Chapter 3
three
PHOEBE
Zoe didn’t bring it up again for three days, which for her is a form of surgery.
Then she turned up on a Thursday with a car seat base she’d bought for her own car. She installed it wrong. She let me fix it. And she waited until I was on my knees in her back seat with my head under the headrest before she said it.
“He asked them for your number.”
“Who did?”
“You know who did.”
I got the base seated and pulled the strap until it clicked. Then I sat back on my heels and looked at my cousin, who was standing on the sidewalk with her arms folded and her sunglasses up on her head like a woman with nothing to hide.
“Zo, I already told you my answer.”
“I didn’t give it to them. I said I’d ask you.” She held up both hands. “I have committed no other crime here.”
“You somehow managed to install a car seat base upside down.”
She shrugged. “That’s an aesthetic choice.”
I will say one thing about Zoe… she knows how to catch me off guard in a way no one else can. Being quick on my feet has always been the name of my game, but this led me down a path I wasn’t trying to take a few minutes ago.
Not Edwardo. We’ve known each other since we were fifteen and played the same junior circuit in the same three countries. There’s no version of him that surprises me anymore.
What I thought about was that nobody had called me about tennis in two years.
Not the tour. Not a broadcaster. Not even a damn shoe company. There was a stretch of about eight months at the end where my phone was the loudest object in any room I put it in, and then I retired, and the whole machine turned very politely to face somebody else.
That’s how it works and I helped build it and I don’t resent it. Really, I don’t.
But you notice. And once it’s noticeable, it’s hard to unsee.
“Fine,” I said. “Give them the number. I’m still saying no. Politely.”
“Obviously.”
“I mean it.”
“I know you do,” Zoe said, in the tone of a woman placing a bet.
He called on Saturday morning while I was doing bottles. It just had to be the most parent-esque thing I could be doing, of course.
“Phoebe Powers.”
“Sartori.”
“You have a baby.”
“I see your powers of observation are still in need of improvement.”
“I saw the pictures. He looks like your husband, I’m sorry.” Edwardo has an accent that got sanded down by twenty years of press rooms and comes back hard when he’s enjoying himself, and it was fully back. “Congratulations. Genuinely. He is a very handsome child and you look tired.”
“You’re a nightmare.”
“I am extremely charming and you have missed me.”
He didn’t ask me how I was finding motherhood. He didn’t ask whether I was coping, or resting, or being kind to myself. He didn’t do the voice everyone else does.
“So,” he said. “They asked you and you said no.”
“I said no.”
“Why?”
Not oh, that’s a shame. Not you should think about it. Why. Like I was a person with a reason. I leaned against the counter, taking a momentary break from the smell of breastmilk clinging to bottle nipple crevices.
“Because I can’t change direction yet,” I said. “I’ve got a separation across my abdominals and it’s closing, but it isn’t closed, and if I plant and go the other way I’ll do something I can’t undo.”
“How long?”
“Eight weeks. Ten if I’m sensible.”
“The match is in eleven.”
My kitchen, wide, modern, and clean, felt like it was swallowing me up.
“You already knew that,” I said.
“I did already know that, yes.”
“Edwardo.”
“Phoebe.” The accent went all the way home.
“You do not have to beat me. I would like you to try, because I have been thinking about it for two years and it is ruining my life. But you do not have to. You have to walk out there in front of twenty thousand people and be the best in the world at something, one more time, and then go home and be a mother, and let both of those be true in front of everybody at once.”
The bottle warmer clicked off.
“That’s one hell of a pitch,” I mumbled, hating the sound of it.
There was a chuckle on the other end. “I have had a while to work on it.”
I said I’d think about it, which is what I say when I’ve already decided and would like to look reasonable about it. Then I hung up, my heart going like I’d run somewhere at a speed I hadn’t worked back up to yet.
Troy got home with takeout and an entire trunk of ridiculous flowers, because he had a good day and can’t experience an emotion at a normal volume.
“Who died?” I said.
“The florist thought so too.” He put them on the counter, all of them, an absurd amount. “She asked if it was an apology and I said no, and she looked at me like I was lying.”
“Are you lying?”
“I’m never lying. I’m an actor. It’s completely different.”
