15. Emma
Emma
Ihave been counting the time. Not intentionally, at least, not at first. But the minutes accumulate like small stones in my palm, and I become aware of their weight whether I want to or not. He said he would be back by evening. It is afternoon now, and evening feels far away.
The delivery arrives at four, right on schedule, the way everything in Alex Hartley’s world arrives: efficient, complete, and entirely out of my hands.
Two men in plain black polos carry it up from the loading dock instead of a courier, because nothing about my life is small anymore, not even lettuce. I sign for it at the door because Alex still won’t let me go down for it myself.
I turn back to the grocery bags spread across the kitchen island. I only asked for three things, but there are six bags, which is obscene for two people and one cat, but this is what happens now.
I stand in the kitchen surrounded by enough produce to cater a church picnic and stare at two varieties of tomatoes, four kinds of apples, three loaves of bread, and what appears to be an entire shelf of imported cheese. And I had only checked two bags so far.
This is Alex’s solution to shopping.
After the alley, he refuses to let me go anywhere alone. I argued that I like choosing my own groceries. That I want to squeeze the tomatoes, check the strawberries myself, stand in an aisle comparing two brands of pasta because one looks slightly less disappointing than the other.
His answer had been immediate.
I remember the conversation. I stood right here in this kitchen, and he leaned against the counter with that immovable look he gets, and I told him it was excessive. A waste. There would be things I didn’t even like, things that would sit in the pantry until they expired.
Then ask them to bring everything, he said. You choose what you want to keep.
And the rest?
I don’t care. Donate it. Soup kitchen. Homeless shelter. Whatever you want.
I liked that. I liked it more than I should have, probably because it meant he was listening.
He heard the part about waste and he solved it without making me feel like I was asking for too much.
So now every few days, bags arrive, and I sort through them as if I am curating a small museum of things that please me, and the rest goes into a separate bag for the shelter on Fifth.
I dig through the rest. Today there is artisan bread that smells of rosemary and sea salt.
There are figs, dark purple and tender, and a variety of honey I have never tried before that comes in a glass jar with a cork stopper.
There is fresh pasta, sheets of it, draped between layers of parchment paper like fabric.
There are things I did not ask for: truffle oil, a specific kind of olive that I mentioned once in passing three weeks ago, and a box of those almond cookies I ate the entire container of in one sitting.
He remembers everything. That is the problem. That is always the problem.
I am placing the figs into the crisper drawer when something warm brushes against my ankle.
Bee winds between my legs in a slow figure eight, her fur silk-soft against my bare skin. She looks up at me with those enormous green eyes and produces a sound so pitiful, so thoroughly devastating, that it could end wars.
“You already ate twice today,” I say, pointing the truffle oil at her like a tiny weapon.
She meows.
“Yes, I remember feeding you. Twice. I watched you. You cannot have more until dinner.”
She meows again. Longer this time. A whole paragraph of suffering.
“I know what you’re doing.”
She meows again, louder, and sits directly on top of my foot as if she intends to enforce the demand through sheer body weight.
“No.”
Another meow. This one cracks in the middle. Her face becomes tragically thin despite the fact that she has gained enough weight since coming here that the veterinarian actually praised me for it.
“You are not an abandoned Victorian orphan.” I stare at her. She stares at me. She is a terrible creature and I am a weak woman.
“Fine.” I crouch down and dig through one of the bags until I find the small tin of cat food Alex ordered for her, and nearly drop it when I see the label.
“Are you serious?”
She blinks.
“This costs more than half the things I make from scratch.”
Even the packaging is expensive, the kind that comes in individual portions with ingredients listed like a restaurant menu. Wild-caught salmon. Free-range chicken. Things I have never eaten myself. I peel back the lid and spoon the food into her bowl.. The smell makes my nose wrinkle.
“You had better enjoy this, because you are becoming accustomed to a standard of living I cannot maintain.”
Bee does not approach with dignity. She buries her face in it immediately, making small, urgent sounds.
“You eat better than most humans,” I tell her, watching. “This is super expensive. I hope you are not getting used to this.”
