20. Skye
— ? —
Skye
The restaurant is gorgeous.
Candles, white tablecloths, a city view that makes Los Angeles look almost romantic.
The kind of place where the sommelier describes wine in terms that sound like poetry and the menu is written in a font so elegant you need a magnifying glass to read it.
I’m wearing the red dress I bought after the separation - the one that makes me feel like myself, not the carefully curated version I performed for eight years.
The neckline dips lower than anything I would have worn to a Rowland Studios event.
The fabric clings in places that used to make me self-conscious.
Tonight, I don’t feel self-conscious. Tonight, I feel dangerous.
Jayden can’t stop staring. I catch him three times before appetizers - his eyes dropping to the neckline, tracing the line of my collarbone, lingering on my mouth when I take a sip of wine.
Each time I catch him, he doesn’t look away.
Just holds my gaze with an expression that makes my stomach flip.
“You’re being obvious.”
“I’m aware.”
“People will notice.”
“Let them. You look incredible - I’m not apologizing.”
I should tell him it’s inappropriate. I should remind him we’re separated, that this is just dinner, that I haven’t decided anything yet.
Instead, I take another sip of wine and let myself enjoy the weight of his attention.
It’s been so long since he looked at me like this.
Like I’m the only thing in the room worth seeing.
Dinner is good. Better than good. He tells me about a young director he’s mentoring - someone with raw talent and no connections, the kind of person the industry usually ignores.
His whole face lights up when he talks about her work, the way it used to light up when he talked about his own projects.
There’s something different about it now, though. Something less hungry, more generous.
“She reminds me of you, actually,” he says. “The way you used to talk about your writing. Before.”
Before. The word hangs between us, heavy with everything it contains.
“I finished act two,” I hear myself say. “Of the screenplay.”
His eyebrows lift. “Yeah?”
“It’s rough. The pacing is off in the middle, and there’s a scene in act one that I can’t figure out how to fix. But the bones are there.”
“Can I read it?”
“You asked that yesterday.”
“I’m asking again.”
His foot brushes mine under the table. I don’t move away.
The conversation flows in a way it hasn’t in years. We’re not performing. Not playing roles. Not doing the careful dance of husband and wife at a public event, saying the right things for the right people. Just two people rediscovering each other over candlelight and expensive wine.
“The ending is giving me trouble,” I admit over dessert - a chocolate something that’s too pretty to eat but I’m eating it anyway. “I know what I want to say, but the words aren’t coming.”
“What’s it about? The screenplay?”
“A woman who loses herself in her marriage. Spends years becoming someone else. And then has to figure out who she is when everything falls apart.”
He’s quiet for a moment. His fork hovers over his own dessert, forgotten. “That sounds familiar.”
“It should. It’s basically my autobiography. With better dialogue.”
“Your dialogue is already pretty good.”
“Flatterer.”
“Honest admirer.”
The candlelight catches the silver at his temples, the laugh lines around his eyes.
He’s not the boy I married anymore. Neither of us are who we used to be.
But sitting here, in this moment, I can almost see the thread that connects that boy to this man.
The one I fell in love with, and the one I’m trying to learn again.
The check comes. He pays. I let him.
When we leave, he walks close. His hand hovers at the small of my back - not touching, but close enough that I can feel the warmth radiating from his palm through the thin fabric of my dress. Every nerve ending in my body seems to migrate to that spot, waiting for contact that doesn’t quite come.
The valet brings his car around. Sleek, black, low. He tips the kid - generously, I notice, more than necessary. Opens my door before I can reach for it. His hand brushes my elbow as I slide into the passenger seat, and the touch sends a current up my arm that settles somewhere behind my ribs.
He gets in. Doesn’t start the engine.
The restaurant sign paints the inside of the car in reds and golds. My dress is glowing. His jaw is glowing. The whole car feels smaller than it did a minute ago, the air thick with something unspoken.
I’m supposed to be looking straight ahead. I turn to him instead.
He’s already watching me. That look. The one he used to have. The one I thought I’d never see again - hungry and reverent all at once, like I’m something he’s afraid to touch and desperate to hold.
“Skye.”
“Don’t say it. Just-”
I don’t know what I’m asking for. Don’t say you love me. Don’t say anything that will make this harder. Don’t make me feel things I’m not ready to feel.
I reach across the console. Fist his tie. Pull him toward me.
The kiss is not tentative.
It’s years of wanting pouring out at once, all the nights I fell asleep alone, all the times I reached for him and found empty air, all the anger and grief and desperate, hopeless love that I’ve been carrying like stones in my pockets.
His hand comes up to cup the back of my neck, fingers threading through my hair, and mine is under his jacket, digging into the heat of his shirt, pulling him closer even though the console is in the way.
