Chapter 4
CHAPTER 4
ELLIS
Her letter came as I was walking through the hotel lobby, duffel bag in hand, headed on my way home for a weeklong break. I’d packed all my things in case the fire miraculously gets contained in the meantime, and signed up with the extended stay to have my mail forwarded in case anything else comes while I’m gone. I almost didn’t open her letter right away when I slid into my truck, knowing I couldn’t write back immediately. Now that I’m driving and need to keep my eyes on the road, I wish I hadn’t.
I feel… fuck, I feel devastated. Like I ripped into a freshly healed scar. And electrified, like my whole system endured a shock. This was a terrible idea, stealing this connection this way. I feel a little sick.
She is a stranger to me; it’s easier to justify this in part because this is like meeting her all over again. But she’s also not. When she referred to her brother, I knew she actually meant mine. And Silas is who I’ll call as soon as I calm down so I can get the details on this Martha-and-Walter development she mentioned, too.
Dammit, I have to pull over and read through it again.
Traveling was something we dreamed about when we were younger, but in the same way that you talk about “when I win the lottery, I’ll do this or this,” in that it still felt unattainable. It kills me to think she might have set that aside for other dreams.
Dreams that ran just as dry, if they were the ones to do with happily ever after and a house filled with kids.
But to say she can’t pinpoint where it went wrong? I know exactly when it did, exactly how many months of negative tests there were: thirty-six. I know the very date one came back positive and can remember how happy she looked and the salty taste of one of her joyful tears on my lips. I know the exact day and time she almost died on a hospital table when it turned out to be ectopic, and I can remember the color of the dark circles under her eyes for months after with disturbing clarity. I remember how it felt when I told her I didn’t want to try anymore. I thought the vasectomy would eliminate it from our life altogether, but things only got worse, and the weight of her resentment became a living, breathing thing. And then her mom got sick and the distance between us grew, and fuck , I couldn’t weather it. I thought I could take her anger enough for us both, but she’d barely look at me, she’d barely speak to me. She’d pull my body into hers night after night, and I’d try to find her and find us time and time again, but it was like we were both ghosts. I could feel us both walking on emotional eggshells every day, and by the time she said she wanted out, I was so goddamn tired that I did, too.
My phone rings through the truck speakers, and I jump in my seat, then clear my throat before I hit Answer for Silas.
“Hello?”
“I’m impressed,” he says. “You realize it’s been, like, over two weeks and you haven’t called me once?”
I hope he can hear my eye roll. “You told me to stop hovering, Si.”
“And you listened ,” he says. It’s almost as if he’s miffed about it.
“How’s it going?” I ask. “You doing all the scar therapy they told you to?” He’s supposed to do specific movements so that the places where his skin is mangled won’t heal too tight and become restrictive.
“Yeah, yeah. Been taking myself on little errands and wiping my own ass and everything like a big boy, too. What the hell have you been up to? Micah says he hasn’t heard from you either, and Sage is too preoccupied right now to notice either way.”
Telling him I jetted off to work feels like admitting to my abysmal coping skills. “Just… getting caught up on things.”
His silence is weighted. “You’re definitely lying.”
“I’m not.” Not technically, anyway.
“You are, but go on and keep your secrets. Wanna get a beer?”
“Sure, Frodo. Tomorrow. Noon?”
“Sounds good.” And then he hangs up without a goodbye.
The abrupt conversation has successfully diverted my thought spiral into something less turbulent, so I let myself ease back into it and onto the highway again.
I hate remembering how we fucked such a good thing up, but I think I’ve spent too much energy on putting up mental and emotional boundaries to avoid it all, and even though it somehow feels fresh and tender again, I find myself wanting to examine it closer. We somehow made it through having a kid at seventeen and eighteen and grew that love into something so real I know nothing else could ever come close, and yet it still fell apart, and I want to know why, and why I still miss her so much.
Maybe she’s right and it’s better to leave that pain in the past, but… I’ve certainly been doing my best to do just that for the last few years, and that hasn’t changed a damn thing.
