Justin pawed through the numerous bottles with a dissatisfied frown. Why did people leave the empty bottles there instead of putting them in the trash can? It was right there next to the table, they didn’t even have to walk anywhere. If it had been his own house instead of this stuffy and claustrophobic country club he would have been able to delve into his secret stash, the one he kept in his studio. All he wanted was a whiskey. Was it too much to ask on his own damn birthday?

The problem wasn’t really the availability of the drinks and he knew it, but he had to focus on issues he had a hope of immediately being able to remedy.

“Looking for something?”

“I could have sworn there was single malt around here somewhere.”

“I don’t know about here but if you want to sneak my present back out of the pile there’s one in there.”

“Kirkpatrick, you rock.”

“I know. Listen, you wanna grab the bottle and head outside? I could use a cigarette and it’s kinda warm in here.”

“That sounds like the best idea I heard today.”

In companionable silence the two of them executed that plan. Maybe it was because they’d spent so many years together every hour of the day, but when they were in each other’s company they frequently didn’t need to say very much.

Making sure Vanessa wasn’t there to get mad at them for disturbing the carefully laid out gifts, they retrieved the overly expensive bottle of aged Glenfiddich and headed out of the door. The night air was crisp and a welcome relief from the overheated clubhouse. Chris lit his cigarette and they meandered around the grounds, headed towards the golf course. Justin tried not to stare too hard at the gazebo as they passed by.

It was a long time before Chris finally ended the non-communication.

“Can I confess to an ulterior motive?”

“Here we go. I keep telling you, you got a better shot with Lance.”

“Ha freakin’ ha.” He snorted. They reached a bench which seemed a convenient enough stopping point, so he sat down and passed over one of the glass tumblers they’d stolen. Justin sat down beside him and opened the bottle.

“So what’s up?” Justin was liberal with his own measure before pouring Chris a glass.

“I don’t want to pry into your shit, man, but you got the guys kind of worried. Me too if I’m honest.”

“About what?” His words were slow and guarded.

“You just… you don’t seem yourself, these days. You’re too quiet, in your own head all the time. And tonight you’ve been the jumpiest motherfucker since OJ heard the cops were coming.” Chris did not fail to see the way in which Justin’s mouth twitched at that comment, only proving the point. “Is something going on?”

Something was going on, that was an understatement, but he wasn’t sure he particularly wanted to spill his guts. Apart from his fear of letting the cat out of the bag before the deed was done, his paranoia that his plan would get back to Vanessa… he was aware that he didn’t come off looking like the greatest guy in the world here. Was it weird that he couldn’t handle Chris thinking badly of him?

Then again, his attempts to be the perfect guy were what had got him into this crap in the first place.

It was a cliché for wayward husbands to claim their wife didn’t understand them and they were trapped in a loveless marriage. Justin had certainly never meant to find himself in that situation, but here he was. If he’d been smarter he would have realised it sooner, maybe even managed to prevent it getting so far as marriage, but at the time he’d been too busy labouring under the illusion that he could make her happy if only he did things better. As if her moods and her behaviour were all down to his various failures to act correctly.

“It…”

To hell with it, it was clearly going to come out anyway. Seeing Olivia earlier appeared to have punched a hole in his emotional dam.

“You might as well be the first to know. It’s Vanessa.”

“Oh.”

It wasn’t a question it was a statement, and Chris’s tone unintentionally said it all.

The fact that his friends didn’t like his wife was hardly news to Justin but this was the first time he was really registering the significance of it. He wasn’t used to seeing such hard set lines on this buddy’s face; Chris was so perennially jovial. That so many of his oldest friends had failed to warm to her probably should have been a hint, but he had been a man in love. Why would he question that? In the beginning she had been the perfect partner. The beginning had been a dreamy haze of sex and cute dates and being on the phone until the sun came up. So what if some of his pals weren’t keen?

As time went on he had fallen out with more than one friend who’d tried to point out the backhanded comments creeping in and the subtle ways she denigrated him. He hadn’t spotted it however, thinking that nobody and no relationship was perfect. She still displayed enough of her original guise to make him think it was only a blip. Now he could only wish he had listened, because after the big expensive wedding it was as if the switch had finally flicked all the way over.

The engagement had delayed the inevitable by injecting some excitement back into proceedings, but to no avail. After the wedding was done and all she had was living with him day to day Vanessa became increasingly dissatisfied with her lot. The further they got into the relationship the more controlling and openly domineering she became. She was nothing but mean to him twenty four seven and woe betide him if he displeased her, she became near psychotic. Justin couldn’t do right for doing wrong and he faced a daily barrage of complaints about what a waste of space he was.

