6. Karlie
— ? —
Karlie
I don’t know how long I sit in the driveway before I go inside.
Long enough for my hands to stop shaking. Long enough to replay the evening in my head a dozen times, looking for anything I could have done differently. Long enough to realize that it doesn’t matter, because no matter what I do, I keep ending up in the same place.
Alone. Watching my husband choose someone else.
I finally get out of the car and walk into the house. It’s dark and quiet, which means William isn’t home yet. Of course he isn’t. He’s probably still with Helen, making sure she’s okay, being her comfort while I sit here in the dark.
I pour myself a glass of wine and sit in the living room without turning on the lights. I don’t want to see this house right now. The furniture we picked out together, the photographs on the walls, the evidence of a life I thought we were building.
I’m on my second glass when I hear the front door open.
William’s footsteps are heavy in the foyer. He pauses, probably noticing that the lights are off, and then he appears in the doorway of the living room.
“Karlie?”
“In here.”
He flips on the light, and I squint against the sudden brightness. He looks worse than he did at the auction. His tie is loosened, his hair is disheveled, and there’s a wildness in his eyes I’ve never seen before.
“We need to talk,” he says.
“Now you want to talk?” I take another sip of wine. “It’s almost midnight, William. I’ve been trying to talk for four months.”
“I know.” He moves into the room, and I realize he’s not calm at all. He’s vibrating with tension, his hands clenched at his sides, his jaw so tight it looks painful. “I know, and I’m sorry, and I don’t know how to fix this.”
“Do you want to fix it?” I set down my wine glass and stand. “Because from where I’m standing, it looks like you’ve already chosen. You’ve chosen Helen. You’ve chosen your family. You’ve chosen everyone and everything except me.”
“That’s not true.”
“Isn’t it?” Now we’re facing each other across the living room. “Tell me one time in the last four months when you chose me. One time when I came first.”
“Karlie…”
“You can’t,” I say. “Because it hasn’t happened. Every time Helen calls, you answer. Every time your parents need something, you run. Every time I try to reach you, try to remind you that you have a wife waiting for you at home, you shut me down.”
“I’m not shutting you down. I’m trying to hold everything together…”
“And what about us?” My voice rises. “What about holding our marriage together? When does that become a priority?”
“You are a priority…”
“Then act like it!” I’m shouting now, and I don’t care.
“Act like you give a damn about this marriage! Act like you remember I exist! Because right now, William, I feel like furniture. I feel like a roommate you’re contractually obligated to house.
I feel like the last item on your list, the thing you’ll get to when everything else is handled, and everything else is never handled. ”
“I made a mistake,” he says, his voice strained. “I’ve made a lot of mistakes. But I’m trying…”
“Trying isn’t enough!” I throw my hands up. “I’ve been trying for four months. I’ve been patient and supportive and understanding, and none of it matters because you’re not here. You’re never here. Even when you’re standing right in front of me, you’re somewhere else entirely.”
“What do you want from me?” His voice rises to match mine. “My brother is missing. My father is losing his mind. My mother is…”
“I know!” I scream it. “I know, William! I’ve been living it too, in case you forgot. But I didn’t sign up to be a ghost in my own marriage. I didn’t sign up to watch another woman comfort my husband while I stand alone at parties. I didn’t sign up for this.”
“Then what did you sign up for?” He’s shouting now too, his voice raw. “A perfect husband? A fairy tale? I told you from the beginning that I don’t know how to do this. I told you I couldn’t offer you romance…”
“I don’t want romance!” The words rip out of me. “I want to be more than an afterthought. I want to be more than the wife you forgot about. I want to matter more than she does, just once. Just fucking once.”
“She doesn’t matter more…”
“Don’t lie to me.” My voice drops, and somehow that’s worse than the shouting. “I heard you with her at four in the morning, William. I already told you once.” I watch his face change. “When was the last time you talked to me like that?”
He doesn’t answer.
“That’s what I thought.”
We stand there, breathing hard. My chest hurts. My throat hurts. Everything hurts.
“You’re my wife,” William finally says, and his voice is rough, strained in a way I’ve never heard. “You’re the only thing keeping me sane. I don’t know how to say that. I don’t know how to show it. But you’re not an afterthought. You’ve never been an afterthought to me.”
“Then show me.” My voice cracks. “Stop telling me and show me. Because I can’t keep doing this, William. I can’t keep fighting for a marriage that feels like it’s already over.”
He crosses the room in three strides and grabs my face in his hands.
“It’s not over,” he says, and his eyes are fierce, desperate. “We’re not over. I won’t let us be.”
“Then prove it.”
He kisses me, and there is nothing gentle in it anywhere, nothing careful.
It’s angry and desperate and full of everything we’ve been unable to say for months, his mouth hard on mine, demanding, and I kiss him back just as hard, teeth and tongue, because I’m furious and I want him and I hate that both of those things are true at once.
