Her Last Client, Part Iii

...See, when she let her guard down, when she looked deep, she saw things that left her somewhat disturbed, Roxanne didn’t know her man’s favorite color, and that fact didn’t really upset her. She didn’t know that much of his home town, or of the dreams that pushed him on in life, she didn’t feel the need to learn the things you normally expected of a wife. And sometimes she imagined, when they made love, some of the men she knew in the old days, she even recalled a fine brothel client the night that their second daughter was made. It wasn’t that she didn’t like her Stu, there was little to criticize in him, but could she survive without him by her side? Yes, she could, she realized to her chagrin. When she realized this she heard that damn man, her last client back at the bordello, the man she had dismissed as a sexist, now she wondered, had he been in the know? It took her many months to accept this, it went against all she’d ever been taught. Could there be truth in his thoughts on women? And if it was so, then what had she wrought? Had her teenage self been so arrogant to think that she could outwit tradition? Had she destroyed her chance to truly feel following her 'free-spirited' vision? She’d always though the restrictions on sex, at least those placed on the female kind, had been oppression, acts of injustice, but now troubling thoughts came to her mind. If all this was older than what she learned, if innate truths had long been in action, why had she not learned about such a threat? Why had these ideas never gained traction? Why weren't women being told how things were? Why all the half-truths of what lay beneath? Could she have avoided this emptiness if she'd been warned of what paths not to seek? And now, nearly forty, it was too late, she could not change the girl she had once been, she had lived as they told her to believe, and now she never could really bond with men. Roxanne liked her husband, liked Stu a lot, but she now knew it could never be love. She wouldn’t divorce, that would hurt her girls, she would stay with him, she would make it enough. How would she live, how could she deal with this? She didn’t even know where to begin, but she’d do what she could to make sure her girls both made it to the altar as virgins.