Compared to the way she’d been when they first got together it was Jekyll and Hyde, but the change had been so gradual that he’d barely noticed it happening. It had been so easy to write off as typical marital gripes with the ‘ball and chain,’ nothing to worry about. All women were supposed to think their husbands were useless and couldn’t do anything without supervision, right?

They were two years into their marriage before the realisation struck that it wasn’t normal to be miserable and dread going home to your spouse every day.

Justin took a big gulp of the whiskey for some Dutch courage. The burn hit the back of his throat in a reassuring way.

“I met someone else. I’m leaving her.”

Chris’s jaw dropped just enough for his mouth to gape unattractively. His dumbstruck expression looked more than a little stupid. That was easily the last thing he had expected Justin to say; he’d been more ready for a pregnancy announcement.

“Uhh… what? Who? When?”

“You know Olivia? She’s at the party?”

“Olivia… Rob’s sister Olivia?”

“Yep.”

“Dang.”

Now it was Chris’s turn to need some more alcohol. He knocked it back far too quickly for such expensive whiskey which deserved more savouring. Well, he supposed he could see the appeal. He was friendly with Rob and she’d tagged along on many an occasion, so they were reasonably well acquainted. Olivia was much more introverted than anyone he’d seen Justin with before but in her own way she was a pretty nice girl – maybe not the first person who’d grab your attention but difficult to dislike. If he’d tired of Vanessa he couldn’t get much further opposite.  

Chris cleared his throat. “I mean, I realised that… well, you know…”

“My wife is a heinous bitch?”

He near choked - JT was certainly pulling some surprises out of the bag this evening. That was something Chris had never thought he’d hear him say. None of them had ever liked her, she wasn’t a warm person, but Justin had been fiercely defensive to anybody who dared express such an opinion.

“I was going to say that you’d been unhappy, but now you mention it.”

“You don’t know the fucking half of it, Chris.” The words were bubbling up in his throat, desperate to be finally aired.

“Liv called it emotional abuse. Like, I didn’t even realise there were terms for all the shit Ness does but she was using words like gaslighting and every last thing she said it was just Vanessa. My wife spends all her waking moments grinding me under her damn heel and I have no idea how I let that happen. It’s been like living with a vampire, all she does is suck the shittin’ life out of me and I can’t fucking take it any more.”

Now he was confused on top of taken aback. What the hell was Justin talking about? He’d gone from cutting people out of his life because they breathed a less than flattering word to calling her an abusive vampire? Where had the big turn around come from and how did an affair fit into it? Was Olivia his therapist or something? He’d started an affair with the girl because she told him his wife was mean?

Chris didn’t disagree with the overall assessment - Justin certainly did behave like all his fight had drained away these days - but he was a little lost.

“Wait, slow down…” He clapped a hand on his shoulder.  “You threw me for a loop here man, I’m not following you. Why don’t you start from the beginning?”

“I…” Justin threw his hands in the air, carelessly spilling some very fine aged whiskey. “It all started out okay. I mean, you know much I loved her, and to begin with things were totally fine. But as time went on she just started getting meaner and meaner to me. She’s always putting me down and telling me what a loser I am. Nothing I ever do is right and everything bad that happens to her or that she does is my fault. She just dragged me down until I wound up as this little robot whose only thought was how to make her happy so she wouldn’t trash me again. Except that everything I do pisses her off more, and then she starts doing this nasty shit to put me back in my place. Like, she’s even sabotaged career opportunities for me because they weren’t what she wanted or because I’d breathed wrong.”

He paused, took another gulp of whiskey for fortification and then kept on.

“But even when she behaves like a she-devil and I get mad at her, she somehow twists it so it was my fault that she did that or it was my fault for being oversensitive or some shit, like there was nothing wrong with any of the crap she’d just pulled and I was the unreasonable one. And the screwed up thing is I believed her. Fuck, to be honest I’m actually kind of afraid of her.”

“Umm… wow.” Chris didn’t know what to say.

“Yeah, I know.” Justin slumped back on the bench, staring wearily at the grass. “I just… she ground me down so slowly that I never realised. It’s like I forgot that marriage is supposed to be a partnership and your wife isn’t supposed to look at you like you’re the dog shit she trod in.”

“So if it’s been like that… why didn’t you tell us? Or leave? If it was that bad why the hell would you stick around?”

