19. Christine
— ? —
Christine
The shower decides to betray me on the worst possible day.
One minute I’m standing under the spray, trying to wash away the exhaustion of another sleepless night.
The next, there’s a concerning groan, a metallic shriek, and then water is everywhere - not from the showerhead but from the flexible hose feeding it, split down its length, spraying in a pressurized arc that hits the ceiling, the walls, the floor, everything except the drain where it’s supposed to go.
I scramble out, slipping twice, grabbing my robe from the hook as I flee.
The bathroom is flooding. The bathroom is actively, enthusiastically flooding, and my mother took Isabella to visit family for the day, and I am standing in the hallway in a thin silk robe with my hair dripping and absolutely no idea how to fix this.
I do the thing I swore I wouldn’t do.
I text him.
My shower exploded. Help!
His response comes in seconds. On my way.
I should change. Should put on actual clothes, dry my hair, make myself look like a functioning adult instead of a waterlogged disaster.
But the bathroom is still making concerning noises, and I need to find towels, and by the time I’ve thrown every spare sheet I can find at the flood, I hear footsteps on the stairs.
He fills the doorway like he belongs in it.
Old t-shirt, faded jeans, a hardware store bag in one hand and his phone open to what looks like a tutorial in the other. No suit. No driver. Just Benedict, looking more human than I’ve seen him in years, already moving past me toward the disaster zone.
“I’ve got it,” he says, and disappears into the bathroom.
Thirty seconds later the spray stops. He’s found the shutoff under the sink, and the bathroom goes abruptly, enormously quiet.
I should leave him alone and close myself in the bedroom, put on clothes, maintain some semblance of dignity and distance. I should not follow a man I’m supposed to be divorcing into a tiny bathroom where the air is still thick with steam and every surface is slick with water.
I follow him anyway.
The bathroom is too small for both of us.
It always has been - Mom’s apartment was built in an era when space was a luxury, when bathrooms were functional rather than palatial.
He crouches by the open panel under the sink, tools spread across a towel, the tutorial playing on low volume from his phone propped against the toilet.
I lean against the doorframe.
Then the sink.
Then, because he’s been working for an hour and I’ve given up pretending I’m not watching, I sit on the closed lid of the toilet with my robe knotted tight and my pulse doing something unhelpful in my throat.
I tell myself I’m just making sure he doesn’t flood the apartment worse.
I’m a liar.
He works with his whole body. Shoulders flexing under damp cotton every time he reaches into the wall, the fabric stretching across muscles I’d forgotten he had.
His forearms are corded, gleaming with a fine mist of water, veins standing out when he tightens a fitting.
A thin scrape blooms across one knuckle - he must have caught it on something sharp - and I watch a bead of blood well up, watch him ignore it, watch his hands move with a competence that shouldn’t be attractive but absolutely, devastatingly is.
Stop looking at his hands.
I don’t stop.
His hair is a wreck. He’s shoved it back twice with a wet wrist, but it keeps falling anyway, dark and messy, dripping into his eyes. He blows at it, irritated, and the movement draws my gaze down the line of his throat.
His Adam’s apple.
It moves when he swallows. When he mutters at the phone. When he glances at me - once, quick, like he’s checking I’m still there - and has to look away again.
I watch it like it might tell me the truth of him. Like the bob of his throat under golden skin contains some secret I’ve been missing all along.
The tutorial murmurs instructions. Metal clinks against metal.
Water drips from the showerhead in a patient, maddening rhythm.
He shifts position, t-shirt riding up the small of his back, and I see muscle there too - the deep groove of his spine, the way he moves now like a man who does things with his hands instead of delegating everything to staff.
Heat gathers low in my stomach.
I’ve tried.
God, I’ve tried. Not to notice. Not to remember the particular weight of his body over mine, the sounds he used to make, the way his hands could render me completely, utterly mindless.
An hour. Maybe more. I stop counting.
I don’t leave.
When he finally sits back on his heels, he’s soaked through. The t-shirt clings to his chest and the hard line of his stomach, transparent in places, leaving nothing to imagination. Water beads in his hair, darkens it, makes it fall into his eyes. His hands are wet, a little scraped, and his face-
His face is ridiculous. Triumphant. A boy who learned a trick and wants someone to see.