She does not care. She is eating.
“Seriously Bee. I cannot feed you like this when we?—”
Leave.
The word arrives like a slap. I go still, crouched on the kitchen floor in my socks, one hand still holding the truffle oil, watching Bee eat her absurdly luxurious dinner.
Leave.
When will that be?
I stand up slowly. Set the oil on the counter. Wipe my hands on a dish towel and then just stand there, breathing. I stare at her bent head.
Everything happening right now feels like an illusion.
Like one of those desert mirages, shimmering and whole and so convincing that you walk toward it with your whole body believing.
But the air will shift. The light will change.
And the water will be gone, and there will just be sand, and you will stand in it with dry mouth and the memory of something that was never real.
I do not know how Alex will react when it ends.
Maybe he will be the one to end it, maybe he will get his fill of me one day, the way a person eventually tires of a song they have played on repeat, and he will move on to something better, something that does not complicate his life.
Or maybe I will have to be the one to walk away again.
And I cannot imagine what that will look like, what words I would even use.
Whatever we are doing cannot last. And even if it doesn’t.
Even if some impossible version of this survives whatever comes when he finally hears the truth.
His family will never forgive me for existing in his life.
They are right to hate me. I will be a source of heartache every time they see me.
A reminder of something they wish had not happened.
You cannot build a life on a foundation that everyone around you wants demolished.
Even when he knows why, I will still be the person attached to every terrible thing that happened afterward.
What future could possibly grow out of that?
I close the cupboard harder than necessary.
Bee looks up from her obscenely expensive dinner.
“Don’t.”
She continues chewing.
I curse out loud. I curse the position we are in, the way we arrived here, the things that were done to both of us that landed us in this penthouse with this cat and these groceries and this aching, impossible thing between us.
But I yearn for him anyway. That’s the part I can’t argue myself out of, no matter how carefully I lay out the reasons I shouldn’t.
That is the cruelest part. That no matter how much I reason with myself, no matter how clearly I see the shape of the ending, my body does not care. My body wants.
I check the clock. The minutes have barely ticked by.
I pace. I put away the pasta. I put away the honey. I rearrange the olive oil bottles by height for no reason. I check on Bee, who is licking the saucer clean with reverence. I look at the clock again.
I sit on the couch. Stand up. Walk to the floor-to-ceiling windows and look out at the city.
It is beginning to darken, the sky turning that bruised purple that comes before true night.
The lights are starting to blink on in the buildings across the park.
Millions of people in those buildings, and I am here, in this gilded cage, waiting for a man I may not be able to keep.
Bee finishes her third meal of the day, entirely undeserved, and stalks off toward the office chair she has claimed as her own personal throne without so much as a thank you.
I hear the elevator before I see it. That soft, mechanical hum that means the car is rising through the building, coming here, coming to this floor, to me. My whole body turns toward the sound like a flower toward the sun.
I do not plan what happens next. There is no thought involved. My body simply moves.
The elevator doors open and Alex steps out, briefcase in one hand, coat over his arm, and he does not even get to set a foot on the hardwood floor before I am on him.
My hands find his face. My mouth finds his.
I walk him backward, and he staggers, braces, the briefcase hits the floor with a heavy thud, and neither of us breaks.
“Belle—what?—”
He starts to say my name, and I swallow it. The kiss is frantic. It is messy. It is all teeth and urgency and has no patience for technique.
Alex stumbles back one step and catches the wall with his palm before we both go down.
“Jesus Christ.”
I kiss him again. Harder. There is nothing graceful in it.
My hands are in his hair, pulling, and his hands are on my waist, gripping hard, and I can feel him already, hard against my stomach through the fabric of his trousers.
I try to grab his hair and immediately curse the fact that he keeps it cropped so short because there is nothing to grab. I growl in frustration.
Alex laughs against my mouth. “What?”
“Your hair.”
“My hair?”
“There isn’t enough of it.”
“You attacked me in an elevator to complain about my haircut?”
“Shut up.”
I kiss him again.
His amusement disappears.