Chris was only trying to fathom it out in his own head; he had no idea what a nerve he’d struck. It was a painful question, one that made Justin feel like a moron. Indeed, why the hell wouldn’t he leave? It seemed so ridiculous that he would hang around for more punishment. Thankfully he’d had Olivia to reassure him that he wasn’t stupid and that it was how the whole screwed up cycle worked.

“Because I was used to it.” He shook his head. “I know how much of a fucking dipshit I sound saying that, like it’s normal for your wife to bully you around, but somehow she managed to make me believe all the crap she said about me. Like I was the one who was messed up and I was lucky she was putting up with me. I thought that things would be better if I could only work out how to not screw up all the time.”

His voice was getting higher and higher in pitch as it all spilled out.

“And I didn’t want to tell anybody because it sounded so petty and stupid. I feel weak even saying that, you know, I thought it was just me being a pussy. It’s taken me this long to realise that actually she’s just fucking vicious and she gets off on destroying me.” 

It was rare for Chris Kirkpatrick to struggle for words, but he did. There was no wisecrack or goofy joke he could make here to lighten the mood. He took in the glossy tears threatening to spill down Justin’s nose, and the way he was anxiously gripping his glass. The hand was rigid, fingers curved around so tight they’d gone white, and that shocked him more than anything Justin had said. The words by themselves were a jumbled mess that in a way did sound kind of hard to swallow. Looking at him while he said them, however? That was something else. That small gesture was breathing life into the picture and making him realise exactly how bad this really was. His friend certainly looked destroyed.

Silently he picked up the bottle again and poured more whiskey into both their glasses, practically filling them. Measures be damned.

“Fuck, Justin. I wish you’d said something.”

“Me too.”

“So… what changed, then?” Having poured himself that large drink he wasn’t compelled to consume it. He tapped his fingers against it instead, hearing the light click of nails on crystal.

“I met Liv, on set at the movie. She knows a lot about this stuff and she kind of helped me see how serious it was.”

There had been despair and then, right when he was at his lowest ebb, there had been Olivia. She’d played the minor part of his girlfriend’s best friend in a thriller movie which had done decently if not brilliantly at the box office. They’d often been in the make up chairs at the same time, so they had talked a lot. She was pretty. She was sweet and funny. She was a woman being nice to him and seeming to value his opinions; he’d forgotten what that was like. Justin had known he was playing with fire when he started asking her to hang out off set and he didn’t enjoy being dishonest, but still she’d felt like a God given solace.

It was why he’d found that little declaration of hers so difficult these past few weeks – to cope with the disdain in his own home he needed the comfort of being around Olivia, a woman who actually liked him. Plenty of people wouldn’t understand why he had remained in the marital cage for so long, why he felt he couldn’t simply leave, but she had. She seemed to understand what it was like to be so smashed up by another human being that you didn’t feel like there was any better world out there for you. Olivia had understood that he needed to be built back up again before he might be capable of saving himself.

“That… shit. That movie was what, a year ago?”

This was the part he had been dreading. He couldn’t bear to see the judgment that was inevitably going to flicker in Chris’s eyes, in everyone’s eyes when they heard. Worse was he knew they’d be right.

That he’d managed to marry such a nasty piece of work didn’t alter the fact that he had made those vows and proceeded to break them. He had loudly decried cheaters in the past yet was now a cheater. It made him a hypocrite and weakened his claim to any moral high ground. He didn’t forget it and didn’t underestimate how much it bothered his Liv. She’d branded herself a home wrecker, no matter how untrue that was. It was untrue because despite how it might seem he wasn’t really leaving his wife for her but for himself.

“Yep,” he mumbled. He was looking anywhere but at Chris.

“So you’ve been doing all this on the down low for a year, you’ve now come to the point of leaving your wife for her, and I’m the first person you’ve told?”

“Yep.”

This time he did take another shot. “I know I came out here to grill you about things but… holy shit. I… I don’t know what to say.”

“I know that it’s a shitty thing to do but…”

“After what you just told me?” He interrupted. “Nobody could blame you. I can’t wrap my head around how you held out as long as you did. Why now?”

“Olivia, again. She feels really bad about the whole thing and she said I either had to leave or stop seeing her. I don’t know. I guess I needed some time to work up to it, convince myself that it was okay to want to go be with somebody who doesn’t call me an asshole ten times before breakfast.”

Olivia had been remarkably supportive and understanding of his initial difficulty in facing up to his situation, but even her patience had its limits. She couldn’t be blamed for feeling pushed. Though in most circumstances he’d tell anybody giving him an ultimatum that they could ‘fuck right off with that’ Liv’s had been warranted.

