12. Stephanie #2
The laughter was doing a job, and the job was keeping my brain off everything else it wanted to catalog.
The size of him. How good he used to feel.
The ink spilling across his chest and down one arm that I hadn’t been able to read.
His thighs, thick and built for holding a person up against a wall.
His chest, which some traitor part of me had clocked as a very comfortable place to fall asleep.
Get it together, Stephanie.
“You can open your eyes now.”
I lowered my hand.
He’d dressed, thank god. Sweatpants and a soft gray t-shirt, hair still damp and pushed back off his forehead, cheeks still flushed. He looked embarrassed and half-amused, and under both of those a wanting so plain that I refused to name it out loud even in my own head.
My mouth went dry regardless.
“I’m just gonna…” I pointed toward the bedroom through the open doorway. A bunk bed sat inside, small and unmistakably built for children, made up with cartoon quilts and a stuffed rabbit slumped against each pillow.
“Yes. Of course.” He rubbed the back of his neck, an old tell. “I cleared the bottom bunk for you. I know you move in your sleep. Didn’t want you falling from up high.”
He remembered. Three years and a divorce and he still knew that I thrashed all night, that I’d once rolled clean off a too-tall hotel bed and woken up on the floor tangled in a sheet, laughing, before we were the kind of people who didn’t laugh anymore.
“Makes sense,” I managed. “Thank you.”
“Do you need anything? Water? An extra blanket?”
“I’m fine.” My voice came out smaller than I wanted.
“The bathroom is through that door. I left towels for you.”
“Thank you.”
“And if you get hungry later, there’s a mini fridge in the corner. I stocked it with those sparkling waters you like. The grapefruit ones.”
He remembered those too. My exact brand, the flavor I bought and no one else in either of our families would touch.
“Thank you,” I said again, because every other word had gone out of my head.
I walked into the bedroom and shut the door behind me.
Kevin’s things had migrated into the room while he waited to find out who’d be sleeping here.
His open suitcase sat against the far wall, clothes folded with the surgical neatness that used to drive me a little crazy, and on the nightstand beside the child-sized bunk was a book, a notebook rather than a paperback, the cheap kind you’d buy in a drugstore three-pack, except this one had clearly been carried for years.
The cover had gone soft and furred at the corners, the cardboard rounded from a thousand openings, held shut with a fat rubber band that had left a permanent groove in the pages.
I don’t know why it snagged me. Kevin had never been a journal person.
In seven years of marriage I’d never once seen him write a word he wasn’t billing someone for.
And yet here was a notebook worn to the texture of an old dollar bill, sitting where a man keeps the thing he reaches for last at night.
I picked it up before I’d decided to. It was heavier than it looked, swollen with use, the rubber band the only thing holding it together.
I almost opened it. My thumb was under the band. Whatever was in there, he’d carried it through the exact three years I’d spent believing he’d moved on without a backward glance, and some starving part of me wanted, badly, to know what a man like that wrote down when no one was looking.
Then I heard him set a glass down in the other room, and I put it back exactly where I’d found it, band and all, my face hot.
It wasn’t mine to read. Whatever Kevin Coleman had been doing with his nights for three years, he hadn’t offered it to me, and I wasn’t going to steal it out of a drugstore notebook on a nightstand.
I told myself I didn’t care what was in it.
It was a lie, but it was a small one, and I had bigger ones to manage tonight.
Breathe, Stephanie. Just breathe.
Breathing turned out to be the wrong move, because the whole room was steeped in him.
The new cologne over soap over the warm bare-skin scent underneath that had only ever been Kevin.
I’d spent ten years falling asleep in that smell.
My body knew it on a level far below thought, and it responded without asking me first, a low pull behind my ribs and lower than that.
Torture. This was going to be torture.
I dumped the borrowed backpack on the floor and collapsed face-first onto the bottom bunk. The pillow smelled like clean laundry and nothing else. Small mercies.
I dragged the cartoon quilt up over my head and burrowed under it, building myself a tiny fort of denial. If I couldn’t see the room or smell him, maybe I could convince my nervous system I was somewhere, anywhere, else, and survive until morning.
