All she can think isYes, I want to. I want nothing more.
In her mouth, the words feel like broken marbles. “I can’t.”
Maybe the intensity of their conversations, his soft touches, how he listens to her and lights up at her laugh, are things he does to all girls he wants to sleep with.
She doesn’t truly know him.
His face is full of pulverized devastation as she slips from his arms and whispers, “Have a nice life,” before kissing his cheek and walking away.
In her dank garage, she cries, her body a crescent moon around Jude as he sleeps deep and calm, his floppy limbs flung out like a starfish. She kisses his cheeks and reminds herself that he is enough. It doesn’t matter that he will wake and have an inevitable tantrum over something and hit her and cry and fight everything she says.
He’s only five years old. He’s not doing this on purpose.
Or maybe it’s her fault he’s like this, because he grew inside her where she’d packed down all her vile secrets, her rot and lies and misery, and his resentment of her is simply her hate for herself.
Twenty-four hours after Bren leaves, her phone starts going off with nonstop texts.
Turns out I couldn’t stop thinking about you.
She is smiling as she texts back.Strange. I forgot all about you.
They message each other all day, video-calling when they can. He stays up till the small hours of the morning, hyped up on espresso shots with his hair a rumpled bedhead, pacing through his dark skeleton of a house as he rambles to her about his day. Behind him, on the tiny screen, she can see torn-up floorboards and sagging walls, and when she asks how the renovations are going, he quickly pivots to show her a nice room he’s almost finished. To see the wreckage of his home would make her feel better, actually, feel as if she’s included in his reality. But he prefers her to look at pretty things.
He keeps calling.
He keeps texting.
Weeks pass and there is so much of him in her life that she doesn’t care that all their conversations are cotton candy instead of meat.
“You deserve better,” he says. “Shit, Elodie, you deserve the whole goddamn world.”
His words are warm honey, and he spoons them into her mouth until she is filled by him. He is an addiction that leaves her shaky and distracted, late for work and uninterested in food. When Jude has a two-hour meltdown, she simply shuts the door of the garage and sits on the curb to call Bren, pretending the shrieks in the background are someone else’s child.
Bad mother.
Bad mother.
Bad mother.
They have two months of this tentative, wondrous bliss, and then one morning she answers a video call to him walking briskly through a crowd with loudspeakers booming out metallic announcements in the background. “Hey, so. I thought…” He glances behind him as he hurries across a street. Car horns blare. The sun flashes bright in the sky, and her sleep-mussy brain finally makes the connection that it should be nighttime in America. “I might be even more of an idiot than usual, but I maybe got on a flight.”
“Bren.” Something like wanting, like terror, has lit her up. She’s barely awake, Jude playing at her ankles with his favorite stuffed rabbit, jam smeared all over his mouth, and she was meant to be thinking about work, preschool, laundry, groceries.
“To Australia,” he clarifies. “Because there’s this girl. Like,holy shit, there’s thisgirl. I’m so in love with her.”
She is going to cry; she wants so desperately for it to be real.
“I booked this resort on an island, because I thought,I want this girl to know how I feel about her or I will explode.” He sounds so keyed up,talking fast, his eyes bright with just a hint of anxiety. “But she could say no. I mean, who does this? It’s crazy. I’m crazy.”
She rubs her grubby pajama sleeve against her eyes. “Bren, I can’t—”
“Tell me to fuck off and I will.” But his eyes are endless wells of pleading hope.
“Fuck off,” she whispers. “Then please come get me.”
The island resort lies offthe city coastline, luxurious in ways she’s never experienced. A bellhop takes their bags to a room overlooking crisp white beaches and palm trees and an ocean polished brighter than a glossy gemstone. The bedsheets look ironed, decadence in the decor and artful curve of the sofas. They can’t stop smiling at each other, both talking without pause since she met him at the ferry. It’s as if they’re catching up on years apart instead of two months. It can’t be this easy to fall into sync with him, but she forgets to feel self-conscious when he holds her hand, forgets her usual shame at her cheap clothes, her tiny suitcase, her scraggly curls escaping their ballerina bun.
A tiny nub of doubt grows in the back of her throat, small enough to ignore, but its persistence wears at her.There has to be something wrong with him if he loves you.
