2. Gordon
— ? —
Gordon
She’s awake when I come back to bed.
I can tell before I even touch the mattress. There’s a tension in the room, a weight in the air that makes my skin prickle. The room is dark, but I can make out the shape of her, lying on her back, arms crossed over her chest, staring at the ceiling like it’s personally offended her.
I know that posture. I’ve seen it before, usually after I’ve done something wrong. The problem is, I’m not always sure what the something is.
“Liz-”
“Don’t.”
I stop with one knee on the bed. “Don’t what?”
“Don’t do the thing where you pretend you don’t know why I’m upset.”
“I wasn’t going to-” I stop. I was absolutely going to do that thing. “Okay. I’m listening. What’s going on?”
She laughs, but there’s no humor in it.
“It was work,” I say, because I don’t know what else to say. “You know how it is right now. One more week and this whole thing is done, and everything’s coming to a head at once, and I can’t just disappear when-”
“I don’t care about the company, Gordon.”
I don’t have an answer ready. I’ve been living and breathing this launch for months. Every waking moment has been about the company, the meetings, the thousand small crises that pop up every day. It’s everything I’ve worked toward, everything I’ve sacrificed for. And she doesn’t care.
“Then what do you want me to say?”
She sits up. Even in the darkness, I can see how furious she is. How tired. How beautiful, even when she’s looking at me like she wants to put her fist through a wall.
“I want you to say you see me.” Her voice is shaking, and I don’t know if it’s anger or something else. “I want you to act like I exist. I want you to eat dinner at a table like a human being and have a conversation with your wife that lasts longer than the time it takes Sloane to send a text.”
“That’s not fair-”
“Isn’t it?”
“I came home, didn’t I? I’m here. I’m-”
“You came home at one in the morning, Gordon. I had dinner ready at six. I waited for you for seven hours. Seven hours of watching the candles burn down and checking my phone and telling myself you’d walk through the door any minute.
And then you finally showed up, and you ate over the sink without looking at me, and you couldn’t put your phone down for five minutes to have an actual conversation. ”
I don’t have a defense for that. She’s right, and we both know it. I can feel the guilt settling in, heavy and familiar.
“I know I’ve been distracted-”
“Distracted.” She laughs again, and it’s an awful sound. “That’s one word for it.”
“What word would you use?”
“Absent. Gone. Checked out.” She ticks them off on her fingers. “I live in this house alone, Gordon. I sleep in this bed alone. I eat alone, I wake up alone, I go to sleep alone. You’re here, but you’re not here. You haven’t been here in years.”
“That’s not true-”
“When was the last time we had dinner together? Not you eating over the sink at one in the morning. Actual dinner. At a table. With a conversation.”
I open my mouth to answer, then close it. I’m trying to remember, and I can’t, and the fact that I can’t makes the guilt worse.
“When was the last time we went anywhere together?” she continues. “A movie. A restaurant. A walk around the fucking block. When was the last time you looked at me, really looked at me, and asked how I was doing?”
“I ask you how you’re doing all the time-”
“You ask and then you don’t listen to the answer. You ask while you’re looking at your phone. You ask like you’re checking a box, not because you actually want to know.”
I want to argue with that. I want to tell her about the house, the cars, the money she never has to worry about, the whole life I’ve stacked up around her brick by brick while she slept.
I want to tell her that every one of those eighteen-hour days had her name on it, that I don’t even like the work anymore, I just like what it buys her.
But I’ve made that speech before, and it has never once made her feel better. It just proves her point.
So I don’t say any of it.
I reach for her. My hand finds her shoulder in the dark, and I feel her tense under my touch, and for a second, I think she’s going to shove me away.
She doesn’t.
She lets me touch her, lets me pull her closer, and somehow that’s worse. Because she’s letting me hold her body, but the rest of her, the part that matters, is somewhere I can’t reach.
I kiss her neck, her jaw, the corner of her mouth.
“I’m sorry,” I say against her skin. “I’m sorry, Liz. I know I’ve been absent. I know I haven’t been-”
“Present.”
“-present. I know.” I pull back far enough to look at her face, even though I can barely see it in the darkness. “But it’s almost over. One more week, and it’s done, and everything changes. I swear to God, everything changes.”
“You always say that.”
“I mean it this time.”
She’s quiet. I can feel her eyes on me, hunting my face for sincerity, or maybe for evidence that I’m full of shit. I don’t know which one she finds.
“Do you?”
“Yes.” I cup her face in my hands. Her skin is warm against my palms. “I do. I swear. I know I’ve been shit lately.
I know I’ve been neglecting you. But once this deal closes, I’m going to make it up to you.
All of it. Every missed dinner, every broken promise, every time I chose work over you. I’m going to fix it.”
She doesn’t say anything. She just looks at me, her expression unreadable in the dark.
Then she kisses me.
It’s not a gentle kiss. There’s anger in it, frustration, something raw and desperate that I don’t fully understand. Her hands fist in my shirt, yanking me closer, and I go willingly, letting her take what she needs, giving her whatever she wants.
We don’t talk after that. We don’t need to.
She shoves my shirt up and I pull it over my head, and her mouth is on my chest before the fabric hits the floor, teeth and heat, nothing careful in any of it.
I reach for her and she pushes my hands away and strips her own shirt off, her own bra, fast and businesslike and furious, and then she’s over me, knees on either side of my hips, looking down at me in the dark.