He stands, setting the wrench down on the folded towel. “Done.” His voice is rough from disuse. “I fixed it.”
I stare at him. “Wow! You fixed my shower.”
“I’m good at these things now.” He’s grinning, actually grinning, and it transforms his whole face. “I learned. YouTube tutorials. Trial and error. I can also make formula, change diapers in under thirty seconds, and assemble IKEA furniture without crying.”
“Who are you?”
The grin softens. Something older moves behind it, something that makes my chest hurt.
“Someone trying to deserve you.”
The words land in the space between us and stay there.
The shower he just repaired ticks as it cools.
Neither of us moves. The air is still thick and warm from the flood, warm enough to feel like a hand at the back of my neck.
I’m wearing almost nothing. He’s dripping on the tiles.
The house holds its breath around us - no baby, no Clara, nothing down the hall but silence and the knowledge that we are entirely, dangerously alone.
I could thank him. Could stand up, let him leave, say goodnight the way I’ve been saying it for weeks - careful, distant, a closed door between us.
I don’t.
My gaze catches on his hands again. The tendons. The water running down his wrists. The way he holds perfectly still, like any sudden movement might startle me into remembering all the reasons this is a terrible idea.
I stand.
The robe whispers against my thighs. One step. The wet floor cool under my bare feet. Another. His breath catches - I hear it, loud in the quiet. I lift my hands and set them on his chest, feel the soaked cotton and the hammer of his heart beneath, and rise onto my toes.
Up close he smells like rain and metal and my soap. A drop of water slides from his hair to his jaw. I watch it fall.
“Christine-”
“Just,” I whisper, almost against his mouth, feeling the warmth of his skin.
Close enough that I feel the word land on his lips.
Close enough that I can taste his breath.
He doesn’t pull back. He should. I should.
The space between us is a dare neither of us has been brave enough to take for months, and I am taking it anyway, starving in a house that isn’t even ours, wanting a man whose shampoo hasn’t been in my shower since winter and whose name is still on a marriage certificate that didn’t burn when everything else did.
“Christine. What are you doing-”
I kiss him.
Not carefully. Not like a test. Like a woman who has been starving in a well-stocked house.
My mouth hits his open, hungry, no permission asked. For two seconds he is frozen, his hands hovering like he doesn’t trust them. Like he’s waiting for me to take it back.
I don’t.
Instead I kiss him harder. My hands fist in his shirt, dragging him down into it, and a sound breaks out of me that I don’t recognize. Need. Ugly, honest need. His lips are still, then not - then he makes a noise in his throat like something in him snapped, and he kisses me back.
God.
He kisses me like he’s been dying in the same house.
His mouth opens on mine and his hand comes up to my jaw, not gentle - tilting me, holding me there so he can take more, and I give it.
I give him my mouth like I didn’t file, like I didn’t walk away, like I haven’t spent weeks lying to myself that this was only chemistry.
His tongue slides against mine and I taste him.
Coffee. Him. The man I used to wake up kissing.
He backs me up. Or I pull him. I don’t know.
My shoulders hit something - wall, door, I don’t care - and his body follows, all of him, hard against me, one thigh slotting between mine like it never forgot the map.
I gasp into his mouth. He swallows it. Kisses me deeper.
His other hand finds my waist, then lower, gripping, hauling me against the thick heat of him until there’s no air left between us, until I’m rolling my hips once, helpless, and he curses against my lips.
“Christine.” It’s not a warning anymore. It’s a prayer. It’s wrecked.
I bite his lower lip. He makes that sound again.
You haven’t forgiven him.
I know.
But I kiss him anyway. I suck his tongue. I let him press me into the wall and devour me like six years of muscle memory just caught fire.
I am soaking. I am furious. I am kissing my husband like the house isn’t full of reasons not to.
“Please,” he groans against my mouth. “Tell me to stop. Otherwise-”
“I don’t want you to stop.”
He lifts me.
Effortless. My thighs open around his hips as he sets me on the counter, stepping between them.
The robe slips. One side, then the other, silk whispering down my arms. Cool air.
Then his hands - those hands I’ve watched for two hours - shaking, mapping the newly bared skin of my waist like he’s afraid I’ll vanish.