I also hate what her merely writing the word sex on a piece of paper does to me. The way my mind immediately goes to the last time I had my hands full of her. I don’t know if it’s because we knew each other in that way so early in life, if it’s because we discovered that brand of pleasure and honesty together, but sex with Wren was always more. Just more . Likely because being with her so long meant that there was naturally more of it, but I think in the long term, some of the sex became functional. Efficient. Emotionally complicated during the infertility years. More complicated after the ectopic and the vasectomy.
Still, I knew what worked for her and she for me, and it was great and passionate and everything it should’ve been, but then there were those times, too. The ones that stand out in between the rest, still haunting me in a way that makes my bones go hot with a crude sort of lust.
It’s as if my very few and fleeting romances with women in the last four years may as well have been experienced in black and white—something full of static, where even these distant thoughts of Wren live in color. In every single one of my senses, in sound and in taste, too. I try to blink away the memories that crest, that final time when I think we both knew it was coming to an end. We were rarely touching at that point, and I wonder if it’s because we thought we could trick ourselves into forgetting, like maybe that’d make it easier to leave. Part of me thinks that on some base level, we knew it was the last time—which seems like a ridiculous thought, but… fuck, the memory overtakes me, and I give myself over to the swell of it.
It was hours after her mom’s birthday party, long past when everyone else had gone home. Sage had taken Sam for the rest of the weekend, with plans for some sort of distraction, leaving Wren and me alone in our house.
I hadn’t wanted her to throw anything in the first place. It had been over six months since her emergency surgery, but I didn’t think she’d slowed down for six minutes. She’d thrown herself into taking care of her mom. Drove her to appointments and worked extra at the bakery even while she was still supposed to be recovering. And now she was throwing a party with fifty people when it felt like she couldn’t stand to be alone with me.
“What if it’s her last one, Ellis?” she’d spat when I suggested we do something more low-key. I dropped it after that. Savvy’s disease was a mystery at the time, and there was no reply that I could offer that felt right.
The party was a success and her mom had a great day, because Wren is limitless when it comes to her people. And now, alone in our house together, there was nothing else to clean or put away, but she still wouldn’t come to bed. I tried to wait quietly for her on the couch, then in the kitchen, where my presence only seemed to aggravate her more, which grated at my nerves right back and had me silently following her every move. It was after 2:00 A.M. , but apparently, she wanted to clear out the fridge, so I followed suit. She started reorganizing the Tupperware drawer, so I stood by and threw away anything that was missing a lid. I could feel her annoyance ratcheting up, hear her growling under her breath and could practically taste her angry tears in the air, but I couldn’t just leave her alone. I wanted her to go to bed, I wanted to rip down whatever walls we’d erected between us. I wanted to get to her however I could again and I wanted her to let me take care of her and I wanted her mom to be okay and for us to be happy. And I wanted her to stop fucking cleaning.
She jerked a wineglass off the counter that she’d already scrubbed clean and started going at it again, too hard.
“Wren,” I tried to warn, but my voice was stuck in my throat, too quiet. A small cry cracked out of her when the glass broke and sliced into her palm.
I reached around her and grabbed her wrist, instinctively bringing it to my face to check for shards. When she tried to wrench it away, something desperate and possessed roared through me, and I— god , I feel like some sort of brute looking back. I distantly hear my curse ricochet around the cab of my truck, but I’m still stuck in the memory. I gripped her slender wrist tighter and brought her palm to my mouth and angrily licked the blood from it.
Her eyes went as black as her sundress, and she crushed her lips to mine, biting, tongue slipping against my teeth. I wanted to devour every short, keening gasp she made, needed to steal every tiny sob before it could leave her lips. She pressed her full chest into mine, nipples tight enough to feel through all our clothes. Her hands came up my shirt and she raked her nails down my back so hard I hissed. I could feel where her palm still bled and I hoped she drew some from me, too, some animalistic part of me hoping they’d mix and bind her back to me somehow. I squeezed and molded her ass in my hands, tilting and dragging her against me. I was begging and pleading with my body and I didn’t know what for. She ripped open my shirt, and buttons scattered across the tile; I frantically untied her apron at the same time she shoved down my pants, and then I really was begging, I realized. My chanted please , over and over again meeting her yes , over and over again. Until she spun around and bent herself over our table, panties tangled around one of her ankles, her dress rucked up to her waist.
