeMarco

The first thing Daniel noticed was that he was trying too hard.

Not during the sex itself. The sex was fine. Good, even. That was almost the problem.

He was thirty-six years old, married for ten years, and experienced enough to know that “good” covered an enormous amount of territory. Good because you were attracted to somebody. Good because you were comfortable. Good because you were drunk, although Daniel hadn’t been drinking tonight. Good because you were in love, or happy, or listening to your favorite song. And then there was good because you knew exactly what you were supposed to do. Somewhere along the way, you’d gotten fluent in it, the way you get fluent in a language you didn’t grow up speaking but use every day anyway.

He knew when to smile. He knew what to say. He knew how to make a woman feel desired without it curdling into a performance.

Except suddenly he could feel the performance. Not hers. His.

‘I’m acting like a guy who’s having casual sex,’ he thought, and the thought was ridiculous, because he was having casual sex. That was the whole point of the exercise. Nobody accidentally winds up naked in an apartment with someone named Rachel.

The woman beneath him was beautiful. He’d known that at dinner, before they ever came upstairs, and he still knew it now. Small scar near her left eyebrow. Made him laugh twice, real laughs. Spent twenty minutes explaining why everyone had David Bowie wrong, and Daniel had listened, genuinely, because he liked the way she talked about things she cared about.

Nothing was wrong. Nothing had gone wrong.

And yet Daniel suddenly, inconveniently, missed his wife. Not sexually (that he could’ve solved with a phone call). He missed the way Emily laughed at things he wasn’t trying to make funny. He missed knowing what happened after. With Emily, sex never really ended when the sex ended. There was always something afterward. Water, a joke, or somebody getting up to pee and coming back with a glass of something to drink for the other person out of some unspoken treaty neither of them had ever signed.

Daniel realized he didn’t want to be done with Rachel so much as he wanted to be home.

Those, it turned out, were not the same.

They lay beside each other afterward, sheets kicked down around their ankles, both staring at the ceiling fan like it could fall at any moment.

“Okay,” Rachel said. “You’re acting weird. What’s going on?”

“Just thinking.”

“You’ve been staring at the ceiling like that fan is about to fly away, or like you’re trying to figure out if it’s spinning clockwise. It’s not, by the way.”

“I’m fine,” he said with a half chuckle.

“You sure? Because you’ve got the face. The face guys get right after an orgasm when they’re doing the math on something. It’s a very specific face.”

“What kind of math?”

“Usually it’s ‘how do I say this without ruining the mood,’ but you already ruined the mood ten minutes ago when you got quiet mid-hump, so we’re past that. You can just say the thing.”

He turned toward her. “You always this direct with guys after?”

“I’m this direct with everybody, all the time. It’s just more noticeable when we’re both naked and one of us is spiraling.” She propped herself up on an elbow, the sheet sliding off her shoulder. “You want a second round to reset the vibe, or you want to just say whatever you’re clearly building toward?”

“Tempting offer.”

“I know. I’m very good at that.”

He smiled, then turned to the ceiling once more. “I think I’m done.”

“Done with what? Me specifically?” Rachel gestured at the bed. “…Or with this?”

“I think the whole open marriage thing.”

“Oh.” She said it calmly, with no weight on the word as she settled back down onto the pillow. “Okay. You know that’s allowed, right?”

“I feel like I should have a better reason than the one I’ve got.”

“See, that’s you overcomplicating it. You want a reason like you got dumped, or caught something, or walked in on somebody doing something unforgivable to a kitchen appliance. Real answer’s usually way more boring than that.” She turned onto her side to face him properly. “Can I tell you something, and you don’t get weird about it?”

“Shoot.”

“I think monogamy gets treated like it’s the default and everything else is the deviation, and honestly I think it’s the opposite. I think wanting one specific person, forever, on purpose, every single day, is the weirder and harder thing to do. Most people who are doing this are doing it because the other thing scared them, or because somebody hurt them, or because it just felt easier not to choose. You don’t strike me as any of those. You strike me as a guy who tried the buffet and found out he just wanted what he already had at home. Which is rare. Most people who try that talk themselves into liking the buffet, because admitting they didn’t need it in the first place feels like a waste of the trip.”

He was quiet for a second. “That’s… annoyingly insightful.”

“I’ve had this exact conversation, or some version of it, more than once. You’d be surprised how many people end up here doing the same math you’re doing right now.”

“So… I’m not special.”

“Nobody who cheats… or doesn’t cheat, technically, since your wife knows, so it’s not even that… nobody’s special in the moment. You’re all doing the same three or four realizations in a different order. It’s what you do with it that’s actually interesting.” She reached over and traced a finger down his forearm absent-mindedly. “For what it’s worth, you wanting to be exclusive again? I don’t think that’s really about sex. I think you miss the specific gravity of only orbiting one person. There’s a difference between freedom and just having nothing anchoring you down, and I think you found out tonight which one you actually wanted.”