Colby went down and stayed down, which happens about as often as an eclipse. By nine we were on the couch with Troy’s hand around my ankle, doing nothing with it, just holding on.
“Talk to me about your day,” he said.
“Zoe installed a car seat base upside down.”
“I’d like to be angrier about Zoe than I am. That’s far too amusing.”
“Everybody would.” I put my head back. “Edwardo Sartori called me.”
His thumb kept moving on my ankle.
“Did he.” It wasn’t a question so much as a confirmation he heard me.
“They want us for the Women’s Cancer exhibition. Him and me. Center court, live, the whole circus.”
“And?”
And there it was, and I heard myself do it, and I did it anyway.
“And I told him no,” I said.
“Right.” Troy nodded slowly. “Why?”
“Because I can’t change direction yet.”
“Sure.” He was quiet for a second. “Is that the only reason?”
And I looked at my husband, who’s a great deal more perceptive than people give him credit for, and who’d just asked me the exact right question with about eleven percent of the necessary follow-through.
“Yes,” I said.
“Okay.”
And he let it go. Completely. He reached over and took my hand and kissed my knuckles and asked if I wanted the last spring roll.
Later he backed me into our bedroom door before it had finished closing behind us because somehow by the grace of the universe, Colby was still quiet.
“All right. Say it,” I said.
Troy raised a brow at me at first, but his expression quickly slid somewhere else. “You’re showing off.”
“I asked you to say it.”
“You did the thing with your shoulders.” He got my shirt up and over my head and dropped it.
“At the counter. With the flowers. You did the shoulders thing and then you looked at me that way you do and… and you knew exactly what you were doing,” he said between kisses along my jaw and down my collarbone.
“I always know exactly what I’m doing.”
“I know,” Troy said. “It’s a problem.”
He’s known this body for seventeen years and it’s been about five different bodies in that time and he has never been slow to catch up.
He knows where I’m sore. He knows what’s new.
He didn’t ask me if I was sure, and he didn’t handle me like something with a warning label on it, and he also didn’t pretend I’d had no baby, which is its own kind of stupid.
He just paid attention, the way he has always paid attention, and put his hands exactly where I wanted them without being told.
He got my leggings down and off and put me on the bed and knelt at the edge of it, his eyes dark and wild and that smirk of his absolutely devilish. This man was always taking his time about it, because he’s never in a hurry with this and I’ve never been able to make him.
His mouth started high on the inside of my thigh, and I had both hands twisted into the duvet before he got anywhere near me.
“Mm. Troy.”
“Hm?”
My nerves shot up my spine as he slowly peeled my thong down my legs just enough to not be in the way but still there enough to keep my thighs mildly restrained. “I’m going to be quick.”
“Good,” he said, against my thigh. “Be quick. Then be slow.”
His face between my legs and his breath so close to me had me writhing in anticipation. I knew what he was capable of and let me tell you, his love scenes in the movies are nothing compared to what I’m privy to at home.
He softly stroked the apex of my thighs with his thumbs, sighing to himself as he took me all in and I had the errant thought that I was probably a week past the last time I’d made myself presentable, and hoped the stubble wasn’t too bad.
He kissed the spots where his thumbs were, his nose trailing with his mouth. Then he softly stroked everything I’d been worried about, not at all minding the stubble.
His mouth was light, teasing, barely there. I tried to open myself wider but the underwear and his frame wouldn’t let me and he laughed at my attempt.
“You smell so good, baby.” Another kiss oh so close.
It wasn’t fair, the control he had over me. “I swear to God, Troy Newman, if you don’t…”
He looked up, meeting my gaze. “Don’t what?” He dropped another kiss to my skin which was currently on fire.
“You know.”
He kissed further down my leg, and yanked my underwear down fully, tossing them back over his shoulder. I wiggled my hips under him as he wrenched my thighs apart.
“Do I?” he murmured right above me. “You might have to jog my memory.”
I reached down and ran my fingers along his scalp. “Please lick my pussy, Troy. I’m begging you.”
The devilish smirk was back and he softly pulled my lips apart, his eyes fluttering shut before he snaked his tongue along my slit.
The noise I made was ungodly and my eyes rolled back in my head and I was in another place completely.