“Now,” she sobbed out, her eyes clenching shut. Her trembling hands made fists against the grain.
It felt primitive, taking her like this, not having her eyes or her hands on me. I wanted her bound to me again. I gathered her wrists against her lower back and tied them together in her apron strings, like maybe I’d tie her to me, too. And fuck, she moaned . The sound of it… I spot the goose bumps rising on my forearms, I feel that sound heat, then melt, then harden in my core even now. She squeezed her legs together, and when they came back apart, she was so slick it glistened against her thighs in the moonlight. I should have fallen to my knees and tasted her one last time. My mouth waters at the thought of it. I should have told her how perfect she was, how beautiful she was, flushed and wet and swollen pink with need.
Instead, I nudged her thighs farther apart, wet myself against her before I disappeared into her in one long thrust, like I might get to the very heart of her as quickly as I could. Her breaths came in strangled pants. I’m not sure I could breathe at all. She was hot and snug and holding me so fucking tight, and I was literally holding her from the inside and still she felt too far. Everything dissolved into desperation and my need was punching into my spine too quickly, my hips snapping against her. I slowed when I got close, murmuring a string of obscenities at the sight of her, from the fan of her wild hair and her wrists tied and her spine bowing as she started to fuck herself back against me when I stilled. I peeled my hands from her hips and used one to help leverage her from where she was bound, curled the other around to tend to her clit, letting my rough fingers split and slide against the softest petals of her. I wanted to sink my teeth into her shoulder and make it last. I wanted it to never end, my hazy brain trying to invent a thousand ways to do only this forever. Until I felt the first fluttering clench of her, that battering pulse squeezing me in a rhythm I couldn’t outpace and I was losing myself in her before I could stop. I wish I’d said her name, I wish I’d told her what she did to me, all my thoughts and everything I wanted to do to her, how sweet and good she’d been. I wish I’d said every good and bad thing in my head. But then my vision went white with bliss, and I was coming and going at the same time and I was being shattered, crushed into dust. I was still hard when I started to slip myself out of her, then growled like some disturbed beast when I canted my hips and could feel my cum inside. I pulled her up to me by her wrists when I slid out all the way, the tops of her thick thighs still pressing against the edge of the table as her head tipped back against my heart. I dove for her neck at the same time I pushed two fingers into her, felt her tight groan crawl up her throat and vibrate on my lips when we heard the indecent sound of it. Her legs were shaking so violently I knew that my body was the only thing anchoring her there and keeping her upright. My cock was painfully hard all over again, trapped between us beside her tied hands. Jesus, she was soaked with us. I slid my fingers out of her and left a trail around her smooth hip before I swiped and circled messily at her from the front, my hand hidden behind her apron. Her knees buckled, and I ground harder into her to keep her standing.
“I can’t, I can’t!” she cried out, biting off a curse. I buried my nose in her honey-scented hair and swiped faster.
“Yes, you can. You need it. I need it. Take it, Wren.”
A horn blares as a car speeds around me, and I look down and realize I’m going 25 mph on the freeway. I’m wheezing and throbbing in my jeans, and I have to pull over again. I barely get myself in hand before I’m coming in rough spurts and gasping, sweat dripping down my temples.
I flip off the heater and quickly start to clean up my mess, awash in something equal parts shame and panic. I let out a mildly hysterical sound when I look at the clock and see that I’ve only been driving an hour, if that. It took me less than sixty minutes to open up whatever this Pandora’s box in my brain is and for memories and longing to come spiraling free.
Unfortunately for me, I’ve got a seventeen-hour drive.
Miles and miles of serpentine road, one long sunset and a whole damn sunrise, plus a lifetime’s worth of memories.
And I spend every second of it coming to accept that I’m still in love with my wife.