Chapter Eight #2
Raff rotates his arms over in my direction, he’s leaning in for the cuddle, and then Vin is there, squeezing in between us and wrapping an arm around his brother. “Alive yet?” he asks Raff with a couple rough, affectionate pats to the cheek. I set my tea aside just in time.
“Ah! Gah!” Raff tries to wrestle free from Vin’s grip but Vin gets him by the calf, charley-horsing him and making Raff scream.
Raff is the consummate little brother, shouting for Vin to stop but then poking him the second he does.
They pinch and wrestle like kids and when they finally tire, I’m grinning.
Raff squiggles down the couch, shoving Vin away from him with his feet.
Which squishes Vin into me and me into the side of the couch.
Vin quickly moves his arm up and out of the way.
But that means he’s surrounding me now, his chest at my cheek and his arm basically around my shoulders.
Here’s the thing about Vin. Nudie mag shamings or not, he’s a very sexually vibrant man. Not to objectify him beyond belief but…he is kind of built for good sex. His body, yes, wide and sturdy and strong. But that’s not even what I mean.
He’s Mr. Take-Care-of-It. If you need the recycling taken out?
He’s on it. The groceries purchased? He’s already at the store.
Have you seen this man change a tire? It’s porn.
And if you, like me, happen to be married to him, and if you, like me, happen to get horny on a Saturday morning, and if you, like me, happen to look at him in a certain way, then he drops the newspaper and picks you up and makes the neighbors regret moving to this building, you lucky bitch.
Not that that’s on the menu anymore. But I can feel his chest hair under his T-shirt and his deodorant is bringing me back to some very sweaty times and my memories are no one’s business but my own.
“Sorry,” he mutters, and tries to switch his weight.
Against my will, I tangle my fingers in his shirt, keeping him from moving away from me.
He doesn’t breathe. His eyes are painting lines on my face.
Does she want me against her? I can feel him thinking. Yes, you idiot, I feel like shouting back.
The lease bares its teeth at me from the fridge, hidden underneath the grocery list.
I use my grip on his shirt to rearrange my own weight, a little farther from him, and then unhand him.
Vin’s eyes are still reading me, even though my face is turned away now.
“You two are freaks of nature,” Raff observes from his end of the couch. “You’ve been married for eight years. How can the sexual tension still be this strong? Hey, let’s watch that Arnold Schwarzenegger movie where he’s a cop.”
“That’s the description of all Arnold Schwarzenegger movies,” Vin says, gruffly, finally taking his eyes off me.
“You two knock yourselves out,” I say. “I’m headed to bed.”
I’m in a lazily colorful blur of a dream when I hear my bedroom door open.
“Roz?” Vin whispers. “You awake?”
“Sort of,” I whisper back, rolling over with a groan.
“Can I come in?”
I push myself up to a sit and rub my eyes. “Yeah.”
He quietly closes the door behind him and comes to stand at the edge of the bed, hands in the pockets of his sweats. “Raff is sleeping over.” He clears his throat. “He’s in the guest room.”
Ah. Meaning he’s sleeping in the bed where Vin has slept ever since Raff moved out. Meaning Vin doesn’t have a bed to sleep in tonight. Meaning if I want to keep this discord a secret for any longer, then Vin has to sleep in here.
“Okay,” I say, answering the question he didn’t ask out loud and scooching over to the far side of the bed. Which, actually, is Vin’s side of the bed normally, so when he pulls back the covers and slides in on my side, it makes everything even more disorienting.
I realize, at the last second, that since he didn’t get in on his side, the bed didn’t make its signature Vin squeak. I resist the urge to ask for a do-over.
His breaths are long and even but they aren’t his sleep breaths.
“Maybe we should just tell him,” I say.
Vin is quiet for a few breaths. “I don’t like saying it out loud.”
Which plucks a string inside me. I feel it twang down to my fingertips. That is different than saying he doesn’t want to talk about it.
Not wanting to say it out loud makes it sound like he wishes it weren’t true.
I bury half my face in the pillow and hope he can’t make out my next words. “I haven’t told anyone yet, either.”
He sits up, and so do I, and we’re face-to-face, just two feet between us. I wish the lights were on, so I could see his face. But then I remember that it doesn’t matter anyways because of the beard.
“If you were gonna tell someone…” He clears his throat. “What would you say?”
“Oh. Um…” I consider all the different facets of the truth. Eventually, I go with “That you signed a lease. And you’re moving out.”
“I haven’t, though.”
