Chapter 11
Audrey
He walks me backward toward the bed, slow, one hand at my waist over the ridiculous gingham, and when the backs of my knees find the mattress, he lowers me onto it with a care that catches me off guard.
The skirt rides up.
I don't notice at first. I'm watching his face, the dark planes of it, the way his eyes have gone heavy. His hand skims up the outside of my bare thigh, and then it stops.
Stills.
I follow his eyes down.
The hem has ridden up high on my leg, and in the gray light I can see what he's seeing. The bruise. The high one, purple in the center, yellow-green at the edges. The older one beside it, faded to the color of weak tea. A smaller one below that.
Heat floods my face, and I move to tug the skirt down.
He catches my wrist, gently. Brings it away.
"What's this?" His voice has dropped.
"It's nothing."
His eyes flicker. "Audrey." He's not letting it go. His thumb traces the air just above the marks, not touching, like he's afraid to press. "Did somebody hurt you?"
"No. God, no." And the no comes out so sharp and so sure that something in his shoulders eases. I let out a breath. "It's me. I do them to myself."
He goes still.
"Not like—" I close my eyes. I've never had to say this out loud.
"It's the injections. For the migraines.
You're supposed to give it a few cycles to work.
The doctor said three months, maybe more, so I've been—" Something pinches in my throat.
"I've been doing them for a while. I just bruise easy.”
His thumb finally settles against the purple one, lightly.
"And they help?"
"No." The word is small. "Nothing helps."
I don't tell anyone about this. Nora knows about the medications, but no one's ever seen.
Not her, not the kids—never the kids. I do them in the bathroom with the door locked, even though no one would come in.
I press the plunger, wait for the click, and throw the pen into the sharps container under the sink.
Then I wash my hands and go make dinner like a woman who has her life together.
I wait for him to wince, to find somewhere else to look, the way people do when the broken part of you gets too close and they remember something they need to do.
Asher slides ?off the bed onto his knees.
He does it without ceremony, like it's nothing, like a man in a stripper-cop costume folding down onto a woman's bedroom floor is the most natural thing in the world. He hooks one hand behind my knee and draws my leg toward him. He puts his mouth on the first bruise.
He kisses it.
Not a peck. He sets his lips against the mark and holds them there, soft, like he's trying to take some of it back out of me.
Then the next one, the tea-colored one. The fresh one below it.
Slow, unhurried, reverent. The strange thing is that the more he sees of me, the closer he gets.
And a word floats up that genuinely surprises me.
Tended.
He's tending to me.
My hand finds his hair without asking permission. He kisses the last mark on my thigh and presses his forehead to the inside of my knee for a second, like he's the one who needs a moment.
Then he looks up the length of me, and his eyes have gone dark. His voice comes out low.
"These are the parts you hide," he says. It isn't a question.
"Yes."
"Then those are the ones I want." And he turns his head and kisses the soft inside of my thigh, higher this time, and my breath catches on the way in.
"Asher."
"Mm."
"What are you—" I can't finish the thought. His hands have curled around the backs of both my thighs, easing them apart. He's settling his shoulders between them like a man who has all afternoon, and my whole body has gone tight and hot and uncertain.
He pauses and looks up at me. Reads whatever's on my face.
"Has anyone ever done this for you?" he asks.
And I can't answer. Because the answer is no.
Over a decade married, and the answer is no, it wasn't a thing we did, it wasn't a thing I ever asked for, it wasn't a thing I thought I was allowed to want.
I grew up in a house where the body was a thing you managed and apologized for, where wanting was the sin underlying all the other sins.
My silence is the answer.
Something moves across his face. Not pity. A kind of focus, like I've just become the only thing in the world he intends to be good at.
"Okay," he says, quiet. "Tell me if you want me to stop."
I won't. We both already know I won't.
He tugs the skirt from my legs.
Then he lowers his head.
The first touch of his mouth there undoes something in me I didn't know was tight.
I make a sound, a startled one, my hands fisting the sheet.
It's everything at once. Soft, wet, and unbearable, the heat of his mouth where no one has ever—the careful, slow drag of it.
My hips lift off the bed without my say-so, and his hands press them gently back down.
