My jaw tightens. I take a step back toward the door. She immediately closes the distance.
Too close. I can see the individual lashes around her eyes, the small scar on her chin, the slight curve of her lips. She is beautiful. She was always beautiful. I used to tell myself that was why I kept coming back. But that was a lie.
I kept coming back because she wanted me, and in that want, I found the languid, effortless path of least resistance. I kept coming back because it was easy to come back to her.
“Nora is… loyal. Passive.” Her smile is a razor’s edge. She knows what the words will do to me. “You know that. If she didn’t leave after walking in on us, she never will.”
I want to argue. I want to tell Briana that she does not know Nora, that she has never known Nora, that the woman she is describing is a caricature, a shadow, a crude, convenient sketch of my wife that exists only in Briana’s need to justify what we did.
But my jaw feels locked and uncooperative. The words stay down in my stomach, turning into a cold, caustic weight.
Because the truth is, I have thought the same thing. In my darkest moments. I think about it in the 4:00 a.m. dark, staring at the back of Nora’s head while the house creaks around us. I have thought:She is still here.She is still making my breakfast.She is still packing my lunch.She is still laying out my shirt.
“I told you it was over,” I say, my voice like stone. Hard. Cold. Unyielding. “I meant it.”
I did mean it.
But meaning it and doing it are different things. I have not touched Briana. I have not called her. I have not texted her. But I have thought about her. In the dark, in the lull of the moments when Nora’s silence felt like a door that would never open again.
I have thought about Briana’s gaze—hungry and certain—the want in it that never asked for more than the pieces of myself I was already discarding.
Briana lets out a low laugh. The sound is soft, almost affectionate. A wet, throaty sound. The laugh of someone who has heard this before. It is like she knew the texture of my resolve; she sees that it is fashioned of nothing more than thin, scorched paper. I wonder if she thinks she can see right through me.
Her arms wind around my neck. Her fingers lace together at the back of my head. She pulls herself close, her body pressing against mine. The air is suddenly heavy, filled with the perfume of her, just her; a scent of crushed gardenias and musk that infiltrates my senses, drowning the clinical detergent-like chill of the storage room.
“Julian,” she whispers, her breath hot against my skin, “enough. You can stop the performance. The guilt is pointless. She. Isn’t. Leaving.”
She isn’t leaving.
My chest tightens.
She’s right. Nora isn’t going anywhere.
I told myself it was because she felt she had no worth. I told myself it was fear of being alone after her parents died. I told myself that she stayed because she was broken, because she didn’t know how to exist in a world that did not include me.
But if I’m honest, the reason never truly mattered to me.
All that mattered was the result:She is still here.
And that is enough for me.
Briana pulls my face down to hers.
Her fingers burrow slowly, possessively into the hair at the nape of my neck, a gesture she knows I cannot resist. She has always known. From the first night, from the first touch, from the first time she leaned across a desk and looked at me like I was the only man in the room. Like I am the only man who matters.
“We can have this back,” she whispers, her fingers tracing through my hair. “It’s easy. No consequences. No more guilt. Nora isn’t going anywhere. You know it.”
I stiffen.
Her words find the pull. The one Briana has always known how to find. The pull of wanting what I should not want, of taking what I should not take, of believing, against all evidence, that I can have one without losing the other. That I could taste the salt of the sea without ever leaving the safety of the shore.
She’s offering me a fantasy where I can exist in two rooms at once: one where I am a good husband chewing buttered peas in a silent kitchen, and another where I am this: a man being caressed by a woman who smells like expensive flowers.
The thought of it makes my body shudder. I feel like cold, cured meat.
She speaks as if life is a series of low-stakes transactions. As if I can keep the wife who folds my underwear and the woman who wants to ruin me, and that one of them will ever truly notice the smell of the other on my skin.
“I told you, it’s over.”
