No Ordinary Affair Read Online Free PDF

no reason for me to bother then, is there?”
    I turned and walked back out not even waiting for him to hand me the umbrella. If it didn’t matter what I wore, did it matter whether I arrived with soaked hair? I didn’t want to go to the dinner anyway. The McKennas were nice enough but were twenty years older and stodgy. Mr. McKenna worked with Mark at the school and Mrs. McKenna stayed at home with their two English bulldogs, both of which parked their gaseous bodies under the dining room table whenever we went over, to the apparent ignorance or indulgence of their owners.
    This night was no different. Mark and Richard replayed the same complaints about St Regis – lack of support, unappreciative parents, declining standards – while I pretended to be interested when Marion detailed Flora and Popkin’s latest exploits. I’d endured similar evenings with the McKennas before without the level of irritation I was feeling now. I was hating it - hating every minute of it - and resenting Mark for dragging me along, for not noticing my dress, for not…for not knowing me well enough to sense how uncomfortable I was, for not knowing me well enough to know what I wanted, for being married to me for six years and not knowing me as well as Ethan Willoughby knew me after six minutes.
    For Mark life was a cycle of work, home, work, home – a predictable wheel that always clicked just where he knew it would. And I was just another one of those predictable clicks.
    Why should I be the one to feel guilty? I couldn’t help but ask myself that as I sat there listening him complain the same complaints while Marion tried to get my attention so she could show me Flora’s latest trick. Mark didn’t notice me because he didn’t care to. Marriage wasn’t a journey of personal exploration for him, a process of discovering himself and his partner. It was just another routine part of his routine world.
    I stood and Mark looked at me, a question in his eyes.
    “I’m not feeling well.” I turned my attention briefly to our hosts. “So sorry but I feel a bit off suddenly.”
    Mark stood and walked over. “Goodness, Mary,” he said. “If you were feeling poorly I wish you’d have told me before we came all this way.”
    “Well I didn’t feel quite so dodgy or I would have,” I said. “And you’re quite welcome to stay if you’d like. Perhaps Richard could give you a lift home. But I really think I should be going.”
    Mark looked from me to our hosts and back again. “Do you think you can drive?”
    He wasn’t even going to drive me home. Fancy that.
    “I’m fine to drive,” I said. “You stay here.”
    “I’ll give him a lift back,” Richard said.
    “Perhaps you feel poorly because you’re pregnant,” Marion offered.
    “No,” I said more curtly than I’d intended. Mark and I had discussed children and I’d been ready in our second year of marriage. But he always said he wanted to wait until he found a better work situation, although he did nothing but complain about it. And I wasn’t about to have a baby without his full cooperation, so I continued to take birth control pills religiously.
    I drove home rapidly, eager to be away, to be alone. At home I went upstairs to the bathroom, ran the tub full and stripped in front of the mirror, sighing nervously as I turned to inspect my bare bottom reflected in the glass.
    It wasn’t as red as I expected, which filled me with a strange disappointment. But there were two distinct oval marks, one with a crescent shaped purple edge to it. I traced the mark with my finger, remembering the blow that had left it. It had been the third one, the one that I remember hurting the most - the one that had brought the flood of tears.
    Professor Willoughby , I thought.  I will not tell falsehoods.
    I leaned over the sink, my fin gers pressing between my legs.  I will not tell falsehoods. 
    I looked back as I worked my fingers against the sensitive bud of flesh, looked at the marks