“Well, yeah. The lease doesn’t start until August fifteenth. I’m not going to make you find a place to crash until then.”
“No. Not that I haven’t moved out. I—I mean that I haven’t—” He cuts off in frustration, his eyes flitting to me and then away. “I can’t have this conversation with you sitting there like that.”
“Like what?” I look down at myself. I’m in a baggy sleep T-shirt that has Christmas trees on it because we’re not Rockefellers and I don’t have enough money or closet space to keep my seasonal pajamas limited to their season.
“Like, come to bed, Vin.”
I’m gobsmacked. “This says come to bed to you? What, you have a Mrs. Claus kink?”
“Roz, you look like you. Like the you I’ve been married to and sleeping with for eight years.
Yes, this says come to bed to me. Because when you’ve got those sleepy eyes and you’re all…
in blankets and you’re talking to me in the middle of the night, usually it’s a come to bed situation and it’s—” He cuts off, searching for the right word.
“Distracting?”
He lets out a gust of air that’s supposed to sound like a laugh.
“Sure. Distracting.” He’s frustrated and pushing his tongue into the side of his cheek and glaring at the wall and facing half away from me and I would put a million dollars on red 27 right now that this conversation is completely over.
And then he flushes that bet down the toilet. “Confusing, really.” He clears his throat. “Is what I meant to say. Because right now you look like the Roz I’ve always been allowed to…touch. But…I’m not…allowed anymore. And I know that. But even so, it’s…hard for me.”
I have never ever heard Vin be so articulate about how he’s feeling in a given moment. Ever. And the fact that he’s saying these words at all is almost as impactful as the words themselves.
I say my words the moment I think them. “Are you?…Not allowed?”
Like, Says who?
His eyes are on mine. There’s no green in the dark, only shadows. “I thought…” he says. “I thought you…”
But he can’t come up with any more words. His breaths are fast and spilling out between us. I’m suddenly understanding exactly what he meant by a come to bed moment. Because having Vin look at me like that, sitting in the dark, while I have no pants on—
He puts one set of knuckles on the bed between us and leans in toward me, balancing his weight. I think he’s going to go in for a kiss but then his free hand comes up and just rests on my cheek. His eyes close for a moment as his thumb waves hello to the soft skin under my eye.
I fist my hands in his T-shirt the way I did on the couch earlier. Yes, you idiot, written in every tremble of my fists. His nose touches mine and he’s tipping me back, my head into the pillow and his body over mine.
Our lungs are racing each other, pressing our chests together. His hand, at the back of my head, tightens in my hair.
Blue tile flashes in my head. A wall of sound. Vin still and heavy atop me. Blood when I touch his back.
“No!” I gasp, but even before I gasp it, he was already scrambling up and off me.
His eyes are pinned to the neck of my shirt, which has slipped off one shoulder, exposing the thin scar down my collarbone. The same scar that extends the rest of the way, fourteen inches, down his back.
He’s got one hand covering his mouth and his eyes are a little wild, he’s breathing hard, and not in the delicious way he was thirty seconds ago. “Jesus.” He’s tearing his eyes from mine and turning away, giving me his back. His feet on the ground and his elbows to his knees. The picture of defeat.
It’s not a mystery, really, why we stopped sleeping together after the accident.
First of all, because we were literally injured and needed a lot of time to heal.
Me, a sprained shoulder from where I fell and the laceration on my collarbone, four inches long.
And Vin’s down his back, fourteen inches long.
From the same section of windowpane that the truck crashed through.
Vin’s injuries were, obviously, worse. He also scraped a lot of the skin off the back of his right hand.
And then, of course, there was taking care of Raff.
We were battered people. There was the medical stuff, and the legal stuff associated with the accident. We were lucky if we slept a few hours in a row. I challenge literally anyone in the world to feel sexy under those circumstances. That was just…not what our marriage was about during that time.
This is the first time, since the accident, that Vin has laid me down in a bed, with intention. And if this were pre-accident, I’d already be biting a pillow and trying not to wake up Raff.
Instead, Vin sits, facing away from me and looking like he’s never felt more worthless in his life.
When I touch his back—the side without the scar—he’s sweaty. His muscles tighten under my hand. I’m not sure I’m welcome. “Don’t leave,” I whisper, and he turns his head enough to give me his profile.
“Let’s just try to sleep,” I say, tugging a tiny bit at his shirt. “If you get up right now…I feel like it’ll all, just, break.”
His brow furrows. “Isn’t it already broken?”
But still, he lies down next to me.