I turned to see the brunette from earlier, with significantly more chips than she'd started with, and a megawatt smile that would have put the whole strip to shame.
"Was that your first time playing poker?" I asked as we moved away from the noise of the bar.
"Yeah." She grinned. "Daddy doesn't like cards, but my room mates are serious players and gave me a.. percentage steak?"
"They were staking you." I laughed. "Giving you money in return for a percentage of any winnings. Just be sure you check in with them before you make plans for those chips."
"I'm Susan." She offered her hand.
"Paul." I shook it.
"How are you liking Denton?"
"It's a nice little college town, good music scene." I took a sip of my drink. "Really a bonus to the school's comp-sci offerings. You're at SMU?"
"Yeah, Econ and Business Management dual major, with a minor in International Business. Please don't make me break out the flow charts to explain how all that works." She sipped her drink and looked at it in surprise. "That's really good."
After we found her roommates and divvied up her winnings, we chatted until the event closed down around dawn. She wrote her number on a bar napkin and stuffed it in my shirt pocket as she left. I called her the next day and we spent as much time together as we could with our schools in different cities. It was a rare weekend where one of us didn't wake up in the other's apartment at twice.
After I graduated and I'd found a job with a tech firm in Plano. I worked my butt off and made several major contributions to the company's success. We pioneered several new iterations of artificial intelligence that made modern machine learning possible, and we all got paid rather well for it. After two years, I bought a small house just outside University Park and Susan moved in with me. Her father disapproved of the relationship, but her mother took a liking to me. After a few months, I was ready to pop the question, but Susan wanted me to ask her father for her hand.
And so, I arrived at her parent's house early on a Saturday morning, with my best suit on. We sat down in her father's study and he explained that he had some concerns about our relationship, long term. I smiled and nodded. We'd been going strong for nearly four years at that point, and officially living together for six months of that. I knew our future together was bright, and I told him so. That's when he brought out the prenup from hell, and after two minutes of digging through the legalese, I knew I needed to have an actual lawyer review it.
I reached out to one of Susan's former classmates who had recently passed the bar. He offered to charge me a fairly reasonable rate to review the monstrosity. Apparently, my future father-in-law's reputation as a litigator preceded him; few of the other lawyers I'd contacted would even look at the thing, the others heard my father in law's name and politely declined. The original was incredibly one-sided, favoring her in every possible scenario where we divorced. A short while later, Robert was working like a man possessed. He completely rewritten the no-fault clauses so that the community property split fifty-fifty, and then started in on what he called the unique theory of the adultery clauses. I smiled, nodded and brought the man more coffee; ask me how to prune an artificial learning network and I can walk you through it without a hitch, but this legalese was black sorcery of the highest order to me.
After a few hours, Robert had failed to untangle the adultery clause and was running out of steam. Over coffee, he told me that that the best we'd be able to do is make sure it applied to both parties. Rose colored glasses on, I agreed, and took the prenup to talk with Susan and her dad, with Robert in tow.
Her dad was simultaneously livid and impressed with how his gordian knot had been untangled. After reading over the proposed change, he explained the changes to his daughter, which then required an explanation of the original document. Which lead to her threatening to elope with me to Vegas; she'd expected her father to welcome me into the family, not to try to intimidate me with legal documents. She grabbed Robert's version and signed it so forcefully that she made her dad's desk shake before handing me the pen. I mentioned my girl can be contrarian. Six months later we were man and wife.
While I'd been playing with computers, Susan had hardly been idle. After graduation, she was headhunted by several companies. She eventually decided on a reputable accounting company that was locally based. After a few months, they merged with one of their competitors, and she was laid off. After looking for almost three months, she got a job with a firm managing the estates for the benefit of charities. Unfortunately, she hit the glass ceiling pretty hard at that firm; as much as that company wanted her talent, the idiots were too stupid to see her real potential. After a year of unfulfilled promises of advancement, she'd taken an opportunity with XYZ Services, multinational accounting firm that lined up with her skills and the skills she wanted to acquire.