As awful as his marriage had become it was familiar and he was used to it, so he continued to let himself be swept along with the tide. The upheaval of walking out seemed too daunting so he had been skating by, sustaining himself through their assignations. That wasn’t good for him and it wasn’t fair on her. Making the break was the only way to go but it had taken that push for him to finally locate his missing courage. Being trampled on for so long almost made you forget how to get back up.

“So… you’re really doing it? You’re not just telling me that, you’re actually making plans?”

“Yes. Breathing that answer out was a huge cathartic release. Even saying it made his shoulders feel about ten times lighter. “I’ve been getting things together and later this week I’m going to serve Vanessa the papers.”

“Where you going, you need somewhere to stay? You know my house is your house.”

“No I’m good, but thank you.” He gave Chris a brotherly clap on the arm, feebly trying to express the rush of gratitude he felt for the unhesitating support and lack of judgment.  Especially the lack of judgment. “Going to hide out in a hotel room where she won’t think to look for me for the first couple of days, then I think I’ll head to my mom’s for a while.”

“You’re not going to Olivia’s?”

“No.” He shook his head. “I mean, I do want it to work with her, but leaving is not about following my dick to new pastures. I’ve got to concentrate on getting out of this toxic bullshit, it’s going to be ugly for a while and trying to move straight in with Liv on top of that is too much. It would be really premature.”

You’d think knowing he’d be gone soon would make it easier but it made him more impatient. It was as if the closer he came to freedom the less he could stomach being around Mrs Timberlake. Without the brief respites in Olivia’s arms it was all the harder, but given how vindictive his wife had shown herself to be Justin didn’t dare make his move before getting all his legal ducks in a row. He couldn’t stop her from making the divorce settlement ugly but he could quietly remove any and all authority she’d been given in his accounts and business affairs before he told her, shut down any opportunity to use it against him. Thank God he’d had a pre-nup.

In hindsight Vanessa had been pretty unreasonable about that too, another warning sign he’d missed. She’d never been overly greedy or behaved like a gold digger, but she was that bit too insistent on things always going her way. No matter how small or irrelevant the issue was, no matter how little it should have mattered to her or how illogical (even self-contradictory) her stipulations were, she had to get the result she dictated. Sometimes he thought she was doing it more to check she could than because she truly wanted what she demanded. Maybe that was why he’d never cottoned on - if she’d been grasping for his money or for material things as predecessors had he might have noticed quicker.

No, Vanessa wasn’t motivated by money. It was pure principle: her way or the highway. That was why he had to tread so carefully, because this time she wasn’t going to be getting her way for once. That would enrage her. She would be as obstructive and difficult as possible not because she was heartbroken or wanted to keep him, not because she wanted money, but because she needed to ‘win.’

“So here’s what we’re gonna do.” Chris said decisively. He was doing what he always did after an emotionally heavy conversation – he was looking for something practical to do to fix it. “We are having dinner Tuesday night, my house.”

“But…”

“Don’t argue. Us and Trace, family only. You are going to tell them exactly what you just told me, and we’re gonna talk out the plan for the great JT Liberation. We need to make sure you get away as quick and painless as possible and somebody fends off that evil bitch while you get settled.”

He was trying to resist the urge to march back into the party and personally send her back to the Hell she was spawned from. Chris like most of Justin’s friends had never liked her, had always found her to be cold and unfriendly. Yet even though he’d called Vanessa a bitch before (not to Justin’s face) he’d never realised the full extent of it. None of them had, or they’d have hauled him out kicking and screaming. They’d never thought of her as anything except totally normal. Even having witnessed Justin get moody and withdrawn he’d never dreamed this was why. He’d thought it was your typical relationship drama and nothing to worry about. Nobody had ever suspected that she was ripping shreds out of their friend behind closed doors; they’d merely agreed that she was unpleasant and they didn’t understand what he saw in her.

Chris was going to be feeling very guilty about that blithe oversight for a long time to come. Quietly he clenched and unclenched his free hand into a fist, trying not to let his rage at Vanessa overtake him. Justin didn’t need him to go off on one right now.

“Thanks, Chris.” Justin self-consciously brushed his fingers across his cheek, blotting away the tears that were still wet and slightly tacky to the touch. “I know you weren’t exactly prepared for me to drop this all on you.”

“To hell if I’m ready - next time you’re in trouble you fucking tell me so I can help you, you little punk. You’re my brother, you know that.”

They were silent for a long while after, still sipping the birthday whiskey which was now more for commiseration than celebration.