“That’s a hell of a thing to figure out mid-hookup.”

“Better than figuring it out during a divorce.”

He laughed softly and reached over to push a strand of hair off her face, an unnecessary tenderness neither of them commented on. “This doesn’t bother you? Being the… I don’t know what to call it… the event that triggered the realization?”

“Not even a little. I’m not attached to being anyone’s plotline, Daniel. I like sex, I like good conversation, I like a guy who actually listens when I go on about a dead British guy in makeup. Tonight I had all three. That’s a win regardless of what you choose to do with your Tuesday.” She grinned. “Go home. Tell her tonight, not tomorrow, because tomorrow you’ll have talked yourself into some watered-down version where you ‘want to talk about maybe thinking about it,’ and by Thursday you’ll have chickened out entirely and just started being weird and distant instead, which is worse for everybody.”

“You’ve seen this before.”

“More than once.” She flopped back onto the pillow, stretching, entirely unselfconscious. “Seriously, don’t tell her because you think it’s the responsible move. Tell her because you actually mean it, or she’ll clock the difference in about four seconds and you’ll both have wasted your evening.”

“I mean it.”

“Then get dressed. Go be annoyingly in love with your wife somewhere that isn’t in my apartment.”

He was pulling his shirt back on when she added, from the bed, not even opening her eyes, “For the record, this was genuinely great. Don’t let the ending rewrite the whole night in your head. Good things can still be good even when they’re also the last time you experience them.”

He paused at the door before looking back at her. “Thank you. For this. All of it. The talking, I mean, not just the- “

“I know what you meant.” She smiled without opening her eyes. “Go home, Daniel.”

Emily was in front of the bedroom mirror rifling through an assortment of makeup when Daniel got home, wearing an exquisite black dress that left only the right things to the imagination. The very one that had, historically, ended several evenings early, for reasons that had nothing to do with disappointment.

He stopped in the doorway. “Hey.”

She caught his eye in the mirror, then turned, taking in his face the way she always did, reading it before he’d said a word. “You’re back early. It’s not even eleven.”

“Yeah.”

“That’s not a casual ‘yeah.’ That’s a loaded ‘yeah.’” She set down the mascara wand she had just started using. “How was Rachel?”

“Good. Really good, actually.”

“Okay, that’s not the face of a guy who had a great date and is home early because he missed his wife’s cooking.”

“No.”

“So… what happened?”

He sat down on the edge of the bed. She came and sat beside him, angling herself so she could look at him and not just catch him in a mirror.

“I think I want to close the marriage,” he said.

The room went quiet.

“Okay,” she said slowly. “That’s… certainly something.”

“I know.”

“Talk to me. Don’t just drop it and sit there.”

He exhaled. “I miss you. Which sounds insane, because I saw you this morning, I’m looking at you right now, it’s not like you’ve been anywhere. But somewhere in the last few hours I realized I miss the version of us where you’re the only person I do this with.”
He rubbed his temples, almost to massage the rest of his thoughts out. “And I don’t mean that like some big romantic gesture. I mean it like… I think I built a life with you on purpose, every piece of it, and somewhere along the way I started treating the exclusivity part like it was optional set dressing instead of one of the pieces I actually chose.”

Emily was quiet for a moment, turning that over in her mind. After what felt like eons, she spoke. “Can I be honest? I don’t know if I feel that same pull. I like this version of us. I like knowing I could meet someone interesting and follow that thread if I wanted to. I like the freedom of it. I don’t feel like anything’s missing on my end.”

“I know. And I don’t want you to pretend you feel what I feel just because I feel it.”

“Good, because I wasn’t going to. I guess what I’m trying to figure out is whether this is about missing exclusivity, or whether it’s about something scarier… like you’re worried that if we keep doing this long enough, one of us is going to fall for somebody else. Actually fall, not just have a good night.”

He thought about that for a moment before answering. “Maybe some of both. I don’t think I’m scared of you leaving. I think I’m scared of finding out that what we have is replaceable. That if you can have a great night with someone else and I can have a great night with someone else, then what exactly makes us the thing? What’s the ingredient that’s unique to us, versus just being two people who are good at connecting with other people?”

“That’s a real question. And honestly? I don’t think it has an easy answer.”

“I don’t think it does either. But I think closing this back up is how I find out. I think I need there to be a version of intimacy between us that literally doesn’t exist anywhere else, that I’m not allowed to go get somewhere else even if I wanted to, and I think that constraint is the point. Not because I don’t trust myself. Because I want something that’s legitimately ours, not just ours by preference for the night.”

