19. Isaac
— ? —
Isaac
I came expecting to comfort her.
She’s had a hell of a day - the baby shower, Hazel’s ambush, the champagne incident that’s probably already all over every group chat in town. The whole drive over, I rehearse it at red lights. Tea. A blanket. Let her cry if she needs to cry. Say the right, gentle, supportive things.
Instead, she pulls me through the door before I can even say hello.
“Chantal-”
She kisses me hard enough to make my head spin.
“Hi,” I manage, when she finally lets me breathe. “I had a whole plan. There was going to be tea. There was a speech. I practiced it at three separate red lights.”
“I don’t want tea.”
“It was a very comforting speech-”
“Isaac.” Her hands are already working at my shirt buttons. “I want to feel powerful. I want to feel wanted. I want to feel good.”
“You’ve had a hell of a day-”
“I know. That’s why I need this.”
“Are you sure? Because-”
“Stop.” She pulls back just enough to meet my eyes.
Her expression is fierce. Certain. “Stop being careful. Stop treating me like I’m fragile.
I’m not fragile. I’m pregnant, and exhausted, and I just publicly humiliated my ex-husband’s mistress by proving she faked a pregnancy, and right now the only thing I want is you. Are you going to give me that or not?”
I’ve never seen her like this.
Demanding. Commanding. Taking exactly what she wants.
She’s running on adrenaline and champagne fumes. She buried her best friend’s lie in front of everyone three hours ago. This might be grief wearing a party dress-
“I can see you doing the noble math,” she says, yanking my belt loose. “Stop it. I know exactly what I’m doing.”
And then, right on schedule, in Bernice’s voice - because it was Bernice’s voice, across a conference table, with a legal pad in front of her:
Eleven weeks. The decree isn’t signed for eleven more weeks. Until a judge puts a pen down, that woman is legally still his wife, and every single thing you do in that house is discoverable.
Caroline is out there tonight promising to swear to whatever it takes. She’s been inventing this exact night for a month. Do this and you hand it to her, true, notarized, gift-wrapped. You spend five years being the one who doesn’t take, and you take on the one night it can cost her the baby.
Eleven weeks. Eleven weeks and it’s free.
I have never wanted anything the way I want to be talked out of this.
“You’re doing it again.” Her hands stop on my belt. She’s close enough that I can feel her breath. “The noble math.”
“It’s not noble math.” My voice comes out wrecked. “It’s eleven weeks. That’s all it is. Eleven weeks and there’s nothing for them to find.”
“And what happens in eleven weeks that isn’t happening right now?”
“You get to keep her without a fight-”
“I’m going to keep her with a fight. That’s the whole point.
That’s been the point since the elephants.
” She takes my face in both hands and makes me look at her.
“They’re going to say it either way, Isaac.
They said it before it was true. Hazel said it before I’d ever touched you.
So we can wait eleven weeks and let them be right about a woman who did nothing, or-”
“Or.”
“Or I stop being reasonable.” Her thumbs move along my jaw. “I’ve been reasonable for four years. Reasonable is what got me a nursery full of elephants.”
Eleven weeks, Bernice says, one last time, from very far away.
Bill me, I tell her.
“I need you to stop talking,” Chantal says, “and start touching me.”
The first time was tender. Careful. I was terrified of hurting her, terrified of pushing too hard, terrified of ruining something I’d waited five years for. Tonight, she doesn’t want tender.
She shoves my shirt off my shoulders before we even make it to the bedroom, the fabric tearing slightly under her grip. I yank her dress over her head in the hallway, the sound of the zipper screaming in the quiet house.
By the time we hit the mattress we’re both half-naked and past negotiating.
The decree isn’t signed. Caroline is out there somewhere promising to swear to whatever it takes, and every mark she’s about to leave on my shoulders is a deposition waiting to happen.
Her teeth graze my collarbone, biting down hard enough to draw a hiss from my lungs, and I decide the deposition can have me.
“Harder,” she gasps when I try to slow the pace.
So I stop being gentle.
I get my hands under her and move her where I want her - not down, never down, not with eight and a half months of our girl between us - but back against the pillows, propped and open and reachable, and the noise she makes when she understands what I’m doing is going to live in my head until I die.
“That’s - yes. There-”
I put a pillow under her hip because I’m still me, and she laughs, breathless and furious about it. “I said stop being careful.”
“I’m not being careful.” I get my mouth on the inside of her knee. “I’m being thorough. There’s a difference and you’re about to learn it.”
