CHAPTER 38
In the Back Seat
The car smelled faintly of leather, rain, and Elise's perfume.
Daniel sat beside her in the dark, their hands linked on the seat between them. The driver kept his eyes forward. The partition was not raised, but the hush inside the car felt private anyway, carved out by exhaustion and adrenaline and the steady hiss of tires on wet pavement.
For three blocks, neither of them said anything.
Daniel watched the city smear past the window. The night replayed in fragments: burgundy fabric under chandeliers, Marcus offering his hand, Elise checking for him from the dance floor, a thumb grazing a wedding ring, his own voice telling her she was allowed to enjoy being desired.
He did not know how to become a man who had said those things.
Then Elise leaned against him, and his body knew before his mind did. He put his arm around her.
'I feel strange,' she said.
'Bad strange?'
She shook her head against his shoulder. 'No. Open strange.'
He understood too well. 'Like we left a door unlocked somewhere.'
'Yes.' A pause. 'Did we?'
Daniel looked down at their hands. Her ring rested against his knuckle. 'Maybe. But not by accident.'
She turned her face toward him. Even in the dim light from passing traffic, he could see the tenderness and the worry together.
'Are you angry?' she asked.
'No.'
'Are you hurt?'
He thought before answering. That felt important. 'A little. But not because you did something wrong. Because being honest scraped places that were already bruised.'
Elise absorbed that quietly. 'I felt that too.'
'When?'
'When he held my hand and I liked it.' She said it softly, but without retreat. 'I thought liking it would make me feel guilty. It did, a little. But mostly it made me afraid you would see pleasure on my face and hate me for it.'
Daniel's arm tightened around her. 'I did see it.'
'I know.'
'I did not hate you.'
She closed her eyes.
'I hated that I was afraid,' he continued. 'I hated that some part of me wanted to turn your pleasure into evidence against me. But then you kept looking for me. Every time you looked back, it told me I was not being erased.'
Elise opened her eyes again. 'You were the reason I could enjoy it.'
The sentence filled the back seat with a heat that had nothing to do with Marcus and everything to do with the marriage sitting between them, breathing hard.
Daniel lowered his mouth to hers.
The kiss was quiet because of the driver, but quiet did not mean small.
Elise's fingers curled into his jacket. Daniel felt her lean into him with a restrained urgency that made every inch of distance feel chosen.
He kissed her as the city moved around them, as rain threaded down the windows, as their reflection trembled in the glass: husband and wife, changed and still themselves.
When they parted, Elise laughed under her breath.
'What?' Daniel whispered.
'I was thinking that he escorted us out, and somehow you are the one who brought me home.'
Daniel rested his forehead against hers. 'I am trying.'
'I know.'
They rode in silence again, but it was a different silence now. Not empty. Not evasive. A silence full of things waiting to be said in a bedroom with no driver, no chandelier, no broad-shouldered guard managing the edges.
At a red light, Elise touched Daniel's wedding band.
'Do you regret it?' she asked.
The answer surprised him by arriving whole.
'No.'
Her breath caught.
'Do you?' he asked.
'No.'
The light turned green. The car moved forward.
Daniel looked out at the wet street and felt the future rearranging itself in ways he could not yet map.
There would be fear. There would be conversations that hurt.
There would be limits and revisions and maybe regret later, or maybe not.
But there would not be the old silence. Not if he could help it.
Elise squeezed his hand.
'What happens when we get home?' she whispered.
Daniel looked at his wife, at her flushed mouth and rainlit eyes and the ring Marcus had touched only because they allowed it.
'We keep telling the truth,' he said.
She smiled, slow and warm. 'That sounds dangerous.'
'It is.'
Her fingers tightened around his.
The car turned toward their street.