Me? Not so much. If Gabe is the solution, I am the problem. As an unwed, childless woman, anything I do is seen as a personal offense. How dare I mooch off the rationed grocery scraps or seek employment? You’d think I make a habit of stealing ripe bananas from the hands of babies and comfortable jobs from the hands of more qualified men. In reality, the produce I’m given is usually on the cusp of molding, and the few jobs I’ve worked only offered mundane domestic tasks better suited for a “woman’s touch,” according to my previous employers.
No matter how much we “noncontributors” speak up for ourselves, we’ll never be heard. Not when their minds are made up. In Caligo, opinions are truth, and facts are irrelevant. And the truth is made abundantly clear with every side-eye and muttered cursed: I am not welcome there. Haven’t been since my demotion to Tier Three, thanks to Gabe tossing me aside like garbage. So, how can I call that place my home when it’s more like a glorified cage that resentsmyvery existence?
Claustrophobia presses on my chest as I stare at the flashing light between the cracks of Gabe’s fingers.
“Let her go.”
Gabe’s soft smile flattens. “But I?—”
I unclasp his hands, breathing a little easier as the insect flies off.
He wipes his palm against his pants. “I wasn’t going to hurt it.”
“I know. I just . . .” I close my eyes, and a shiver races down my spine. “She deserves to be free.”
Gabe nods, then quirks his lips. “‘She’? Did you give her a name, in addition to a gender?”
“Go piss yourself,” I mutter, turning away from his dimpled smirk and stepping deeper into the glowing insects’ den.
“Not my first pick of names, but it could grow on me.” Gabe chuckles at his own joke as he rounds my side. His auburn brows pinch together at whatever he sees in my face. “What’s wrong?”
I can’t bring myself to meet his gaze as I answer with a question of my own. “Why do you keep doing this?”
“Doing what?”
I fold my arms against my chest, rubbing a palm along my upper arm. “Talking to me. Trying to get me alone. Pretending like . . .”
I struggle to name exactly what he’s pretending, so I let my words trail off as I lower myself to the ground. I lean against a sturdy tree trunk, rolling the knotted bark against a stiff spot between my neck and shoulders—my body’s warning that a flare-up is coming, especially if I don’t get some sleep soon. But I can’t leave just yet. Not before Gabe explains his sudden interest in barging back into my life.
Gabe settles in on my left. He’s silent for a while, and I’m unsure if it’s because he fears his answer or he doesn’t have one.
“I miss you,” he confesses, voice little more than a breath as hepicks up a twig from the dirt and twirls it between his fingertips. Predicting my response, he adds, “I know it’s been a decade, and I know I’m the one who agreed to the divorce my father was pushing. But I fucked up, Elle. I knew it the moment I signed that paper. I never should’ve let you go. I put my ambitions over our vows. Chose myself over you. And the worst part is, I told myself it was a noble sacrifice, putting my duty to our city above my selfish desires to be with you.”
I scoff. “I’m not sure if ‘noble’ is the right word to describe getting your dick wet in another woman’s vagina. That doesn’t make you a martyr, Gabe. It makes you a?—”
“Liar? Coward? Prick?” he cuts in with some suggestions, pushing the twig harder into his finger.
I nod and add a few more. “Hypocrite. Asshole. Scum.”
“All of those are true.” His hooded eyes darken, barely reflecting the yellow-green light of the flashing insects. “If it helps to know, my wife hates me, too. She moved out after the first month into the conjoining cabin to free herself from the grating sound of my voice. She’ll tolerate me publicly, but more so to appease my father than out of respect for me.”
Itdoeshelp to hear that, yet it doesn’t. As poetic as it is that Gabe’s karma for turning his back on real love is a marriage void of it, I don’t find joy in his unhappiness.
“It can’t be all bad. You’ve made six babies together.”
He’s quiet for a beat, tracing circles in the dirt with the twig. “I love my boys. I swear they teach me more than I teach them. Like how to slow down and put the needs of another before yourself. Two things you’re already good at, by the way. But their conceptions were purely transactional. There’s no pa?—”
“No.” I hold up a hand. “I do not want to hear about how you fuck your wife.”
“That’s the thing, though. It’s not even fucking. I mean, we tried that, at first. But neither of us were into it. She’d just lay there. Unmoving. Expressionless. The one time she showed some semblance of enjoyment, she moaned my father’s name.” We both snarl our disgust, and Gabe continues, “So we switched to a system where the midwives implant her with my pre-prepared ejaculate.”
All these years, I’ve believed their projection of the perfectly happy couple. Convinced myself that she satisfied him in all the ways I couldn’t. And I loathed him for that. So, although I believe Gabe’s revelations about his marriage, I struggle to undo my presumptions and rebuild it with this new information.
“Damn,” I finally say after several weighted seconds. “Never thought my married ex-husband’s sex life would be more pathetic than my own.”
Gabe chuckles without humor, snapping the twig in half. “Doyou... ?”
He leaves the question unfinished.
