My palm presses down and the vibrator finds a rhythm. So does the memory. Leo’s hand at my hip, warm and unambiguous. The way his thumb slid across the bare skin between the hem of my shirt and top of my jeans. The exact rasp of his scruff when he leaned in to talk into my ear, lips brushing skin by accident but not really accidental. How he smelled—clean and expensive in a way that shouldn’t work in a bar that smells like beer and salt and whatever hipsters were smoking that week. His chest against my back for one song, then my front for another, our bodies slotting together like something that had been sitting on a shelf and was always meant to interlock.
I was drunk, but not wasted. He was sober, but never crossed the line. It was friendly, it was hot. It was sexual, it was safe. I knewhe wouldn’t make a move, and that emboldened me to move. My ass against his crotch, back arched, arm stretched up and around his neck. The music slowed and he didn’t spin me to face him. Just wrapped both arms around my front, dropped his chin to my shoulder and held me, swayed with me, while I rested my head back against his shoulder.
What if he hadn’t been such a gentleman? What if he’d invited me home?
I try not to imagine it. My body refuses to obey. My thumb clicks the remote once, twice, as the scene escalates in time with the pleasure between my legs.
His mouth—God, his mouth—is suddenly between my legs in my mind, that scruff turning into friction, into heat, into a kiss where no one has kissed me like that in… I don’t even know how long. His hands are too big to be gentle and that is exactly the point. One grips my thigh, pushes it open; the other locks around the other thigh so I can’t move, like he knows I’ll try. Not because I want him to stop, but because I want to climb out of myself and see if this is real. His tongue finds a pattern, deliberate, devastating. He pays attention. He listens with his body. He doesn’t stop when I gasp; he changes tempo, angle, pressure until my brain forgets my own name. My fingers slide into his hair in the fantasy; in reality one twists into the sheets, pulling, yanking, searching for purchase while my hips press deeper into the mattress, my palm working the vibrator against my clit and my G-spot in tandem.
He’d said the other day at that meeting, mouth turned up in a smirk, sexy and tempting as sin,It’d be fun to play tangent to your curves.I’d rolled my eyes. Brushed him off. Now, the words shiver through me and land low.Tangent to your curves.It’s obscene in my head. It’s perfect.
Like my vagina is a horny little mathematician.
The orgasm hits like lightning in a canyon. Sudden. Loud. An initial jolt, closely followed by shuddering echoes that ripple throughout my body. My thighs clamp around my hand and wrist;my belly pulls tight; my breath goes ragged, stuttered, caught. I hear a sound, a drawn out curse, and it’s mine. I ride it. I let it take me. My eyes squeeze shut so hard I see stars and behind the stars is a jawline I shouldn’t be mapping with my mouth.
How I ever compared that jawline to a soggy waffle fry, I’ll never know.
Then, it’s over.
The silence afterward is not the good kind. It’s a vacuum. I pull the vibrator from between my legs and depress the button, turning it off as quickly as possible like I can shut up my own choices. The object drops to the mattress with a soft thud; my hand falls to my stomach. For a breath or two, I float. For a breath or two, I think maybe this is what forgetting feels like.
Fat chance.
Shame creeps in slowly, like tide water under a door you thought was sealed. It soaks my skin, my hairline, the base of my throat. Just ten minutes ago I had Chase’s name glowing on my phone screen and my thumb hovering over a call I didn’t make. Ten minutes ago I was a woman who missed her husband. Now I am a woman who just came to the image of another man between her legs. A man who is not mine. A man who should not matter. A man who—if we’re tracing lines and calling things what they are—is a complication I never asked for and cannot seem to stop thinking about.
I am STILL. MARRIED.
I turn onto my side and tuck my knees against my chest. My throat stings. I try to swallow the tears back the way I’ve been swallowing every other thing I don’t have time to deal with. They don’t listen.
I cry quietly—first because I don’t want Skye to hear me if she comes in, then because embarrassment is my default, factory setting. Then because the embarrassment turns into grief I didn’t schedule and the grief turns into a weighted blanket I can’t get out from under. I cry because I miss the life I was supposed to have,and because I don’t miss it enough to go back. I cry because imagining someone else’s hands on me made me feel wanted for the first time in… I don’t even know how long. I cry because I still wear a ring-shaped dent on my finger like my skin refuses to fill the space. I cry because I’m still married. Because I left. Because I stayed too long. I cry because I still want to be married. Because I don’t want to be married. Because I’m confused and alone and my skin feels too tight and too different and nothing feels normal. Because I made myself small. Because even in my quest to stop doing that, sometimes I still am.
Eventually, the tears slow. The room reappears—lamp casting a soft cone of light onto the wall. I left the open legal pad on the coffee table like a promise I made to future me, my phone sitting face down nearby. I can feel its gravity from here, the way an object holds a planet in orbit. But I can’t see it, so it doesn’t have any real power over me.
I should get up, clean up my mess in the living room and plug in my phone so it’s not dead before morning, but I won’t. Tomorrow is Saturday. I have nowhere to be. No one to see. Let it die.
I don’t move. I don’t go get it. I don’t text Chasesorryorare you okayorI miss youorI shouldn’t butor any of the thousand dumb things that would unravel me. I don’t text Leoyou’re an idiotorstop being hot near meorplease keep being hot near me I hate you—because if I start, I won’t stop, and the only thing worse than shame is the hangover after you toss it a shot and call it a plan.
I drag the blanket up to my chin and stare at the ceiling. Jake’s words drift back, one by one, like buoys you can grab if you’re tired of treading water.
We present, not posture.
We don’t litigate vengeance.
I won’t leave either of you limping.
You’ll be taken care of.
I didn’t know how much I needed someone to say that until he did. Not justyou’ll win, not justyou’ll be free, butyou will be taken care of.It lands in a place inside me that isn’t greedy; it’s just, empty. For years I tried to fill it with effort and patience and prayers that never made it past the ceiling fan. Tonight it fills with a simple, practical promise: this will not ruin you. It will simply, and finally, end.
I breathe in through my nose, out through my mouth. Count to four. Again. Again.
My eyelids go heavy. Shame is still there, a low weight at the base of my ribs, but exhaustion sets a hand on its head and tells it to hush. I turn my face into the pillow, thinking of glass doors and metal letters, of broken high school boys and giant mimosas with Skye. I think of a dance floor and scruff and a mouth that saidtangent to your curveslike calculus was foreplay. I think of a church pew and a man who will always be adored by people who will never know the darkness that lives in his soul.
Somewhere between all of these thoughts, I slip under.
Sleep doesn’t save me. Not really. But it holds me still long enough to forget wanting to call, long enough to not reach for the phone, long enough to give morning a chance to be kinder than tonight.
SIXTEEN
