Chapter 16 – Cora #2
I’m almost asleep when the stroking on my arch turns into a tickle. I shriek, startling back awake.
“What was that?”
“No sleeping. Not until you see Farhadi. You might have a concussion.”
“You could have just said my name.”
And that’s what he does the entire ride home. He rubs my feet, and every so often, when my head dips, he softly calls, “Cora. Cora.”
And every time, when I open my eyes again, he’s watching me. Like he’s afraid I might slip away in front of his eyes.
Like I didn’t already.
Adrian insists on carrying me up the stairs like a bride. He leaves both of my shoes in the car. The house is silent and dark, and his face is stone again.
When we get to the nursery, he doesn’t stop.
“The girls,” I protest. “Winnie needs to be fed.”
He stops, frowns, and then after a moment, strides back down the hall, setting me down by their door. “Just for a feed,” he says. “You’re coming to our bed tonight. You’re staying awake until Farhadi gets here.”
I don’t argue. My neck is aching now. I’m well aware that I crashed his car into a concrete column a few hours ago. I wouldn’t leave me with children unsupervised, either.
I quietly turn the knob and tiptoe in. Kendra crashes in a nearby guest room when she stays over to babysit, so there’s no one in the daybed.
For once, Winnie is sleeping with her arms by her side.
Her little guppy mouth is open, a pool of drool on the mattress underneath.
I pad over to the dresser, get a burp cloth, and dab up the wet spot as best I can.
I momentarily debate leaving the cloth to cover the wet spot, but the safety monitor in my head immediately vetoes the idea. The safe sleep rule is a bare crib. No loose bedding.
I very gently pat the dribble at the corner of her mouth, about to drip and undo my efforts, and kiss her soft cheek.
She’s a much better sleeper than Pearl was at her age.
Pearl slept like a cat, her eyes popping open at any noise, and if she sensed boob incoming, she was immediately a hundred percent awake.
Winnie won’t stay awake if you rouse her, not even for a feed, but my boobs are aching pretty badly, so I take a seat in my rocker and pump.
Adrian stands the whole time with his back to me, perusing the girls’ bookshelf, reshelving the books that he takes out to examine. I bet he’s alphabetizing them.
Once I’ve stored the milk in the fridge, I tread softly into Pearl’s room.
She’s clutching a stuffed elephant by the tail, and her nightgown has worked its way up to her armpits.
There is no fixing that without waking her up.
I cover her with the sheet she’s kicked down to the foot of the bed.
She grumbles, itches the tip of her nose with the palm of her hand, and curls onto her side. I quietly withdraw.
My gut hollows as I follow Adrian obediently out of the nursery and down the hall. I was so weak-minded today, so unforgivably reckless. I took my eye off the ball. My girls are so little. They need me. I can’t afford to get into trouble. I have to fight harder.
I’ve never figured out how to stop an episode once it starts. It’s like the cord between the part of my brain that proposes ideas and the part that approves or disapproves is stretched so thin it breaks. There’s no time between an impulse and the execution, no possibility to think twice.
I’ve never hurt anyone, though. Anyone else.
But what if Adrian decides I need serious help? Winnie might not miss me, but Pearl would. No matter what anyone told her, she’d think it was her fault, that she wasn’t worth staying around for. I can’t let her think that. She and Winnie are the reasons God has kept me alive this long.
Adrian opens the door to our bedroom and gestures me inside. My anxiety rises, squeezing my throat.
I walk ahead, stopping in the middle of the room. Nothing’s changed, but it doesn’t feel like mine anymore. Maybe because his smell has taken over, the scent of his body and fancy shampoo and three deodorants. I can’t help breathing deep even though it makes my heart hurt.
He closes the door but doesn’t come much farther. I turn to face him.
He tugs at his tie. “Do you want the first shower?”
The melting and drying snow has mussed his hair, and coupled with his five o’clock shadow and the bruises under his eyes, he looks less like a ruthless businessman and more like a mere man, exhausted at the end of a long day, wary of his crazy wife and past ready for bed.
A stirring low in my belly twines with my spiking anxiety. I scrunch my bare toes, squeezing the rug.
I bet he’d wake right up if I were naked.
I bet he’d think twice about sending me away if he thought he could get what he wants back.
The stirring in my belly becomes an ache between my legs.
I bet I’d sleep better beside him if I could pretend for a little while that he’s not an enemy.