He tastes like wine and chocolate and him. His tongue slides against mine and I make a sound I don’t recognize - something between a gasp and a moan - and I feel his whole body shudder in response.
The console is still in the way. I don’t care.
I’m climbing over it, red dress riding up my thighs, one heel getting caught on the gearshift.
His hands are everywhere - my waist, my hips, the bare skin of my back where the dress dips low.
He pulls me into his lap and I go willingly, desperately, straddling him in the driver’s seat of a car that costs more than most people’s houses.
His hand slides up my thigh, fingers tracing the edge of my dress where it’s bunched around my hips. My breath catches. I want more. I want everything. I want to crawl inside this moment and never come out.
A car pulls into the space beside us. Headlights sweep through the windshield in a hard white flash.
I freeze.
Not because of the car.
The light on his face - for one full second - is the same white flash of the camera bulbs at the gala. His face, half-lit, expression unreadable. My stomach drops through the floor of the car.
I’m back there. In the ballroom. A sea of phones raised. My husband looking at me like I was already guilty. The silence before the storm, and then the storm, and then the slow, grinding destruction of everything I thought I knew.
I pull back. Can’t breathe.
“I can’t.”
He stops immediately. Hands lift off me. Back to the steering wheel where I can see them, palms up, surrender position.
“Skye. What happened. Talk to me.”
The tears are already coming. I can feel them sliding down my cheeks, hot and unwelcome, ruining the careful makeup I spent an hour on. “I keep seeing you at the gala. Every time I close my eyes. Your face when she said my name across the room.”
His expression crumples. “Skye-”
“I want you. God, I want you.” The words come out broken, jagged. “But my body doesn’t know it yet.”
The couple from the next car walks past the windshield toward the restaurant. Don’t look. Don’t notice. Just two people passing by, oblivious to the woman falling apart in the expensive car beside them.
I laugh, wet, half-hysterical. “This is ridiculous. Grown adults. Making out in a valet lot like teenagers.”
“I’ve done stupider things in a car,” Jayden says quietly.
I laugh harder. It breaks something in my chest that needed breaking - a knot of tension I didn’t know I was carrying, loosening just enough to let me breathe again.
He hands me his suit jacket. I’m shaking, half-out of my dress, the straps slipping off my shoulders.
I wrap it around myself, breathing in the scent of him, the cologne he’s worn for as long as I’ve known him.
He looks away while I fix the straps, giving me privacy even though his hands were under those straps thirty seconds ago.
I climb back into the passenger seat. Fix my lipstick in the visor mirror. It’s a lost cause - my lips are swollen, my mascara is smeared, I look exactly like someone who just got thoroughly kissed in a parking lot - but the ritual of it calms me.
He starts the engine. The radio comes on low, something soft and acoustic that fills the silence without demanding anything.
“Let me take you home.”
“Okay.”
He drives me to Ellen’s. His hand finds mine on the console. Stays there the whole way. He doesn’t push. Doesn’t fill the silence with apologies or explanations or promises. Just holds my hand like it’s enough. Like I’m enough, even like this - messy and scared and not ready.
At Ellen’s building, he doesn’t try to come up. Kisses the back of my hand like it’s the most precious thing he’s touched all night, his lips lingering against my knuckles, warm and impossibly gentle after the urgency of the car.
“When you’re ready. If you’re ever ready. I’ll be here. No pressure. No timeline.” His voice is rough, scraped raw. “You’re worth waiting for.”
I get out. Watch him drive away. Stand on the sidewalk until his taillights disappear around the corner.
My phone buzzes before I get to the elevator.
Jayden: For the record, you looked incredible tonight. I’m going to be thinking about that dress for a long time. But I’m going to be thinking about the woman in it even longer. Take all the time you need.
I throw his suit jacket at Ellen’s couch when I get inside. It lands in a heap of expensive fabric and lingering cologne.
Ellen looks up from her laptop. Her eyes go wide.
“Oh. That’s not your jacket.”
I sit down. Cry. Laugh. Cry again.
Ellen just pours me a glass of wine and says nothing. Sometimes that’s the best kind of friendship - the kind that doesn’t require words.
My mother has called four times today. I finally answered the last one, told her a simplified version. I told her someone framed me, I’m staying with Ellen, I’ll be okay. She wanted to fly out. I told her to stay with Dad, that his recovery was more important than holding my hand through a scandal.
“You’re always protecting everyone else,” she said.
“I learned it from you.”
She cried. I held it together until we hung up. Then I didn’t.
I drink the wine. I don’t sleep.
I keep thinking about his hands on my thighs. The sound he made when I kissed him. The way he stopped the second I asked him to.
I keep thinking about the gala. The flash of the cameras. The look on his face.
Both things are true. Both things live inside me. I don’t know how to make them fit together yet.
But I’m starting to think I want to try.