Emily was quiet for a long while, studying their hands resting beside each other. “I don’t know if I’ve ever needed that the way you do. I think I’ve always found the constraint part a little suffocating, honestly. Not with you specifically. Just as a concept. My parents were exclusive their whole marriage and miserable for probably half of it, and I’ve always wondered how much of that misery was actually about fidelity and how much was about neither of them ever being allowed to admit they wanted anything outside what they had built.”

“That’s fair. I don’t think closing this makes us them, though. I think we get to define what exclusive even means for us, separately from how they did it.”

“Maybe.” She looked at him. “I guess the question underneath your question is: do you think open relationships are inherently less serious? Like, is some part of you associating monogamy with commitment, and this arrangement with something lesser?”

He considered that carefully. “No. I don’t think it’s lesser. I think it’s just not what I want anymore, and I spent a while pretending it was because I didn’t want to be the guy who asked for something more conventional after we’d worked so hard to build something that wasn’t. I think I was more attached to being the couple who did this than to actually wanting to keep doing it.”

“That’s honest.”

“I’m trying to be.”

She nodded slowly, and for a while neither of them said anything. The two of them just sat with the size of what was being discussed.

“I need to think about this,” Emily said finally. “Not because I’m resistant. Because it’s a real decision and I don’t want to make it just because you walked in tonight with a feeling. I want to know if it’s still true for you in the morning, and I want to actually sit with whether it’s true for me too, instead of just agreeing because I love you and you looked like you meant it.”

“That’s fair. Take the time you need.” They fell silent once more before he decided to break it.

“You’re still going on your date tonight? Mark, right? You should still go.”

She looked down at the dress like she’d forgotten she had it on. “You want me to go on a date twenty minutes after telling me you want to close the marriage?”

“I don’t want this to be about me taking something from you the second I decide I want something different. I want it to be about what we want, not about what you lose the moment I say it out loud. Those are different things, and I need you to hear and feel that difference, not just nod at it.”

She studied his face for a long beat, like she was checking for a version of him that didn’t mean it. “You’re being annoyingly sincere right now.”

“Sorry,” he said with a half chuckle.

“Okay.” She stood, smoothed the dress, glanced at herself in the mirror one more time (not out of vanity, just checking) the way you check a decision is still standing after you’ve poked at it. “I think I still want to go tonight. I want to actually think about all of this with a clear head, and I don’t think I do that well sitting across from you while staring at your sincere face.”

“Fair.”

“I’m not doing it to punish you, or to prove a point. I just… I don’t want tonight’s decision to be made in the heat of the conversation. I want to actually miss the freedom, or not miss it, and find out which on a normal Tuesday, not in the middle of all of this.”

“That makes sense.”

She picked up her purse from the dresser, paused at the door, looked back at him. “For what it’s worth… I don’t think you’re wrong for wanting this. I just need to want it too, not just want to make you happy. That’s the only way it means anything.”

“I know. Go.”

She didn’t go.

Not because he stopped her. He didn’t. He meant what he’d said. She got as far as the driveway, sat in the car with the engine off, and pulled out her phone to text Mark that she was five minutes out.

She didn’t send it.

Instead she sat there for a long time, longer than she meant to, running the conversation upstairs back through her head. Not the parts about Rachel, not even really the parts about exclusivity, but the one line that kept snagging:
‘What’s the ingredient that’s actually unique to us?’
She turned it over, trying to answer it honestly instead of defensively.

She thought about the version of the night where she went. Where she sat across from Mark’s stupidly chiseled jawline, had a good time, maybe a great time, came home late and told Daniel about it with the easy, unbothered honesty they’d built the whole arrangement around. Normally that thought made her feel light. Free, unclaimed, exactly the kind of woman she’d wanted to become after watching her mother spend thirty years quietly resentful and never once saying so out loud.

Tonight it just made her feel tired.

Not guilty. She was careful with herself about that distinction. She didn’t owe Daniel guilt, hadn’t done anything that required it. Just tired, the specific kind of tiredness of realizing a version of yourself you’d built on purpose, brick by brick, over years, might not actually be load-bearing anymore. That maybe she’d needed the freedom more when she was thirty and terrified of turning into her mother, and needed something different now, and hadn’t let herself notice because noticing felt like losing an argument she’d already won.

She sat with that for a long time. Long enough that the porch light across the street clicked off. Long enough that she stopped thinking about Mark entirely and started, instead, thinking about the very first year of their marriage. Before any of this, before the agreements and the conversations and the rules they’d built with genuine care; just the two of them, badly cooking dinner together in an apartment too small for the amount of arguing they did about where to put the couch.

She wasn’t nostalgic for a simpler time. She never thought simpler was better. She just, sitting in a cold car in a dark driveway, wanted to go back inside.

So she texted Mark:
‘Something came up tonight. Can we grab coffee sometime instead? Just need a rain check.’
Which was true, mostly. She didn’t owe him more explanation than that and didn’t care to offer him one.

