Her name is Jenny

Her name is Jenny. She’s married, the mother of three, a teacher at the neighborhood elementary school and she’s just fallen in love for the first time. She’s shopping, now, at Target, and trying to manage her mind and heart – and the guilt – and she’s not doing so well. His name is Billy. He owns a diner downtown and he kissed her last night and she still feels him, tastes him, smells him. It wasn’t a long, lingering kiss, but it was cheating, she knows that, because she wanted it so, and still does, and wants even more. She doesn’t hate Bob, her husband. In fact, it’s more that she feels sorry for him. She wants to apologize to him. Not for kissing Billy, but for the previous 17 years. Most of them have been a lie. Not a mean lie, not a vicious lie, but a lie, nonetheless. She’s not sure when she will tell him about Billy, or even if. But she knows Bob will want to make love, tonight, and she will comply, mostly because of Billy’s kiss, and she knows exactly what she will do: she’ll go through the motions and when he finally enters her she will hope that it will somehow jolt her back to her senses, back to reality, back to the way things are supposed to be, all the while knowing it won’t, never will, never can. For now, she shops, and savors the kiss to herself, by herself, within herself, and wonders if it will feel the same the second time or if it ever does. She is afraid it won’t. She knows, down deep, it won’t. And, suddenly, curiously, she feels ... free.