My voice is harder than I feel. Inside, I am crumbling. Inside, I am the same man who followed her into hotel rooms, who whispered her name in the dark, who convinced himself that what Nora did not know could not hurt her.
“And I’m telling you it doesn’t have to be.”
Her fingers link behind my neck, an old, intimate gesture that unlocks a part of me I’ve tried to lock away. The part that doesn’t think, doesn’t feel the weight of vows or the trust of the woman who spoke them. It is the part of the soul that exists before the invention of language and reason and logic, the part that simply wants.
“I miss you,” she breathes against my lips. Her mouth is so close that I can feel the shape of the words. “I miss this. We can have it again, Julian. Just like before.”
Her mouth meets mine.
And for one devastating, shameful second.
I forget.
The kiss begins gently, tentative—two people remembering each other, relearning the shape of familiar mouths. Then her fingers tighten in my hair, her body presses closer, and the softness transforms into a hard, crystalline, jagged hunger. A desire that carries a terrifying lucidity, the lucidity of knowing exactly what it wants.
I forget it all.
The same way I always do.
My remorse. The sandbag-sized guilt had been sitting on my chest for months, making every breath a shallow, wheezing effort. The weight of what I did to Nora, to us, to the life we built together. Gone. Washed away like grit down a drain by the heat of her mouth.
The man I swore I would become. The one who would be patient, and faithful, and worthy of her forgiveness. Gone.
It all dissolves the instant her lips find mine.
This is Briana’s power over me. This is what she’s always done. With a single touch, she erases the world, turning conscience into static, turning memory into noise, rendering the future into a blank slate where nothing matters except the heatof her mouth and the press of her body and the sweet, narcotic relief of not having to worry about anything at all.
My body acts on its own.
I kiss her back.
My hands find their old place on her waist.
My fingers remember the curve of her hips, the fluid dip of her spine. My mouth remembers her taste. My body remembers her weight, her heat. She makes me forget I am a husband, a liar, a man who broke his wife.
For a single, suspended heartbeat.
I am exactly the man I was months ago.
My mind goes blank. There is nothing but the heat of her mouth, the roar in my veins.
Just this. Just her. Just the escape.
But then—
I hear it.
In the dark, behind my eyelids:
The sharp plastic crack of a lunchbox hitting the floor. The sound of the lid rolling across the tile, the wet splatter of red sauce against the carpet like a fresh bruise. And then the deafening silence, a clinical vacuum that sucks the air right out of my lungs.
Nora’s face.
My entire body recoils like I’ve been punched.
The sheer force of it drives me back. My hands, which moments ago were anchored to Briana, snap away as if her skin is white-hot lead. My mouth tears away from hers. I stumble, my shoulder hitting the shelf, a box of files tumbling to the floor.
The guilt slams into me. An angry fist in the stomach, a force that steals the air from my lungs.