Over the next few years, she worked her way into their Special Projects group. Special Projects performed sensitive work on mergers and audits for government security, most of which she was prohibited from discussing with anyone outside the project. These projects were also usually quite time sensitive, requiring precise timing to meet a rigorous schedule. That led to long periods of overtime, but her hard work paid off, both monetarily and in advancing her career. Eventually she stepped into the position of Assistant Manager under her mentor, a woman named Cecily Jones. Susan and Cecily had gotten along swimmingly, and I'd considered her husband, Lowell, to be a close friend. We'd gone so far as to include her family in our 'Pod', during the height of the pandemic. Eventually, Cecily moved up the corporate ladder to senior management, and we had expected that Susan would take over the manager's office.
Unfortunately, it wasn't to be; Bart Hackett, an Afrikaaner, was being moved laterally to cover the position after several years heading the Major Accounts Department, a larger, but less prestigious position. Scuttlebutt among Susan's coworkers at a company event indicated that his uncle was on XYZ's board, and that his most recent re-positioning was a pit stop to get his security clearance on his way to the C-suite. At first, Susan would come home ranting about how badly Bart was screwing up. Apparently, he intended to run the group 'lean' and had laid off some people with skills that were difficult to duplicate. Over time she softened on him, first when she found out that he was a fellow Mustang, and later when he put his actual management chops to work bringing in projects on time and under budget. I had even had a passible conversation with Bart and his wife, Morgan, at her company's Officially-Non-Religious-Holiday Party.
Then came the Anderson project. I wasn't entirely sure what they were actually doing, or for whom, but that was par for the course with Special Projects. Susan went from a routine forty-ish hours to sixty, before imitating a worker at a Japanese black company and going whole hog on a minimum-eighty hours a week. For the better part of the month, I'd only seen her when I woke to take Daisey on our daily run, and half the time she'd leave before we got back. God only knew what hour she would come in at.
I'd tried to be supportive, but I'd been worried about her hours for a while. When we'd first gotten married, we'd planned to start having kids around the six-year mark. With our eighth anniversary behind us, she'd been talking about putting it off. From our texts, it seemed like the project was winding down, and I'd started to hope that she and I could start talking about the next phase in our adventure together. Now I didn't know if she'd just been with him this entire time.
***
Dinner managed to be its own kind of horrible. We sat and ate in silence. I wanted to rant at her, to demand an explanation, but that would just turn into a shouting match, or worse, a conversation I'd already said we'd delay. At the same time, her silence spoke volumes. After we washed the dishes, I sat down to stream a comedy special before bed. To my surprise she curled up against me, and we watched some comedian make a fool of himself on stage. Neither of us laughed.
After the show ended, I grabbed my pillow and took some clean sheets to the murphy bed in the spare bedroom. As I unfolded it from its false cabinet, the springs groaned like an old man moving boulders. The bed had come with the house, but it hadn't been used in years. Around the time of our wedding, I'd replaced the mattress with an Ikea foam model to accommodate one of Susan's out of town cousins. Susan came and watched me for a moment before deciding to say something.
"You don't have to do that." Sue started. "I'm not going to kick you out of our bed."
"I don't think I want to be around you right now." I said, matter-of-factly. "If you're planning on sleeping here instead, you'll still want clean sheets."
"Look, there isn't any need for any of this." She frowned. "Nothing has to change between us-"
"You're asking for something to change," I cut her off. I took a deep breath and put the poker face back on. "And something has already changed between us. I've just had my first dinner at home with my wife in weeks, and she just told me she wants to see other people." "I..." Sue looked slightly ashamed before her face hardened. "If you're stubborn enough to sleep on a murphy bed older than both of us together, I'm not going to stop you." She turned back to our bedroom, just as Daisey came into the office, and lied down at the foot of the folding bed. I'd be lying if I said the bed was comfortable; I absolutely owe her cousin an apology. I woke up the next morning at 5:30 with a crick in my back. I quietly went into our bedroom to get my exercise gear. I thought I hadn't woken her, but then I heard her shift on the bed.
"Baby?" She asked, groggily. "Are you coming to bed?"
"No, Sue." I said, softly. "It's morning. I'm taking Daisey for a run."
Sue groaned. "I don't think I slept at all."