“I hate you,” I gasp against his mouth. “I hate what you’ve done to us.”
“I know.” He’s already dragging the zipper down the back of the gown. “I hate it too.”
He lifts me and my legs lock around him and my back hits the living-room wall, his hips grinding into mine through too much fabric, his mouth on my throat. “I know, Karlie. I’m sorry. I’m so fucking sorry.”
I should say no. I should push him off and demand more than desperate apologies and angry kisses.
Instead I fist my hands in his hair and pull his mouth back to mine, and he groans and carries me up the stairs without breaking the kiss, down the hall, into our bedroom, not the guest room, ours, and follows me down onto the bed.
His hands are shaking as he strips off his jacket, his tie, his shirt, all of it dropping in a heap on the floor.
I watch him undress in the dim light, this man I married, and I can’t tell anymore where the anger ends and the wanting starts.
He comes down over me and kisses me again, slower this time but no less intense, and peels the gown off my shoulders, my waist, my hips, and throws it after his clothes, and then my bra, and then he sits back on his heels and just looks at me.
“I never wanted her,” he says, and his voice is wrecked. “I never touched her. The only woman I want is you. The only woman I’ve ever wanted is you.”
“Then why…”
“I can’t.” He drags my panties down my legs. “Don’t ask me that.”
I should push. I should demand answers. But his mouth is trailing down my stomach now and his hands are spreading my thighs, and every thought I have left burns off under the way he’s looking at me.
“William…”
“Let me,” he breathes. “Let me show you.”
He puts his mouth on my cunt and I arch off the bed.
He licks into me with the same focused intensity he brings to everything, tongue finding my clit and working it in tight, steady strokes, no teasing, no holding back, and when I grab his hair he makes a sound like it’s the best thing that has ever happened to him.
He eats me like he’s been starving for it, like he’s been starving for months and this is the only meal he wants.
Two fingers push inside me and crook hard, hitting the spot that whites out my vision, and I cry out and buck against his face.
“Come for me,” he says, rough, not lifting his head. “I want to feel you come on my tongue.”
I shatter. It tears through me, my whole body seizing, his name ripping out of my throat, and he works me through it without mercy, his mouth relentless, until I’m shaking and oversensitive and shoving at his head.
He crawls up my body and kisses me and I can taste myself on him, and it shouldn’t turn me on as much as it does.
“I need you inside me,” I say against his mouth. “Now.”
He shoves his pants down and notches the head of his cock against me and stops there, holding himself up on one arm, his eyes locked on mine.
“You’re mine,” he says. “Tell me you’re mine.”
“I’m yours.”
“Again.”
“I’m yours, William. Only yours.”
He drives into me in one hard thrust and we both groan. The stretch borders on painful and I don’t care, I hook my ankles behind him and drag him deeper, needing every inch. “Move,” I gasp. “Please, William, I need you to move.”
He pulls almost all the way out and slams back in, and I cry out, and he sets a punishing pace, fucking me hard and deep with the headboard slamming into the wall on every stroke.
One hand pins my wrist to the mattress above my head.
The other grips my hip hard enough that I’ll find his fingerprints there tomorrow, hauling me up to meet him.
He doesn’t touch my clit and he doesn’t slow down, he just fucks me, fast and mean and desperate, his mouth at my ear, and it turns out that’s all I need.
“You’re mine,” he grinds out against my throat. “Say it again.”
“Yours…”
“Louder.”
“I’m yours, William, I’m yours.”
“Come with me,” he says, strained, his rhythm starting to break. “I want to feel you come around my cock. You’re squeezing me so fucking tight. Come on, Karlie. Let go.”
I let go. My vision whites out, I hear myself scream his name, my whole body clenches around him, and he’s groaning and spilling inside me, hips stuttering, his face buried in my neck and my name muffled against my skin.
We lie there for a long time after, tangled together, breathing hard. He rolls us so I’m half on top of him, one arm locked around my waist like he thinks I might get up, his other hand in my hair, stroking softly, his mouth pressed to my temple.
“I want a weekend,” I say quietly, when I can. “Just us. No Helen, no family, no work. One weekend where you’re actually here with me.”
“Okay.”
“There’s a bed and breakfast outside the city. We talked about going there, back in the beginning. Before everything.”
“I remember.” His arms tighten around me. “This weekend. I’ll clear my schedule.”
“Promise me.” I lift my head to look at him. “Promise me nothing will get in the way.”
He meets my eyes, and I see my husband looking back at me. Not the exhausted stranger he’s become, but the man I married.
“I promise,” he says. “Nothing will get in the way.”
I fall asleep in his arms, hopeful for the first time in months.
I wake to the sound of his phone.
It’s still dark out, just barely dawn, and William is reaching for his nightstand, his body tense.
The screen lights up the ceiling.
Helen.
I feel him hesitate. Feel him torn between the phone and the woman beside him.
And then his hand moves toward it.