Chapter 14
Audrey
The flier is the first thing I see when I come through the doors.
MILLbrOOK FIRST PRESENTS, in gold letters across the top.
Beneath it, a line drawing of a stage with the curtains pulled back on nothing.
NEW BEGINNINGS. A biblical play in place of our annual talent show at the End of Summer Festival.
And below that, taped a little crooked to the corkboard, a signup sheet with a pen tied to a string.
There’s three names already: a mother I've baked birthday cakes for, someone's teenager, a name I can’t make out in handwriting that loops.
I stop in front of it.
Martha Howard is passing out blood drive handouts nobody wants. Jenna's laugh carries from somewhere over by the welcome table, the bright one she uses on visitors. People move around me, shaking hands with one another, and I'm standing in front of a piece of paper like it might bite.
I haven't stood on a stage since I was thirteen, the one time I auditioned, my mother swiftly pulling me from the play. I never said the lines I wanted for a single soul.
Until Asher.
I gave Cleone away one line at a time, and he answered her back word for word, like he'd been holding the part for me the whole time and only needed me to ask.
I look at the pen.
Pick it up.
My hand is steady, and it undoes me a little. Months of it shaking over mascara wands and casserole dishes, over the steering wheel in the church parking lot, and it picks today to hold still.
Audrey Sullivan.
I sign it before my mother's admonitions list off in my head. Four names now, mine at the bottom in letters that don't loop, that don't apologize, and I set the pen down on its string and walk into the sanctuary.
The pew is cool through my skirt. I slide to the middle, set my purse in my lap, and fold my hands on top of it. A woman with nothing on her mind but the Lord's Day.
My phone buzzes against my knee.
I work it out of the bag under the cover of my purse, screen tipped away from the Abbots beside me, who notice everything.
Declan.
Heading to my church across town. Thinking of you. Hope you have a good service.
I read it twice.
He's so kind. It makes the guilt settle heavier every time his name lights up the screen.
He understands in a way most people can't. Knows the shape of this grief because he's living with his own. He checks on me, wanting nothing. And I let him. I don't think about why his messages are easier to answer than anyone else's.
I slide the phone back into the bag without typing back. The little dots of him responding don't get to start, not in here.
The kids return to my side after visiting with friends the minute the service begins.
Melinda’s not here. Strange. I let out a breath I didn’t know I was holding. Then I feel terrible for being relieved.
The organ swells. We stand. We sit. We stand again for the reading and sit again for the rest, the choreography of it so deep in me I could do it asleep. There were Sundays when that was practically true, when I came in hollow and let the room move my body for me.
Pastor Donahue climbs to the pulpit and opens his Bible to a place already marked.
"This morning," he says, "we're going to talk about a wise man who made foolish choices: Solomon."
I know this one. Seven hundred wives, three hundred concubines, the wisest king who ever drew breath laid out plain in the text, every excess showing. The congregation makes a small sound when the numbers land, scattered clucks and shifting bodies.
I let my eyes go soft on the brass cross behind the choir.
I have been sleeping with Asher Calloway since August.
The most notorious man in the league. The Harlow Heartbreaker, two words I read off my phone the night after the barbecue and have never managed to unread.
We've never once said what we are. I've never asked him whether there's anyone else, and he’s never offered. I've built a careful little perimeter around it, because as long as I don't know, this thing stays exactly the size I can carry in two hands without anyone seeing the weight.
"And it came to pass," Pastor Donahue reads, unhurried, every word set down like a stone, "when Solomon was old, that his wives turned away his heart."
The brass cross doesn't move. Neither do I.
"His heart," he reads, and lets it sit, "was not loyal to the Lord his God."
I sit very still.
The vents hum overhead. Somewhere behind me a baby fusses and is shushed against a shoulder.
Mrs. Abbot turns a page in her own Bible, the paper whispering.
Pastor Donahue moves on, into the part about the high places and the foreign altars, his voice carrying steady through the sanctuary, and I keep my hands folded on my purse and my eyes on the cross, unable to move.
His heart was not loyal.
I don't know whose heart the verse is talking about anymore.
I came in here this morning and signed my name as an act of courage, and now I'm sitting in a pew doing math on a man who has never promised me one single thing.
