I got up with a yawn and opened the door a crack to look at my confused husband.
“What are you doing?” he asked.
“Well, Iwassleeping.”
“What were you doing earlier?”
“Changing the sheets.”
“I see that. Why?”
I could tell him lots of things. I could tell him that he smelled. I could tell him I was eliminating all blue from the house. In the end, I chose the truth. “They smell like you.”
He leaned back with a small smile. “So you do still like me?”
I laughed even as tears pricked at my eyes. “No, Mitch, I don’t like you at all right now. But I still love you. Too bad you don’t feel the same way about me.”
“Hey,” he said in that low, calming voice as he put a hand to my cheek and brushed away a tear with his thumb. “It doesn’t have to be like this.”
My heart lurched. All thoughts of Vivian 2.0 flew out the window.
“We can still sleep together,” he said with a shrug and that crooked smile I used to find so endearing. “We are married after all.”
The blood in my veins turned to ice. “Are you hitting on me?”
“Well, you know,” he said as he tugged at a spaghetti strap. “I’ve always liked you in that little pajama set.”
I swallowed hard. I was wearing one of my only pairs of matching pajamas, a satiny tank top with matching shorts.
Icouldsleep with him, prove to him that I wasn’t a cold, dead fish.
We were, in fact, still married.
Maybe sex with Mitch might even change his mind since he had been complaining about it two days ago. Had it really been only two days? It felt as though I’d lived a thousand lifetimes. At least, I was tired enough to have done so.
“Come on, Viv. I’ll even go back to the guest room afterward.”
Go back to the guest room?
My brain caught up to my heart. “So, you’re saying that we have sex, but we’re still getting a divorce?”
He grinned. My voice had come out husky, and he mistook my anguish for an attempt at being sultry. “That’s it! Now you’re getting it.”
My heart didn’t break. No, that would be too easy. Instead, my chest burned as if Mitch had administered a hundred paper cuts to the organ and then doused it in lemon juice.
“Oh, I understand perfectly,” I said.
He leaned closer.
“I understand that you want to have your cake and eat it, too. That nothing would fuel your ego more than sleeping with two women at once.”
“Wait—”
“Go screw yourself, Mitchell.”
I closed the bedroom door in his face.
“There’s not another woman!”