Then I stop talking.
She’s wet before I ever touch her - slick and hot and already gone, her hips chasing my mouth the second I make contact.
I work her with my tongue, flat and hard and relentless, no finesse in it at all because finesse is not what she asked for.
She asked to feel powerful. So I let her have me: her fist in my hair steering me, her heel digging into my back, her voice giving orders in fragments - there, don’t stop, God, Isaac, don’t you dare stop - and I obey every one of them like a man taking dictation.
I slide two fingers into her and curl them, and she comes apart with a shout that the neighbors are absolutely going to have questions about.
I don’t stop. I take her through it and straight into the next one, and she’s swearing at me now, one hand braced on the headboard and the other still fisted in my hair, and I have never in my life been so happy to be somebody’s instrument.
“Isaac-” Her voice is shredded. “Enough. Enough. I want-”
“Tell me.”
“I want to be on top of you.”
Every thought I have ever had exits my skull at once.
I lie back. I don’t help. She doesn’t want help - she wants to do it - so I put my hands flat on the mattress and make myself into furniture and let her climb over me at her own speed, one knee at a time, the bump riding heavy and warm and entirely unignorable between us.
She takes me in her hand and lowers herself, slow, working it, and the sound that comes out of me isn’t a word in any language.
“Oh,” she breathes.
“Chantal-”
“Shh.” Her palms flatten on my chest. “I’m busy.”
And then she rides me.
Not gently. Not carefully. She sets a pace that has nothing to do with what her body can supposedly do at thirty-eight weeks and everything to do with what she has decided it will do tonight, one hand splayed on my sternum for leverage, the other cradling the underside of her belly like she’s holding our daughter steady while she takes what she’s owed.
Her head goes back. Her throat goes bare.
She is not thinking about a single person in this town.
The woman who detonated a dinner party. The woman who stared down Margaret Clyborne. The woman who buried Hazel’s lie in front of the entire shower and then drove home and put on lipstick.
She’s using me exactly the way she wants to use me, and I have never been more grateful for anything.
My hands find her hips. Not to steer - just to hold on. Just to be part of it.
“Say it again,” she demands, breathless, rocking down onto me. “What you said before.”
“You’re mine.” My voice comes out ruined. “Mine.”
“Louder.”
“Mine.”
“Again - don’t stop saying it-”
“You’re mine. Not his. Not anyone’s.” I get one hand up, spread it over the taut curve of her belly, over our girl, over all of it. “Both of you. Mine.”
That’s what does it.
She breaks apart above me, clenching around me in waves, saying my name like it’s the only word she’s got left, and I hold her through every second of it - one hand on her hip, one hand on our daughter - and watch a woman who spent four years being reasonable finally, finally take something.
When she can breathe again, she leans down as far as she can, which isn’t far, and her hair falls around us anyway.
“Your turn,” she whispers.
“Don’t move.”
“Isaac-”
“I mean it. Stay right there. Stay exactly there.” My hips come up to meet her, and she gasps, and I do it again, and again, and the headboard finally starts keeping the rhythm my landlord is going to have opinions about. “Look down at me.”
She does. Her eyes find mine, blown wide and shining, and she is above me and around me and in charge of every single thing that happens in this room.
“Say it,” I tell her.
“Yours.”
The word breaks something loose in my chest. Five years of holding still, and I let go of all of it at once, both hands locked on her hips, spilling into her while she watches me come apart underneath her.
Afterward she eases down off me, careful of herself for the first time all night, and I catch her and bring her the rest of the way, and she settles against my side with her palm flat over my heart - holding me down, keeping me exactly where she put me.
***
After.
We lie in a pile of tangled limbs and sweat-damp sheets, and for a long time neither of us says anything at all.
“The neighbors,” she says eventually, staring at the ceiling.
“Are getting a very thorough education.”
“Mrs. Kowalski waters her begonias at seven every morning. I’m never going to be able to look at her again.”
“You publicly dismantled a fake pregnancy today, and this is what embarrasses you?”
“That was justice. This was-” she waves a hand vaguely at the wreckage of the bed “-enthusiasm.”
“I’m framing that. ‘Enthusiasm.’”
She laughs into my shoulder, and then goes quiet, and I feel the day catching up with her in the way her breathing changes.
The day is catching up with her. I can feel it arriving.
“I meant what I wrote,” I say quietly. “In the letter. I want to be part of this. Whatever you’ll let me be.”