Chapter Ten Julian
Briana corners me at work.
I don’t see her coming. I don’t see her until her fingers close around my wrist. Her voice is in my ear, too low for anyone else to hear. The touch is familiar—too familiar. Her fingers have traced this path before: my wrist, my back, my neck, the hollow of my hip.
The memory of her skin rises before I can stop it, and I hate myself for not being able to forget.
“Two minutes. Just come with me.”
Before I can shake her off, she’s already pulling me down the hallway—quick, confident, as if no time has passed. As if the last few months of silence never happened. As if she still has a claim.
I could pull away. I should pull away. But my feet keep moving, following her as they always have—and that’s exactly how I ended up in this mess, how I stayed long after I knew I should stop.
The storage room door clicks shut behind us, sealing us in silence.
She exhales, relieved. I feel my body becoming a bow being drawn taut to the point of breaking; every muscle coiled with a primitive, electric tension, a frantic longing for the door, for the open air, for any possible escape from the trap of her presence.
But I don’t leave. I stand there, frozen, while she stands in front of me, her back to the door, her arms crossed, her smile small and knowing. She steps closer. Her hand is still on my wrist. Her thumb moves in small circles.
“Your wife isn’t leaving you,” she says, her voice rushing out as if she’s been holding this back for months, storing them up, waiting for the moment when she could finally release them. “It’s been too long, Julian. If she was going to go, she’d be gone by now.”
My jaw tightens. I take a step back toward the door. She immediately closes the distance.
Too close. I can see the individual lashes around her eyes, the small scar on her chin, the slight curve of her lips. She is beautiful. She was always beautiful. I used to tell myself that was why I kept coming back. But that was a lie.
I kept coming back because she wanted me, and in that want, I found the languid, effortless path of least resistance. I kept coming back because it was easy to come back to her.
“Nora is… loyal. Passive.” Her smile is a razor’s edge. She knows what the words will do to me. “You know that. If she didn’t leave after walking in on us, she never will.”
I want to argue. I want to tell Briana that she does not know Nora, that she has never known Nora, that the woman she is describing is a caricature, a shadow, a crude, convenient sketch of my wife that exists only in Briana’s need to justify what we did.
But my jaw feels locked and uncooperative. The words stay down in my stomach, turning into a cold, caustic weight.
Because the truth is, I have thought the same thing.
In my darkest moments. I think about it in the 4:00 a.m. dark, staring at the back of Nora’s head while the house creaks around us.
I have thought: She is still here. She is still making my breakfast. She is still packing my lunch. She is still laying out my shirt.
“I told you it was over,” I say, my voice like stone. Hard. Cold. Unyielding. “I meant it.”
I did mean it.
But meaning it and doing it are different things. I have not touched Briana. I have not called her. I have not texted her. But I have thought about her. In the dark, in the lull of the moments when Nora’s silence felt like a door that would never open again.
I have thought about Briana’s gaze—hungry and certain—the want in it that never asked for more than the pieces of myself I was already discarding.
Briana lets out a low laugh. The sound is soft, almost affectionate.
A wet, throaty sound. The laugh of someone who has heard this before.
It is like she knew the texture of my resolve; she sees that it is fashioned of nothing more than thin, scorched paper.
I wonder if she thinks she can see right through me.
Her arms wind around my neck. Her fingers lace together at the back of my head.
She pulls herself close, her body pressing against mine.
The air is suddenly heavy, filled with the perfume of her, just her; a scent of crushed gardenias and musk that infiltrates my senses, drowning the clinical detergent-like chill of the storage room.
“Julian,” she whispers, her breath hot against my skin, “enough. You can stop the performance. The guilt is pointless. She. Isn’t. Leaving.”
She isn’t leaving.
My chest tightens.
She’s right. Nora isn’t going anywhere.
I told myself it was because she felt she had no worth. I told myself it was fear of being alone after her parents died. I told myself that she stayed because she was broken, because she didn’t know how to exist in a world that did not include me.
But if I’m honest, the reason never truly mattered to me.
All that mattered was the result: She is still here.
And that is enough for me.
Briana pulls my face down to hers.
Her fingers burrow slowly, possessively into the hair at the nape of my neck, a gesture she knows I cannot resist. She has always known.