“Eliza-”
“Don’t talk.” She takes my hands and puts them on her body, her waist, her breasts, wherever she wants them. “You don’t get to talk right now.”
So I don’t. I touch her instead, everywhere she puts me and everywhere she doesn’t, and she grinds down against me through two layers of cotton until I’m cursing under my breath, and when I try to slow her down, to make it last, she bats my hands off her hips and does it harder.
She gets the rest of our clothes off in a scramble that’s more war than undressing, and when she sinks down onto me neither of us makes a sound for a second, both of us just holding there, breathing, her palms flat on my chest and her eyes shut tight.
Then she moves, and it stops being quiet.
She rides me hard, no rhythm to it at first, just need, both of us fighting for something we can’t name, her nails raking down my back hard enough to leave marks when I sit up to get my mouth on her throat, her breasts, whatever I can reach.
She pulls my hair. I pull hers. At some point I flip us over because I need leverage, need to give her everything she’s demanding, and she wraps her legs around me and digs her heels in and says harder in a voice I haven’t heard in a year, and I give it to her, my hands pinning her wrists to the mattress while she arches up underneath me and takes and takes.
“That’s it,” I manage against her ear. “Take it. Whatever you need. It’s yours.”
She turns her face and bites my shoulder when she comes, hard enough that I know it’ll bruise, and the sound she makes into my skin, muffled and furious and helpless all at once, finishes me. I say her name, and it comes out wrecked, broken open in a way that surprises me.
For a while neither of us moves. Her legs are still around me, her teeth still resting where they landed, my heart slamming against her chest hard enough that she has to feel it.
After, we lie tangled together, breathing hard. Her head is on my chest, and I’m running my fingers through her hair, and for a few minutes, everything feels almost okay, almost like it used to.
“The anniversary’s coming up,” I say.
She goes still against me.
“I was thinking we could do something,” I continue, my voice still rough. “Get away for a few days. Just us. Remember how we used to talk about Bali? We always said we’d go someday. Maybe this is someday.”
She lifts her head to look at me. I can barely see her face in the darkness, but I can feel the weight of her gaze.
“Really?” she asks, and there’s a note in her voice I haven’t heard in a while. It sounds like hope, fragile and tentative, like she’s afraid to believe me.
“Yeah. Really.” I brush a strand of hair back from her face. “I’ll clear my schedule. I’ll tell Sloane to block off the whole week. We’ll go somewhere warm, and we’ll sleep in, and we’ll eat too much, and I’ll actually be there. Present. With you. The way I should have been all along.”
She’s quiet for a moment, her fingers tracing the bite mark she left on my shoulder, and when she speaks again her voice is very small.
“Don’t say it if you don’t mean it, Gordon. I can take a lot of things, but I can’t take that.”
“I mean it.” I press my lips to her hair. “I swear on everything we have, I mean it.”
She doesn’t say anything right away. Then she lowers her head back to my chest, and I feel her body relax against mine, some of the tension draining out of her.
“That sounds nice,” she says quietly.
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.”
I keep talking after that, telling her about all the places we could go, all the things we could do.
I talk about beachfront villas and private dinners and long walks on the sand.
I talk about sleeping until noon and staying up until dawn.
I talk and talk, my voice getting slower and mushier around the edges, and I’m halfway through a sentence about snorkeling when I fall asleep.
I don’t dream about the trip. I don’t dream about her.
I dream about spreadsheets and conference calls and a presentation that keeps glitching no matter how many times I restart it.
When my alarm goes off at 5:30, I’m reaching for my phone before my eyes are fully open. Three messages from Sloane about the schedule, a stack more from the office, everyone urgently needing something from me before the sun is even up, and not one of them is her.
I’m out of bed and into the shower before Eliza even stirs.
I stand under the hot water for longer than I should, letting it pound against my shoulders, trying to shake off the fog of too little sleep.
I think about last night: the fight, the sex, the promises I made.
I meant them. I did. I want to take her to Bali.
I want to sit across a table from her with no phone in my pocket and nowhere to be, and I want to find out what she thinks about at two in the afternoon on an ordinary Tuesday, because it occurs to me, standing here with the water going cold, that I have no idea.
Eleven years married, and I couldn’t tell you what my wife does all day.
That thought should scare me more than it does.
I just have to get through the next week first. That’s what I tell myself, toweling off, getting dressed in the dark so I don’t wake her. One more week, and then I fix all of it.
By the time I leave the house, she’s still asleep, her hair spread across the pillow, one arm reaching across the empty space where I used to be. I think about waking her up, kissing her goodbye, telling her I love her.
Instead, I grab my keys and my bag and my phone, and I’m out the door before six, my mind already jumping ahead to the first meeting of the day.
But I do one thing first. Sitting in the driveway with the engine running, I text Sloane: Block off the week of the 14th.
All of it. Personal. Then, at a red light six blocks from the office, I pull up a resort in Bali that Eliza saved to a folder on our shared account years ago, a folder I’m not supposed to know about, and I book the villa with the private pool and put down the deposit before the light turns green.
It takes four minutes. Four minutes, after three years of promises, and I spend the rest of the drive feeling like the husband I keep telling her I’m going to be.
Three days later, I find out that Sloane moved the anniversary trip off my calendar and replaced it with a work dinner I apparently couldn’t miss.
By then, it’s too late to fix it.