Gone-Girl-by-Gillian-Flynn

me full on the lips, and he touched me as if I were really there. I almost cried,
I’d been so lonely. To be kissed on the lips by your husband is the most
decadent thing.
What else? He takes me swimming in the same pond he’s gone to since he
was a child. I can picture little Nick flapping around manically, face and
shoulders sunburned red because (just like now) he refuses to wear sunscreen,
forcing Mama Mo to chase after him with lotion that she swipes on whenever
she can reach him.
He’s been taking me on a full tour of his boyhood haunts, like I asked him
to for ages. He walks me to the edge of the river, and he kisses me as the wind
whips my hair (‘My two favorite things to look at in the world,’ he whispers
in my ear). He kisses me in a funny little playground fort that he once
considered his own clubhouse (‘I always wanted to bring a girl here, a perfect
girl, and look at me now,’ he whispers in my ear). Two days before the mall
closes for good, we ride carousel bunnies side by side, our laughter echoing
through the empty miles.
He takes me for a sundae at his favorite ice cream parlor, and we have the
place to ourselves in the morning, the air all sticky with sweets. He kisses me
and says this place is where he stuttered and suffered through so many dates,
and he wishes he could have told his high school self that he would be back
here with the girl of his dreams someday. We eat ice cream until we have to
roll home and get under the covers. His hand on my belly, an accidental nap.
The neurotic in me, of course, is asking: Where’s the catch? Nick’s
turnaround is so sudden and so grandiose, it feels like … it feels like he must
want something. Or he’s already done something and he is being
preemptively sweet for when I find out. I worry. I caught him last week
shuffling through my thick file box marked THE DUNNES! (written in my
best cursive in happier days), a box filled with all the strange paperwork that
makes up a marriage, a combined life. I worry that he is going to ask me for a
second mortgage on The Bar, or to borrow against our life insurance, or to sell
off some not-to-be-touched-for-thirty-years stock. He said he just wanted to
make sure everything was in order, but he said it in a fluster. My heart would
break, it really would, if, midbite of bubblegum ice cream, he turned to me
and said: You know, the interesting thing about a second mortgage is …
I had to write that, I had to let that out. And just seeing it, I know it sounds
crazy. Neurotic and insecure and suspicious.
I will not let my worst self ruin my marriage. My husband loves me. He