From the first night, from the first touch, from the first time she leaned across a desk and looked at me like I was the only man in the room. Like I am the only man who matters.
“We can have this back,” she whispers, her fingers tracing through my hair. “It’s easy. No consequences. No more guilt. Nora isn’t going anywhere. You know it.”
I stiffen.
Her words find the pull. The one Briana has always known how to find.
The pull of wanting what I should not want, of taking what I should not take, of believing, against all evidence, that I can have one without losing the other.
That I could taste the salt of the sea without ever leaving the safety of the shore.
She’s offering me a fantasy where I can exist in two rooms at once: one where I am a good husband chewing buttered peas in a silent kitchen, and another where I am this: a man being caressed by a woman who smells like expensive flowers.
The thought of it makes my body shudder. I feel like cold, cured meat.
She speaks as if life is a series of low-stakes transactions. As if I can keep the wife who folds my underwear and the woman who wants to ruin me, and that one of them will ever truly notice the smell of the other on my skin.
“I told you, it’s over.”
My voice is harder than I feel. Inside, I am crumbling. Inside, I am the same man who followed her into hotel rooms, who whispered her name in the dark, who convinced himself that what Nora did not know could not hurt her.
“And I’m telling you it doesn’t have to be.”
Her fingers link behind my neck, an old, intimate gesture that unlocks a part of me I’ve tried to lock away.
The part that doesn’t think, doesn’t feel the weight of vows or the trust of the woman who spoke them.
It is the part of the soul that exists before the invention of language and reason and logic, the part that simply wants.
“I miss you,” she breathes against my lips. Her mouth is so close that I can feel the shape of the words. “I miss this. We can have it again, Julian. Just like before.”
Her mouth meets mine.
And for one devastating, shameful second.
I forget.
The kiss begins gently, tentative—two people remembering each other, relearning the shape of familiar mouths.
Then her fingers tighten in my hair, her body presses closer, and the softness transforms into a hard, crystalline, jagged hunger.
A desire that carries a terrifying lucidity, the lucidity of knowing exactly what it wants.
I forget it all.
The same way I always do.
My remorse. The sandbag-sized guilt had been sitting on my chest for months, making every breath a shallow, wheezing effort. The weight of what I did to Nora, to us, to the life we built together. Gone. Washed away like grit down a drain by the heat of her mouth.
The man I swore I would become. The one who would be patient, and faithful, and worthy of her forgiveness. Gone.
It all dissolves the instant her lips find mine.
This is Briana’s power over me. This is what she’s always done.
With a single touch, she erases the world, turning conscience into static, turning memory into noise, rendering the future into a blank slate where nothing matters except the heat of her mouth and the press of her body and the sweet, narcotic relief of not having to worry about anything at all.
My body acts on its own.
I kiss her back.
My hands find their old place on her waist.
My fingers remember the curve of her hips, the fluid dip of her spine. My mouth remembers her taste. My body remembers her weight, her heat. She makes me forget I am a husband, a liar, a man who broke his wife.
For a single, suspended heartbeat.
I am exactly the man I was months ago.
My mind goes blank. There is nothing but the heat of her mouth, the roar in my veins.
Just this. Just her. Just the escape.
But then—
I hear it.
In the dark, behind my eyelids:
The sharp plastic crack of a lunchbox hitting the floor. The sound of the lid rolling across the tile, the wet splatter of red sauce against the carpet like a fresh bruise. And then the deafening silence, a clinical vacuum that sucks the air right out of my lungs.
Nora’s face.
My entire body recoils like I’ve been punched.
The sheer force of it drives me back. My hands, which moments ago were anchored to Briana, snap away as if her skin is white-hot lead. My mouth tears away from hers. I stumble, my shoulder hitting the shelf, a box of files tumbling to the floor.
The guilt slams into me. An angry fist in the stomach, a force that steals the air from my lungs.
I cannot breathe. The room is too small. The walls are too close. Briana’s perfume is everywhere, on my skin, on my clothes, on my mouth. I am covered in her. The smear of her lipstick, the heat of her breath, the oily residue of her touch. It’s a film that coats me, a second skin of my own making.
I can taste her.
I can taste my own failure.