I don't fight her hand. I can't. All I can do is lie there under her and feel it happen, feel her carry out something against herself using my body as the instrument, and feel her hips grind down against me harder and harder like she's trying to punish herself with the exact same thing that feels good. There's nothing left for me to do but let her finish it.
Her "fuck you"s come apart into something quieter, half swallowed, gasped out under her breath between everything else she's saying.
I don't care that you killed him. I don't. I hate that I turned you into him.
If that's what she says, none of it comes through as words. It's noise, threaded through the rest of the sounds she's making, no different from any of it. I don't catch a single piece of it clean.
I don't know what she's saying.
I only know that whatever it is, it isn't for me.
She drags a second release out of both of us, hers first this time, silent and shaking, her whole body clenching around my cock hard enough that it drags mine right behind it, wrung out ofme before I have any say in the matter. Her whole body goes rigid over mine and then just stops, frozen there, her hand still clamped over my mouth, her chest heaving against mine, both of us caught in the same held breath for one long second neither of us breaks first.
Then she moves.
The second it's over, she's off me.
No word. No look back. Bare feet on the floor, her robe snatched off the chair and yanked around her shoulders, and then the bathroom door is shutting, then locking, and I'm left flat on my back in sheets that smell like her and like us and like whatever this was, the room gone quiet except for my own ragged breathing and the click of that lock still echoing in my ears.
I hear her crying through the door before the water even starts running.
I liein the wreckage of the bed and don't move for a long time.
What's sitting in my chest is plainer than shock, the sick, flat certainty of what I just watched her do to herself, in front of me, using me to do it, and not stopping when I asked her to. I heard nothing worth being shocked by, nothing but noise and my own name half-formed in a warning she didn't take. My shoulders sting where her nails caught. My mouth still carries the shape of her hand.
None of that is what keeps me lying here.
What keeps me lying here is the fact that I let it happen. I felt the exact second it stopped being anger and started being something else, and I chose not to move, chose to let her keep going because some part of me decided that was mercy. I don't know anymore if it was mercy or just one more time I stood by and let her hurt because stopping her looked harder than watching.
My mother's warnings come back to me anyway, uninvited, not her exact words, just the shape of what she meant, that I'd let Lydia break herself in front of me and call it giving her what she wanted. I hated her for saying it. I hate her more now for being right, for saying it before I had any way of knowing what it would look like.
Lydia's crying carries through the door, low, exhausted, meant for no one's ears but her own.
I get up.
The floor is cold under my feet. I cross the room slow, unsure of what I'm walking toward even as I walk toward it. I reach the door. I raise my hand to knock.
I stop there.
My knuckles hover an inch from the wood and go no further. I don't know what I'd say if she opened it, or what I'd do with my own face if I saw hers wrecked like that up close, knowing I put my hands on her while she did that to herself and didn't stop her in time. Walking in means either lying to her or telling her the truth, and I can't do either, not when the truth is that I let her do it and called it giving her what she needed.
So I do neither.
I lower my hand. I stand there another few seconds, long enough to hate myself for it. Then I walk away from the door, back toward the bed that still smells like her, and lie back down in the wreckage alone.
The crying goes on behind the door. I let it.
Same silence that got us here.
I choose it again, and somewhere underneath everything I already know it's the choice that ends us.
34
LYDIA
The duffel bagis the same one I used seven years ago. I don't know why I kept it. I don't know why, out of everything in that closet, my hand went straight for the one bag that already knows how this goes.
I fold in three shirts, underwear, the phone charger, and my toothbrush, and I don't let myself think past the zipper. Thinking past the zipper means deciding what I'm actually doing, and I'm not ready for that yet. I just need to be somewhere with no memory of last night. Somewhere that's mine.