And I did it on purpose. So I wouldn't have to think about this thing past two bodies in a bedroom.
But now, sitting here listening to scripture, it feels like a warning, a warning I don't have the strength to ignore any longer.
Because I already know how I really feel about it.
The candles are still burning when I come back to myself.
Three on the dresser, two on the nightstand, the flames standing straight in the dark. The room smells like wax and salt and the cologne he wears. Asher is a long warm weight beside me, one arm flung over his eyes, his chest still working its way back down to earth.
The mask is on the pillow where he left it—white, smooth, shaped to half a face. His cape is a black pool on the floor. My slip is somewhere down by my feet. The rose he brought, a single red one tied with a ribbon, leans in a water glass on the nightstand where I put it earlier.
"Wow," I say.
"Yeah." He doesn't move his arm. "I know."
A laugh comes up out of me, soft, surprised by itself. I roll onto my side. The candlelight makes everything kind, smooths the room down to gold and shadow, and my head, which has been a low steady drum behind my left eye since the second hymn, has gone quiet.
It does that, with him. In the dark. Something I just get to have, a few hours at a time, when the lights are low and his weight is the only thing that makes the world hold still.
"Candles make a difference," I say.
He lifts his arm off his face and looks at the flames, then at me, and when he speaks, his voice drops into a register that belongs in a far more serious room than mine.
"I am a creature of the night, woman." He sweeps a hand toward the dresser, grand. "I do my finest work in mood lighting.”
I press my lips together.
He holds it one more second, chin up, fully committed, then collapses out of the pose all at once. "That sounded better in my head."
The laugh escapes me before I can stop it, real and easy, and he grins up at the ceiling like he’s trying not to look too pleased with himself.
I'm still smiling when he speaks again.
The dramatic voice is gone. He says it lighter, the way you toss out a dare you're pretending not to care about, eyes on the candle instead of me.
"You could test-run this creature in the daylight sometime, you know. See if he's just as devastating outside the bedroom."
The candle gutters and steadies.
I don't laugh.
I lie there and feel the smile go out of my face from the inside, like a tide pulling back.
The room gets very quiet around us, just the wax and his breathing and the long sigh of a truck out on the county road.
He's still looking at the candle. He won't look at me, and I understand that the not-looking is the only way he could make himself say it.
"Can we talk?"
He turns his head on the pillow. Looks at me now, the last of the joking gone.
"Yeah." His voice is careful. "Course."
I push up against the headboard and pull the sheet with me, holding it to my chest like cotton has ever protected anyone from anything.
"I can't keep doing this." The words come out steadier than the rest of me. "Not like this, not unless I know."
"Know what?"
"That it's only me." I make myself hold his eyes. "That there's nobody else. I can't do this anymore unless we're exclusive, Asher."
For a moment he just looks at me, and I watch the answer arrive in him, watch his face open around it, and the relief comes so fast and so complete that it makes me lightheaded. Tells me exactly how long I've been holding my breath.
Then the grin starts at one corner of his mouth and spreads, slow and certain.
"I can do that," he says.
The relief crests.
"If you'll be my girlfriend," he adds. "In public."
It breaks.
I sit all the way up.
"You can't be serious."
"Why not?"
"You." I gesture at the whole impossible length of him, at the candlelight, the mask, the cape on the floor, the rose drowning slowly in a water glass. "The most notorious playboy in the league. You want a girlfriend. An actual, in-public, everyone-knows girlfriend."
"What's wrong with that?"
"Nothing. But you can't be serious, Asher."
The grin drops.
Something harder comes in behind it, settling into the lines that bracket his mouth. He sits up too, the sheet sliding off his shoulders, the gold light catching the muscle that jumps once in his jaw.
"I have my moments, you know." The flatness in his voice is new. Hurt. "I know how to take something seriously when it matters."
"Don't be mad." I reach toward him and stop with my hand in the middle, careful and unsure. "But even you have to hear how it sounds. Why can't we just agree to only see each other? Why does it have to be a big announcement?"
"No."
"No? Why not?"
"Because I don't want to."
