Chapter One #2
But of course that only had his gaze gleaming even as he took her wrists and gently moved them away from her face.
Her eyes collided with his, and the way she had stared up at him, Troy remembered how it had him swallowing hard.
Even now, he still couldn’t find the right words to describe it.
He just knew she was the only girl to have ever looked at him like that.
Mine.
It had made Troy want to possess her and cherish her at the same time. To devour every inch of her in an instant, but also to savor every spot his lips touched and tasted.
His mouth had traced a path from her jaw to the hollow of her throat, and she had whimpered, her fingers gripping the sheets so hard her knuckles went white. But she wasn’t pulling away. She was arching into him, her hips rising off the bed, her body knowing things her mind hadn’t caught up to.
He kissed her collarbone. The curve of her ribs. The soft skin below her navel where she gasped, sharp and involuntary, and her hand flew to his hair, gripping, pulling him closer.
Laina had stopped talking.
The woman who narrated her own life out loud, who babbled through parent-teacher conferences and grocery runs and every small terror of her day. She had gone completely quiet. Her mouth was open. Her eyes were shut. And the only sounds coming from her were the ones her body couldn’t hold back.
He came back up and pressed his mouth to hers.
And when he finally settled between her thighs, she went still.
Not frozen—still. The kind of stillness that came when every nerve was focused on one feeling, and there was no room for words or thoughts or anything except the weight of him and the way he moved and the rough sound of his breathing against her throat.
Her back arched. Her hands found his shoulders and held on, nails biting into his skin, and he felt the moment she broke: a single, shattered breath, her whole body tightening against his, and his name on her lips.
Not a babble. Not a sentence. Just Troy.
Once, barely, like it was the only word she had left.
He followed her. And the sound he made against her neck was one neither of them would ever forget.
After, she lay against him. Boneless. Dazed. Her breathing still uneven. And then, slowly, like her brain was rebooting, the words came back.
“I can’t feel my legs,” Laina whispered. “Is that normal? Should I be concerned? Medically? Because—”
“Get used to it,” Troy told her.
She lifted her head. Her eyes were bright and wrecked and absolutely certain.
“Nobody’s ever said that to me before,” she managed.
“Get used to that, too.”
Mine. It was the only word that felt right to use when describing the feeling of finally claiming Laina’s innocence. The possessiveness that came with knowing he was the only one to know her as a man.
But right now, standing alone in a house where every room still bore his wife’s imprint. Mine was also the only word to describe how he felt.
Her rain boots were still by the door, yellow, scuffed at the toes, a size too big because she'd bought them on sale and insisted the extra room was "cozy."
Her school bag still hung on the hook in the hallway, the one with the enamel pin on the strap that said "I Teach Tiny Humans" in small cheerful letters.
The closet on her side was half-empty. She had taken her clothes but left the hangers, but the empty hangers clicked against each other when he opened the door, swinging gently in the draft like they were waiting for something to hold.
He found the shoebox in their closet. Her side, top shelf, pushed behind a blanket but not hidden well since Laina had never been good at hiding things.
Inside of it were photos. Mostly of him.
Printed using the old portable printer she had since college.
Candid photos of Troy at home, on the couch, in the kitchen, always from an angle that suggested she'd taken them when he wasn't looking.
On the backs, in her round kindergarten handwriting:
First Christmas. He made reservations but I cooked instead. The chicken was terrible. He ate all of it.
He turned the photo over. He remembered that Christmas.
Game day. He didn't know I was in the building. Row 14, Section 308.
Eleven photos. Eleven moments she had documented in a shoebox while he was downstairs doing any of the thousand things he did without noticing.
He went through the entire box, but there was not a single photo of his wife. Not one. He didn’t know why that bothered him so much. He only knew that something about it wasn’t right. He closed the box, but the feeling only worsened. That unnamed thing in his chest that was tightening painfully.
He went through the rest of her things until he found a desktop calendar in her drawer. It was one of those freebies given away by companies during the holidays or product launches. And his wife, even though she had access to his money and could buy anything she wanted...
Laina had always been the type to keep these and use them herself because she hated any kind of waste.
Troy slowly flipped through the calendar, starting with the first month of the year.
Every date box had something written on it.
Mostly about to-dos for work, but there were also notes about them, marked with pink hearts.
Unfortunately, many of them were crossed out.
And he remembered all of them. These were all the things that he had to cancel because something had always come up: a meeting, a call, a deal that couldn’t wait.
And his wife had become the last of his priorities.
A pattern began to emerge as he studied the months that followed. She was just as busy as he was with her job. But she still had her menu for home-cooked dinners pre-planned, and he remembered how he had come home too late to share them with her.
It worsened as the number of crossed-out notes increased...in reverse proportion to the hearts that marked them. Soon enough, she didn’t even bother to draw any kind of heart. And afterward, she wasn’t even using a different pen to mark the dates where she and Troy were supposed to be together.
Everything was written in black.
And last month, she had stopped writing anything about him.
But in the margins, in a different hand than Laina's, someone had written a phone number next to the words Aunt Trisha called. Troy stared at it. He didn't think much of it at the time.
And seeing this, month by month, the record of his wife giving up on him, had that unnamed feeling in Troy’s chest turning into a sinkhole. And when Troy looked around the room he once shared with his wife, he could finally see what had been happening throughout their entire marriage.
Laina was still the same girl he had married seven years ago.
But it was Troy who had changed.
Troy who had forgotten why he had married her in the first place.
A few minutes ago, he hadn’t been able to understand why it bothered him, seeing her shoebox full of photos of him but there was not a single photo of Laina. Or of them.
But now, standing alone in this big, fancy house that he had thought would be enough to make Laina feel happy...
He understood now that it should have been him.
The way Laina had taken those photos because she had cherished her time with him.
He should have been the one taking photos of her.
If he had remembered why he had married her.
If he had not lost himself in chasing his own dreams at the expense of their marriage.
Troy, too, should have his own stash of photos.
Maybe not in a shoebox like she did. But in his phone at least. Because when he thought about it now...
he remembered the countless times he would glance her way, see her reading a book, and he would think she was the most beautiful girl in the world.
Those were the moments he would be tempted to take his phone out and take a photo of her. But he never had.
Because he had also believed this day would never come.
The day when his wife would leave him.
Because he had hurt her for the last time.
I d-don’t love you anymore.