“I’ve dreamed about this,” he breathes against my throat. His mouth finds the place beneath my ear that has always undone me. “Every night. Waking up reaching for you. Hating myself for an empty bed.”
“Benedict-”
“I’ve touched myself to the memory of you.” His voice breaks on it, rough and honest and devastating. “Nothing else works. No one else exists.”
The confession goes through me like wine. I arch, fingers in his wet hair, pulling him closer, kissing him because if I don’t I might say something I can’t take back. His hand slides up my thigh and I make a sound I haven’t made in years.
His thumb traces higher. I rock into him, and his forehead drops to mine like he’s barely holding on.
“Christine. God. I-”
The front door opens.
We freeze.
Keys jingling. Footsteps in the hallway. Isabella’s babbling, high and happy, echoing through the apartment.
“We’re back early! The car was giving us trouble, so we just - Christine? You here?”
Benedict’s eyes go wide. My heart slams against my ribs so hard I’m certain my mother can hear it from the living room.
“Shit,” I breathe.
We move at the same time - a tangle of limbs and panic. I yank my robe closed, nearly falling off the counter. Benedict catches me, steadies me, then realizes his hands are on my bare waist and snatches them back like I’ve burned him.
“Coming!” I call, my voice two octaves too high. “Just - one second!”
I shove him toward the door. He’s still soaked, still breathing hard, still looking at me like I’ve rearranged every molecule in his body.
“Go,” I hiss. “Living room. Now.”
He goes.
I take three seconds to stare at myself in the mirror - flushed, wild-eyed, lips swollen, robe barely closed - and know with absolute certainty that I look exactly like a woman who has just been kissed within an inch of her life.
Cold water on my face. Robe tied tighter. Deep breaths.
It doesn’t help.
By the time I make it to the living room, Benedict is crouched by the couch with Isabella in his arms, pressing kisses to her downy head like he hasn’t just had his hands under my robe.
“There you are.” Clara sets down her purse, her gaze sweeping the scene with maternal radar. “Benedict. Didn’t expect to see you here.”
“The shower broke.” His voice is almost steady. Almost. “I came to fix it.”
“You know how to fix a shower?”
“YouTube tutorials. I’m very handy now.”
“He’s very handy,” I echo, and immediately want to die.
Mom’s gaze moves between us - Benedict’s wet clothes, my damp hair, the flush I can feel crawling up my neck.
“Well.” A long pause. “The shower’s fixed?”
“Yes.”
“Good.”
Silence.
Isabella grabs a fistful of Benedict’s hair and shrieks with joy. He winces, gently extracting her tiny fingers, and the moment should break-
My mother is still watching.
“I should go,” Benedict says, standing. He transfers Isabella to my arms with excruciating care. His fingers brush my arm. Linger.
I walk him to the door while Mom retreats to the kitchen.
“That was-” I whisper it like a teenager hiding from her parents.
“A preview.” He whispers back. “I’m going to earn the rest.”
Everything we haven’t finished hangs in the air between us. Electric. Undeniable.
“Same time next week? For the visit?”
“Yes. Same time.”
He kisses Isabella’s forehead. Then he’s gone, the door clicking shut behind him.
My mom waits exactly four seconds.
“So.”
“So what?”
“You want to tell me what that was about?”
“What what was about?” I busy myself adjusting Isabella’s onesie. “He fixed the shower.”
“Christine.”
“Mom.”
“Your face is the color of a tomato.”
“It’s warm in here.”
“It’s sixty-five degrees.”
I open my mouth. Close it. Feel the blush deepen impossibly further.
“I’m not going to tell you what to do,” she says finally, something soft entering her voice. “You’re a grown woman.” She crosses to me, cups my flushed cheek. “But I haven’t seen you look like that in a very long time.”
“Like what?”
“Like you’re alive again.”
My throat tightens.
She kisses my forehead. Then Isabella’s. Then heads for the kitchen, calling over her shoulder: “I’m making tea. You should probably take a cold shower. Since it’s fixed now.”
“Mom.”
“I’m just saying!”
The kitchen door swings shut.
I stand in the middle of the living room, Isabella babbling in my arms, my lips still tingling, my body still humming, my mother’s knowing laughter echoing from the other room.
I press my fingers to my mouth and I can still taste him.