Inside Suzi Chapter 7
by Inside Suzi
Chapter 7Shared ExperienceThere is an hour of this story I slept through, and it may be the most important hour in it. So before I give you the sixth morning in Cancun, I should tell you how I hold it. The morning itself Marcus gave me five days later, on the flight home, somewhere over the Gulf of Mexico, when I asked him for all of it and he set down his coffee and delivered it whole. The thread I read with my own eyes — years later, standing at our kitchen counter, when my husband unlocked his phone and put it in my hand and said, “You should have this one too.” The messages below are verbatim. The rest is his telling, carried inside mine, which by now you will recognize as the way this whole account gets made.He was awake before six.This was not unusual — my husband had always been an early riser, the kind of man whose internal clock ran independently of circumstance, unmoved by vacation or latitude or the particular luxury of a resort room where no alarm was necessary. What was unusual, he told me over the Gulf, was the quality of his wakefulness — the specific alertness of a man whose mind had already been working before his eyes opened, turning something over that had arrived in the night.He reached for his phone.The photo was the first thing he saw. Me, in the resort chair, the pool light moving across my bare shoulders and breasts, my face in frame and entirely comfortable, the suggestion of him asleep in the bed just visible at the edge. I had sent it at half past midnight, after the call with Mei, while he slept — had untied my bikini top and raised my phone and sent it to the group chat without waking him, without telling him, because I had decided to, and that was enough.He looked at it for a long time.Then he opened the private thread with Tom.I did not know the thread existed. Not that morning, and not for a long time after. I read it standing in our kitchen with his phone in my hand, and I have chosen to set it down here exactly as it lives on the screen, because some artifacts should not be paraphrased.Marcus: You saw it.Tom: I saw it. I’ve been awake since five.Marcus: She sent that after midnight. While I was asleep. Her idea, no prompting.Tom: That’s twice now I’ve seen her tits. First time I walked in on them. Now she just sent them to me.Tom: She’s something else, Marcus.Marcus: She is. And there’s more. Yesterday on the boat.Tom: Tell me.Marcus set his phone down for a moment and looked at the ceiling. I was still sleeping three feet away — my breathing slow and even, he said, my hair loose across the pillow, entirely unaware of the conversation happening within arm’s reach of it.He picked the phone back up.Marcus: There was a guy on the excursion. American. She met him at the rail in the morning. By afternoon he had his hands on her during the conga line. She sat on his lap at the group table with me right there watching.Tom: Jesus.Marcus: She disappeared for a while toward the end of the trip. When she came back she wanted to leave immediately. She told me when we got back to the room. She went below deck with him. Gave him a blowjob in the ship’s bathroom.Tom: She told you that.Marcus: Volunteered it.The thread was silent for almost two minutes.Tom: How are you feeling about all of this.Marcus: Like I’ve been waiting for this version of her for a long time. Like watching her become this is the most extraordinary thing I’ve ever seen.Marcus: And like I think she’s ready, Tom. Not for the next small thing. For the real thing.Tom: You’re saying what I think you’re saying.Marcus: We have five more days here. She doesn’t know I’m telling you this. But I wanted you to understand where things are. Where she is.Tom: Waiting.Marcus: