22. Bree #2
“There’s only one hotel room left,” the front desk clerk told us when we arrived at the motel twenty minutes from home. The storm from last week had caused flooding on several roads, making the full drive back impossible. “One bed. I can bring up a cot if you need.”
I looked at Rafael. He raised an eyebrow and left it to me.
“We’ll take it,” I said.
The room was small and the bed was queen-sized. The carpet was a questionable shade of brown, and the artwork on the walls featured deer in various poses of woodland majesty.
Rosie was already so deeply asleep that she didn’t stir when Rafael carried her in and laid her in the center of the mattress.
She immediately starfished, limbs spreading to occupy maximum space.
“She sleeps like you,” Rafael said.
“I don’t starfish.”
“You absolutely starfish. I spent two years getting kicked in my sleep.”
“You’re exaggerating,” I said, though I wasn’t sure he was.
“I had bruises, Bree.”
I slipped into the bathroom to wash the fair off my face. The mirror was fogged at the edges, the overhead light buzzing yellow. I bent over the sink and splashed water on my cheeks, and when I straightened, he was in the doorway.
“You forgot this.” Rafael held up my toothbrush, fished out of the overnight bag. He didn’t hand it over and leave, though. He stepped in, and the door drifted half-shut behind him, and the bathroom shrank to the space the two of us were standing in.
He was close. Fresh from the day, his shirtsleeves shoved to his elbows, and I could smell rain and warm skin under it. My eyes went to his forearms, then to the pulse ticking at the side of his throat, and my mouth went dry on cue, traitor that it was.
Not tonight. Not with our daughter asleep on the other side of that wall. You know better than this.
I knew better, and did it anyway.
I set my hand flat on his chest, just to feel his heart go stupid under my palm, and that was all the permission he needed. He backed me against the edge of the sink, slow, giving me every second to stop him, and when I didn’t, he kissed me.
The stable had been all teeth and fury. This was the opposite, quiet and careful, and somehow worse for it, his hand cradling my jaw, his mouth moving slow over mine until my knees stopped agreeing to hold me up.
I fisted my hand in his shirt. Heat curled low and insistent between my hips, and I pressed my thighs together against the cold porcelain and let myself have it, longer than I should’ve.
It was the faucet that stopped me. My elbow caught the tap, and the old pipe groaned in the wall, and from the other room Rosie sighed and rolled over in her sleep.
We both went dead still, listening. Her breathing evened out again, and she stayed under, just through the doorway, behind a door that didn’t lock, while her mother stood making out with her father against a motel sink.
I pulled back. Rafael let me go the second I moved, both hands lifting off me, and I hated that too, how careful he’d gotten, how much he’d taught himself.
“Not here,” I whispered. “Not with her right there.”
“I know.” His voice had gone to gravel. His forehead dropped to mine, and we stood breathing each other’s air, not touching anywhere but that one point. “For what it’s worth, I’d have been glad to stand in that doorway and just look at you. The rest is a bonus I have no business getting.”
“Go to bed, Rafael.”
He went, pressing the toothbrush into my hand on his way out, a small peace offering, and I stood alone in the fogged little bathroom with my blood loud in my ears and my thighs still pressed together, and I made myself breathe.
Then I showered. I ran the water colder than I strictly needed, and it did absolutely nothing to help.
When I came out, Rafael was sitting in the room’s only chair, scrolling through his phone, clearly intending to sleep there.
“Don’t be ridiculous,” I said. “The bed is big enough.”
“I don’t want to make you uncomfortable.”
“I’m already uncomfortable. We might as well share the discomfort.”
He looked at me for a long moment. Then he set down his phone and crossed to the bed.
We lay down on opposite sides of Rosie’s sprawled form. The lights were off. The room was dark except for the faint glow from the parking lot outside.
Silence.
I could hear Rosie breathing. Slow and even. Peaceful. The sound of a child who felt completely safe.
“She called me daddy,” Rafael said quietly.
“I know.”
“You didn’t correct her.”
The words sat between us, heavier than four of them had any right to be. Rosie had called him Daddy, and I hadn’t corrected her, and we both knew exactly what that meant.
“No.”
“Why not?”
I stared at the ceiling. Rosie’s breathing was soft and even between us.
“Because she was happy,” I said finally. “And you were happy. And I didn’t want to ruin it.”
“Did it ruin anything? For you?”
“I don’t know.” The truth. I owed him that much. “I’ve spent four years convincing myself that keeping her from you was the right thing. That you’d hurt her the way you hurt me. That she was better off without a father than with one who’d disappoint her.”
“And now that you’ve seen him with her?”
“Now I watch you with her, and I don’t know anything anymore.”
He didn’t answer right away.
“I know what I broke,” he said. “In our marriage. In you. I know, and I think about it every day, and I don’t expect you to forget it.”
“Good.”
“But I’m asking you to let me spend a very long time making it irrelevant.”
I had nothing to say to that.
Rosie shifted in her sleep, one small hand landing on my arm, the other reaching toward Rafael’s side of the bed. Unconscious connection. Instinctive need.
“Goodnight, Bree,” Rafael said softly.
“Go to sleep, Rafael.”
I fell asleep eventually. Fitfully, waking every hour to check on Rosie, to reorient myself in the unfamiliar room, to remember where I was and who I was with.
Sometime before dawn, I woke with my hand extended across the pillow.
My fingers were laced with Rafael’s.
We were holding hands above Rosie’s head, our palms pressed together, our fingers intertwined. The connection was warm and solid and felt more intimate than anything we’d done in the stable.
He was awake. I could tell by his breathing, by the careful stillness of his body. He was awake, and he hadn’t moved, and he’d probably been lying there for hours, afraid that any movement would break whatever spell had brought my hand to his.
I pulled away.
My hand. My stupid, traitorous hand.
“Bree-”
“Go back to sleep.”