She sat in the driveway a minute longer, just to be sure this wasn’t a reflex, wasn’t her caving to Daniel’s timeline instead of finding her own answer. She checked herself for resentment but couldn’t find any.

Then she went back inside.

Daniel was in the kitchen, making coffee neither of them was going to be able to sleep after drinking, which was sort of the point.

“You’re back fast,” he said.

“I didn’t go.”

“You don’t have to explain.”

“I want to, though.” She leaned against the counter across from him. “I sat in the car for like thirty minutes arguing with myself. And I kept landing on the same place, which is: I don’t actually think I want the freedom as much as I want to have proven to myself that I could have it. Which isn’t the same as wanting to use it tonight. Or maybe ever, I don’t know yet.”

“That’s an important distinction.”

“It felt like one, sitting there. I think for a long time being the kind of wife who could take a phone call from an interesting or handsome stranger and go meet him for a drink felt like proof I hadn’t disappeared into our marriage. That I was still a whole separate person who existed outside of you. And I think that was true, and useful, and I don’t regret a second of it.”

“Right on. But?”

“But I think I’ve already proven it. To myself, I mean, not to you. I don’t need the ongoing option anymore to know I’m not lost in this. I think I just needed to know I could leave the door open, and now that I know that I’m not sure I actually need the door open all the time.”

He set the coffee down, giving her his full attention. “That’s different from what I said upstairs.”

“It is. You said you missed exclusivity because you wanted something uniquely, definitionally ours. I don’t think I fully buy that part. I think what’s ours is ours regardless of the structure around it, honestly. But I do think I want to close it for my own reason, which is that I think I’ve outgrown needing to prove something I already proved.”

“I can live with that.”

“Good, because it’s what I truly feel.” She almost smiled. “I don’t want us to get boring, though. I mean that. I don’t want closing this door to mean we stop being curious, or stop talking honestly about what we want, or start assuming we already know everything about each other just because we signed a piece of paper about who we’re allowed to sleep with.”

“Agreed completely. I think the actual danger was never the open marriage or the closed one. I think the danger is either version of us running on autopilot.”

“So we stay deliberate,” she said matter-of-factly.

“We stay deliberate.”

They stood there in silence for a while, letting the coffee go slightly cold.
“I do still want us to be able to talk about it,” Emily said eventually. “Attraction to other people. Fantasies. All of it. I don’t want closing the marriage to mean we stop being honest about what we notice out in the world or become a resentful boring couple of old geezers.”

“Completely agree. I have no interest in pretending I don’t notice things.”

“You’d better not. I’d find that suspicious. Like you’d gone blind overnight.”

“I will remain fully sighted and occasionally annoying about it.”

“Good. That’s the deal, then.”

She crossed the kitchen and kissed him. A simple peck on the lips. Unhurried, familiar, nothing performative about it. The kind of kiss that didn’t need to prove anything to anyone, least of all each other.

Later they sat together on the porch, Emily’s head against his shoulder, his arm around her, the street doing its usual impression of a place where nothing has ever happened.

“For the record,” he said, “I think the universe is completely indifferent to all of this. Doesn’t care what we call it, open or closed or anything in between.”

“Probably.”

“Feels a little rude, honestly, given how much thought we just put into it.”

“Extremely rude of it.”

“I mean it. We just spent what felt like forever talking over our whole marriage in the bedroom. And somewhere out there it’s just forming stars nobody’s going to name after either of us.”

“You wanted a trophy for this?”

“I wanted acknowledgment. Some kind of cosmic nod. A shooting star. Anything.”

“The universe doesn’t do participation awards, Daniel. To it this is just a Tuesday.”

“Clearly. Just the same indifferent sky it was an hour ago, before we figured out our entire marriage.”

“Would it have felt more real to you if a comet went by right when you said the thing about the ingredient?”

“A little, yeah. Not gonna lie.”

She laughed, quiet, into his shoulder. “I think that’s the part people get wrong, though. They want the universe to agree with them. Like if you make a big enough decision, something out there should tilt a little in response.”

“And it doesn’t.”

“Not even slightly. It was exactly this indifferent before we started talking, and it’ll be exactly this indifferent tomorrow, no matter what we decide to do about it.”

“That’s bleak.”

“Or it’s the opposite. Nobody’s coming to confirm we got it right. So whatever we land on, it’s ours. Nobody handed it to us, nothing out there approved it. We just… did the work and decided.”

He was quiet for a second, looking up. “I don’t hate that, actually.”

“You wanted a shooting star and I gave you philosophy. Consolation prize.”

“That’s better, honestly.”

She squeezed his hand. Neither of them said much else.

It wasn’t a revelation exactly.

It was just a Tuesday.

They’d take it.