"Come on, Asher." I shove the hair off my face with the hand that isn't holding the sheet. "What the H-E-double hockey sticks is the difference between—"
"Oh, no." He holds up a flat palm. "No no no. Fix that. Right now."
"What?"
"If you want to be with me, you change that to baseball." He isn't smiling. He's completely serious. "H-E-double baseball bats."
I throw up my free hand.
"See? This. Right here." My voice climbs, and I drag it back down by the collar. "You can't even sit in this conversation for thirty seconds without making a joke! And then you almost blew the whole thing apart at Nora's birthday party."
He folds his arms. "Nobody noticed."
"Nora noticed. Nate noticed. They asked about it afterwards." I'm counting it off on my fingers now, the way my mother used to. "Nora called me the next morning, wanting to know when I'd even had the chance to talk to you."
He's silent for a moment. The candlelight leans. "What'd you tell her?"
"That I didn't remember. That it must’ve been earlier that day." My throat closes around it. "I lied to my sister's face on a phone screen because I couldn't think fast enough. I'm hiding this huge secret from the person who carried me for six months. Because of you."
"Because of me."
"Because of what they'll think." It's out before I can file the edges off it, and I hear it land. "Because of who you are."
Because once people knew, they wouldn't look at me the same way.
He goes still.
The words hang there between us.
Something in him settles, and when he speaks, the volume has dropped all the way down to a place that's worse than any amount of shouting.
"Okay." He nods slowly. "Then here it is. Either we make this real, out loud, where people can see it. Or I'm not making any promises."
The flames stand straight up from the wicks. Neither of us breathes loud enough to bend them.
"Fine," I say.
"Fine."
My pulse goes loud enough to swallow the room.
I do the only thing I can think of to call his bluff.
My hand reaches across the rumpled sheet to the nightstand, already closing around the phone, and the screen lights my face cold and blue against all that gold.
My thumb finds the message that's been sitting at the top since this morning, the name already there, already warm from being thought about in a pew.
Coffee this week?
I hit send.
The little sound it makes is small in the room.
Asher's eyes go to the phone. Then to my face. Then back to the phone.
He moves before I can pull it away, his hand closing over mine—still gently—and takes it from me, turning the screen toward himself. I watch him read it, then watch his face do absolutely nothing, which is how I know I've actually hurt him.
"Declan." He says the name like he's setting it down on a table. Quiet. So much quieter than yelling. "You're texting Declan. Right now. One of my best friends, while you're sitting here in bed with me."
"It's not like that." Heat floods up my neck and into my face. "He checks on me, that's all. He knows what it's like. He lost—"
"I know what he lost." His voice is flat. Final. "I was at the funeral."
The silence after that is long enough that I hear a candle hiss as the wick finds a pocket of wax.
"I can't believe you just did that."
He sets the phone down on the bed. He does it carefully, the way you'd set down something you don't trust yourself to be holding, and the care of it is so much worse than if he'd thrown it.
Then he's up.
He pulls his jeans on standing, drags his shirt over his head, missing the sleeve the first time.
He doesn't look at me. Not while he finds his shoes.
Not while he scoops the cape off the floor and drops it on the chair without a word about it.
Not at the door, where any other man would turn around and deliver a final blow.
He doesn't give me one.
He just goes.
I hear the stairs take his weight. Hear the front door, and the click of it pulled shut behind him—soft, deliberate, no slam—which is somehow the cruelest thing he's done all night. That even leaving me, he was quiet enough not to wake my children.
And then there's nothing.
The candles burn down a little lower on the dresser.
The mask lies on the pillow beside me, half a white face turned up to the ceiling, watching nothing.
The rose stands in its water glass, already letting one petal go, and I think of him picking it out—the rose, the ribbon, the whole foolish theatrics of it.
A man dressing up in masks and capes to come to a woman who only wanted him in the dark, asking me, in the language he knows best, to stop hiding him.
I lie back down on my side.
My phone is face down on the sheet where he set it, an arm's length away, dark.
It buzzes once against the mattress.
Then again.
I don't turn it over. I don't have to. I already know whose three small dots are moving across the screen, and I lie there in the gold light realizing I may have finally pushed too far.
And the more damaging thought:
I don't know if he's coming back after this.