1. Adriana #2
“Hon, I’m dead on my feet.” He talks over me without seeming to notice. “Can we rain check the rest? I’ll make it up to you. Saturday, the whole night, promise.”
He crosses to me and kisses me, a dry kiss, lips to my temple with no affection.
And that’s when it reaches me.
Caught on his skin, his collar, close enough that I can’t pretend it’s anything else. Cigarettes he doesn’t smoke. And threaded under it, a perfume. Rose and jasmine, expensive, feminine, not mine. Mine is sandalwood and vanilla because he told me once he couldn’t stand flowers on a woman.
Whatever I meant to say dies in my throat. The smell has reached in and stopped the words cold. My whole body has gone still around it. He feels the stillness and reads it as the surrender it usually is.
“You’re a saint,” he says, already pulling away. “Dinner was great.”
William didn’t finish dinner.
He goes up, and I stay in my chair looking at the doorway he just walked through. The warmth is still moving where his body passed, and I let the scent sit in my lungs and follow it to the only place it goes.
A man doesn’t carry a stranger’s perfume on his collar at ten at night.
He carries it because he was close enough to a woman, long enough, that she’s still on him hours later.
There’s exactly one reason for that, and I’ve spent a year and a hundred small kindnesses teaching myself not to look at it.
The hurt of it comes first, a hot press behind my sternum that makes my eyes sting. Then, fast behind the hurt, comes the anger, cleaner and easier to hold.
I get up. My hand closes around his wine glass to clear it and my grip locks, the stem trembling, the urge to put it through the wall so strong my teeth grind against it.
I set it down before I do something I’ll regret, and I take his jacket off the chair and carry it up, climbing with the anger sitting square in my chest and my jaw set.
The bedroom door is open a few inches when I reach the top of the stairs. His voice comes through the gap, low and easy, and my steps slow, then halt.
“I know. I know, I’m sorry… I couldn’t get away any sooner. You know how it is here… You’re the only thing I think about all day… Soon. I promise. Just hang on a little longer for me.”
Every word hits me somewhere under my ribs and stays there.
I press my back to the wall beside the door and don’t breathe, because if he hears me he’ll stop, and as long as he keeps talking I get to hear exactly what his phone calls actually are.
The pipes shudder, and the shower starts up across the bedroom. His voice cuts off mid-sentence. A moment later the bathroom door clicks shut.
Only then do I push the door open and go in.
His clothes are already shed across the bed, the shower running behind the closed bathroom door on the far side of the room.
The same water that’s run every night for months, straight up before he’s even set his bag down, before he’ll touch me, before he’ll touch anything in this house. I used to think it was a habit.
Now, I stand in the middle of our bedroom and let the thought I’ve never let myself finish come all the way in. He doesn’t wash off the day when he gets home.
He washes off her.
The anger I carried up the stairs has nowhere to go so it courses through my hands.
I hurl the jacket across the room. It hits the wall with a soft, useless sound and crumples to the floor, and I hate that even my fury is quiet, that I can’t make a single thing in this house as loud as what’s happening inside me.
I drag both hands back through my hair and hold them there, breathing through it.
Then a glint catches at the edge of my eye. Gold, against the dark wood of the floor where the jacket fell, half-spilled from the inner pocket.
His wallet.
I cross to it slowly, the dread climbing with every step, and I crouch and pick it up and it falls open in my hand.
Gold foil behind his cards, three in a row. The first one tore loose so the strip ends ragged where a fourth used to be.
My eyes lift to the bathroom door. To the man humming inside and the truth settles over me completely.
We stopped using these almost the moment we married. Not since we started trying, not since the first appointments, the careful tests, and the cold arithmetic of not yet that turned into maybe never and ended in a silence neither of us would name.
When he stopped reaching for me in the dark, I told myself it was the grief of it, the weight of a child that wouldn’t come. I told myself he stopped wanting because I’d stopped being easy to want.
He didn’t stop, though. That’s the thing the foil makes plain.
He just stopped with me.
The water runs on behind the door.
The perfume, the call, the showers, the foil in my hand. Any one of them I could talk myself out of, the way I’ve talked myself out of everything for a year. But not all four. This stopped being a gut feeling or paranoia.
I cross to the mirror over the dresser without deciding to, the foil still in my fist, and I look at the woman who tried so hard.
Midnight blue she never wanted, sapphires he doesn’t remember giving with a burn on her finger from a dinner no one ate.
The tears come up fast and spill before I can stop them, two lines down a face I spent an hour making glad. I watch them fall in the glass, and I let them.
Then I watch them stop.
Coldness moves in behind my eyes, clear and older than the crying. My fingers close around the strip until the edges bite into my palm. Behind the door, the water keeps running, easy and unbothered, the sound of a man who thinks he got away with it. But I don’t put it back.
A year of swallowing every disappointment whole, and this is the one I can’t get down.
For the first time in longer than I can remember, I’m not going to make myself small enough to let it pass.