His tongue went flat and slow against me at first, all the way up and down my slit, over and over, until my hips came off the bed on their own. “You’ve been waiting for this, haven’t you?” He moaned, taking another deliciously long lick at my pussy. “You’re already soaked.”
I couldn’t form words, but quickly nodded, bucking my hips up to meet his tongue.
Then he narrowed it, light little flicks against my sensitive clit, barely touching it.
Then it was tight circles, then faster, then slower the second I got close and my hips bucked wildly, and he did it three times and I said something into my own arm that I wouldn’t repeat in front of anyone else.
“Louder, Phoebs,” he said. “He’s asleep. I checked twice.”
“You did not check twice,” I squealed and then moaned when he licked at me to even further prove his point.
His tongue flicked out at me sharply, then he dragged it down to my entrance tasting me deeply. “Fine, I checked three times. Louder.”
He slowly pushed his two fingers into me and curled them, stroking the spot he knew worked way too well.
He got what he wanted and my whole body jerked with each stroke.
He gently sucked at my clit at the same time and I can’t even tell you what happened next because one moment my husband was expertly eating me out and the next, I came so hard I heard the headboard hit the wall and it didn’t matter that our son was startled awake in the room next to us.
He didn’t stop when my body went limp, he stayed with me through the whole of it and out the other side, slower, gentler, until my legs were shaking and I was pushing at his shoulder and laughing and swearing at him at the same time.
“We have to get Colby…” I groaned, trying to get myself up from under him.
Then he came up my body and let me taste myself on his mouth. “No, we don’t. Marta will handle it because I asked her to take over Colby duty this evening.”
I nearly cried from relief. “Off,” I said, pulling at his shirt. “All of it. Now.”
I got him on his back and took my time getting there, because I could, and because his face when I do that is one of the great pleasures of my life.
The face I make when I pull down his sleep pants to reveal his perfect, twitching cock bobbing up to greet me is one of his greatest pleasures, too. I leaned down with a sigh, taking the head of him into my mouth just because I love the taste of him.
“Fuck, fuck, fuck,” he hissed, weaving his hands up in my hair.
But I was a fan of teasing him too much, and I swung myself around until I slowly sank down onto him, inch by inch. He made a sound I’ve only ever heard in this room.
“Phoebe.”
“I know.”
“You feel?—”
“I know what I feel like.”
I set the pace and he let me have it, both hands open on my hips, not pulling, just resting there while I rode him at exactly the speed I wanted. I put my palms flat on his broad chest and felt his heart going like something trying to get out.
“Was this what you wanted?” I smiled down at him.
He reached up, playing with my breasts, nodding, transfixed. “God, yes.”
I was almost embarrassed when I started leaking in his hands, but it was no matter, my husband is not a shy man, and he leaned forward pulling me more into his lap so that he could lean down and slowly flick his tongue out at my nipples.
I arched my back, giving him better access, and he took that and went with it, pulling my hair to angle my throat so that he could trail kisses along it.
I rolled my hips harder, matching a new pace, not so secretly enjoying the sensation of my hair being pulled and being filled to the brim with my husband’s thick cock.
“Hell yes,” he moaned, jerking his hips upward, bouncing me. “Take that fucking cock like a good girl, Phoebs.”
There was a quiet moment when his eyes flew open and then I watched my husband’s face come apart underneath me as he yelled out, and I have never in my life felt less like a former anything.
He got an arm under my back and rolled us over so that we were lying side by side, my leg thrown over his.
He stopped, right there, still all the way in, and looked at me.
“What?”
“Nothing,” Troy said. “Just looking.”
“Do it later.”
“I’m going to do it later as well.”
That low wrecked voice against my ear, telling me what I am and what I do to him, and not one word of it was about anything I used to be.
Afterward, he lay with his head on my stomach and my fingers in his hair, and neither of us said anything for a long time.
“I love our life,” he said.
“I know you do.”
“I mean it. I know everybody thinks—” He stopped. Started again. “I love it.”
“Troy.”
“Mm?”
“What does everybody think?”
And my husband, who tells me everything, who has told me everything for seventeen years, said, “Nothing. Go to sleep.”