"Oh," I breathe. It's all I've got. "Oh—"
He hums against me, and the vibration shoots straight up my spine. He's in no hurry. That patience wrecks me at first—the way he settles in like he's got nowhere else to be and nothing he'd rather do, learning what makes me jolt and going back to it, slow, again and again.
I try to stay still. Some old reflex, some part of me that thinks I should be quiet, contained, that wanting this much is a thing I'll have to answer for later. I try to press my heels and hold myself down.
It doesn't last.
He does something with his tongue that empties my head completely, and the restraint falls apart. My back arches off the bed. My hands leave the sheet and grip his hair, my fingers curling in tight, and instead of slowing him down it makes him groan against me, makes him press in closer, deeper.
"That's it," he murmurs, and I feel the words more than hear them.
I've never felt anything build like this. With the lights off and his mouth on me and no one in the house, there's nothing to manage, nothing to keep small, nothing to apologize for. And the realization that I'm allowed—that I can just feel this—is almost as overwhelming as the feeling itself.
The pressure continues to coil. Tightens.
He keeps the same slow rhythm, and somehow that's worse.
Or better. I can't tell anymore; the difference has stopped mattering.
My thighs start shaking on either side of him, and I can't make them stop.
My breath has gone ragged, climbing, every exhale carrying a sound I'd be mortified by any other day.
"Asher—" His name breaks in half coming out of me. "I can't—I don't—"
"You can." He doesn't lift his head, just says it against me, certain, and goes back to it. "Let go, doll face."
And the coil winds tighter, past anything I've ever climbed.
So tight it's almost frightening, my whole body strung up toward something I can feel waiting just out of reach.
He slides an arm across my hips to hold me steady, anchors me, and adds something—his fingers, his mouth, both, I'm too far gone to process it—and the bright thing leaps closer.
My head tips back into the comforter. My heels dig in. Everything in me is drawn to a single fine point, trembling there, right at the top of a long fall.
"That's it," he says again, rougher now. "Let me hear you."
And I do.
The sound that comes out of me is loud. Open.
Nothing like the bitten-back noises I swallow into a pillow so the kids down the hall won't hear, the ones I've trained myself to keep small my whole life.
This one releases unabashed, because for once there's no one to perform for and nothing to hold in, and I'm right there, right at the edge, his name halfway up my throat and my body a half-second from going over—
"Audrey?"
I freeze.
My hand flies to my mouth.
For one full second, I tell myself I imagined it. That it was outside, the neighbor, the TV next door, anything.
"Audrey? You up there?"
Nora.
Nora's voice. In my house. At the bottom of my stairs.
The world rearranges itself in a sick lurch. Asher's already up on his feet, head turned toward the door, and I can see him doing the same math I am and landing on the same answer.
She's home, a day early. She's in my house at the bottom of my stairs, and I am sprawled across the bed in a cowgirl costume with a man between my legs, and the only door out of this room is the one she's about to walk through.
"Up here," I call, and I'm astonished at how normal it comes out. Bright, even. "Just changing, give me a sec."
I'm already moving.
I shove at Asher's shoulder and he's moving too, already up off the floor, and there's no time to be quiet about it. I'm off the bed and across the room, yanking my robe off the hook on the back of the door.
He's dressed, at least. That's the one mercy. The whole costume still on him, the tin star, the works. Nothing to gather, nothing to find under the bed.
"The balcony," I whisper, knotting the robe over the gingham. "Off the bedroom. There's a trellis on the side; it's strong. Just go down it and around through the side gate. The latch sticks. You have to lift it hard."
"Audrey." He catches my wrist, just for a second, his thumb on my pulse. "Breathe. I've got it."
"Go."
"I'm gone." But he ducks his head and kisses me—fast, once, right at the corner of my mouth—and then he's moving toward the balcony door, the navy shirt still on him, the plastic star clipped crooked to the front of it.
The last thing I see before I yank the bedroom door open is the police hat lying abandoned on my nightstand.
I leave it. There's no time.
I pull the door shut behind me, and I'm down the stairs before I've finished tying the robe, hair down, hoping to God I look like a woman who was changing and not a woman who was—
"There you are," Nora says.