One night. That was the whole of it. Tomorrow the cabin would be dry and I could go back to avoiding him from a respectable distance, the way I’d gotten good at.
I squeezed my eyes shut and ordered my body to settle. My heart wouldn’t slow. My skin still remembered how he’d looked at me when I walked in, before either of us started laughing.
This was fine. I was a grown woman in a children’s bunk bed surrounded by stuffed rabbits, working very hard not to think about my ex-husband’s cock, and everything was completely fine.
And that was the worst of it, lying there in the dark of a room built for someone else’s children.
The flood, the humiliation, even the memory of him naked on the floor, none of that was the worst of it.
The worst was the sparkling water, and the bottom bunk cleared out so I wouldn’t fall.
He’d spent our last two years of marriage forgetting my birthday and taking calls through dinner, and now, with nothing left to gain, he remembered the small things.
I didn’t know what to do with a man who was careful with me only after I’d stopped being his to be careful with.
I lay there a long time, losing track of it, listening to Kevin move around the other room.
The clink of a glass set down on wood. The creak of a chair taking his weight.
The low murmur of what might have been a phone call, too quiet to make out.
I strained to hear who he was talking to and hated myself for straining.
Eventually the sounds stopped. Footsteps crossed to the bedroom door and stopped, and a knuckle rapped soft against the wood.
“Steph?” Kevin’s voice came low through the door. “You still awake?”
I should have said no. Pretended to be asleep. Instead I heard myself say, “Yeah.”
The door eased open. He stood in the gap with the light from the other room behind him, backlit and enormous, holding a glass of water. “You didn’t take any water in with you. You always want it at two in the morning and then you’re too stubborn to get up for it.”
He remembered that too. Of course he did.
I sat up, the cartoon quilt pooling at my waist, and he crossed the small room and set the glass on the nightstand beside the notebook I’d put back, and then he didn’t leave.
He crouched down beside the low bunk so we were level, close enough that I could see the shower still damp at his hairline, and neither of us said anything for a moment that went on too long to be nothing.
“Thank you,” I said. My voice came out lower than I meant it to.
“Steph.” He said my name like it hurt. His eyes dropped to my mouth and came back up, and he didn’t bother to hide that they had, and the air in that ridiculous children’s room went thick and warm and impossible.
Close enough to count his eyelashes. The heat came off him in a wave.
Three years fell away like they were nothing, like they were tissue paper, and I watched him start to lean in, slow, giving me every second to stop it, and God help me, I tilted toward him. I did. My whole traitor body leaned.
His hand came up and hovered at my jaw without landing, close enough that I felt the warmth of his palm against my skin, held there.
And then, from somewhere far off across the complex, someone laughed, a bright drunk peal of party laughter drifting up from the tent, and it broke the spell clean in half.
I pulled back. He pulled back at the exact same instant, both of us retreating from the same cliff edge, and the loss of his almost-touch left my skin cold where the heat had been.
“I should let you sleep,” he said, rough, standing so fast he nearly cracked his head on the top bunk.
“Kevin.”
“It’s okay.” He was already at the door.
He paused there with his hand on the frame, his back to me, and I watched his shoulders rise and fall with one long breath.
“For what it’s worth, I’m not going to do anything you don’t ask me to do.
Not ever again. You’re safe from me, Steph.
Even from the parts of me that don’t want to be safe. ”
Then he stepped out and pulled the door shut behind him, softly, the latch barely clicking.
He’d come to the very edge of it and then handed the choice back to me, the exact thing I’d have begged him for three years ago and never gotten.
The old Kevin would have closed that distance without asking.
This one had leaned in and then let me be the one to decide, and losing his mouth an inch before I got it was somehow worse than anything he could have taken.
I should have been grateful, and I was. But some small, disloyal part of me lay under that quilt and ached, and it wasn’t relief.
It was disappointment, and I fell asleep with it curled up against my sternum, so busy bracing against the man on the other side of the door that I forgot to brace for anything else.
I closed my eyes. The cold bright room was already waiting for me, and all that blood, and the phone in my hand ringing out into nothing.