An actress in a movie would turn her back, swoop her hair off her neck, and ask her husband to help undo her zipper. I do Gomukhasana arms from yoga class, unzip myself, and let the dress fall to my ankles.
Adrian draws his slumped shoulders back. “Cora?”
I’m wearing a plain white nursing bra and panties. I sure as hell didn’t plan this, so I’ve got nude nursing pads shoved in the cups, and I haven’t trimmed since—well, not for a while.
I’d totally lose courage except there’s a huge tent in Adrian’s pants, and his breath is speeding up, his chest rising and falling like it does when he pulls up at the dock after sculling on the river.
There isn’t much light in the room, only the bedside lamp and the TV that he left on CNBC, muted.
I step out of my puddled dress and start plucking bobby pins from my hair.
“Here,” he rumbles, stalking forward. He guides my hands back to my sides. “I’ve got it.”
He frowns in concentration as his fingers search for pins, carefully pressing my hair to my scalp before he slides them free so it doesn’t hurt.
He’s done this for me many times before, but usually, I’m sitting at my vanity or standing at the sink, and his eye will catch mine in the mirror, and once he’s done, he’ll ease down my bra or negligee and tease my nipples as we both watch.
Usually, I marvel at how handsome he is, delight in how his dark hair contrasts with my blonde, how his rough cheek scratches my soft skin when he bends forward to kiss the crook of my neck.
Now, my chest aches to look at him, a feeling somewhere between longing and loss, hunger and despair. He’s right here, and I want him back.
“Why’d you have to do it?” I murmur as I undo his tie the rest of the way and slip his shirt buttons open, one by one.
“Don’t think about it,” he murmurs back, dropping the pins in his pocket. “That’s the past.”
“How do you stop thinking about the past?”
He kisses me for an answer, like he can make me forget. I can almost taste his longing, his hunger. His desperation.
He devours me as he walks me backward to the bed. My heart bangs and blood rushes through my veins, any reluctance dissolving under the onslaught of his familiar feel. I don’t have to stand on principle or hold a line or punish him anymore. Thank God, if I just let it, my body will betray me.
I tug his shirt free from his pants and drag it off his shoulders. His skin burns under my fingers. His breath is fast and warm in my mouth.
I missed him. Oh, lord, I missed him. More than any of the things I’ve ever had to leave behind.
He fumbles with the clasp of my bra, his hands shaking. The back of my thighs hit the bed. I shove his hands away and unhook the bra myself, tossing it to the floor along with the pads. He unbuckles his belt and jerks it from the loops. A heavy pulse slugs away between my legs.
I want him inside me, and I can’t look at him hard enough.
The veins that run down his hard biceps and forearms. The ridges of his abs.
The sparse dark hair peeking above his waistband.
I love his body. I know every inch of it.
The small splotchy birthmark on his left pec.
His taut, winking belly button. The mole in the crease of his right elbow.
The expression on his face when he’s lost in the sex, the awed, greedy, dreamy look that makes him look like a guy my age, still relatively new to this, still astonished at his good luck.
He grabs my panties, tugging them down as I kick my legs free, and we get in each other’s way as we both unbutton his pants and push them down, boxers and all. I knock his chin with my forehead.
“Sorry,” he mumbles, even though it was my fault, as he hauls me toward the headboard, stretching my arms over my head, cuffing both my wrists with one hand, laying his weight on top of me and wedging a knee between my thighs.
He slows his kisses to tug my top lip and then the bottom, his hips working, his hard cock poking my belly. This is how we fuck, him on top, kissing and sucking and stroking until I’m squirming.
Everything is happening like it’s supposed to—my pussy soaks the wiry hair on his thigh, and my nipples ache, milk beading on the tips, the need pulsing between my legs growing stronger—but I don’t want this, not like this, not the same as before when this was all a lie.
Before he lounged on a sofa while some woman he couldn’t care less about jacked herself up and down his dick like it was her job, idly breaking my heart and ruining our lives because he either didn’t know what he really wanted or what he had or both.
What a privilege it is to be loved and have the choice of whether to fuck it up irreparably or not. I’ve never once in my life been in a position to shit on someone’s love, to be desperately wanted and to casually throw it away.
A wave of fury crashes through me. He doesn’t just get to say it’s the past and act like nothing’s changed.
I bite down on the lip kissing me and shove his chest with all my strength.