15. Brooke #3
This is angry. This is months of missing him and hating him at the same time, this is the wine still on my hands and the fury still in my chest, and I kiss him like I’m settling a score, and after one stunned second he kisses me back exactly that way, matching me, his hand fisting in my wet hair and tipping my head where he wants it, and the blanket slides off my shoulders and neither of us catches it.
He walks me backward until my spine hits the rough wall of the cabin, and the shock of the cold wood against my bare skin makes me gasp into his mouth,
Adrian swallows the sound and presses in closer, one thigh between mine, his hands mapping me like he’s relearning a language he let himself forget, and I arch up into him, and the storm hammers the roof, and I stop thinking about the divorce, the anger, the wall, and all of it. I stop thinking at all.
“Look at me,” he says against my mouth, and I do, and his eyes are dark and wrecked and fixed on me like there’s nothing else in the room, nothing else on earth, and it undoes me more than his hands do, being looked at like that, being seen.
“There she is. There you are. God, I have missed you so much I couldn’t breathe. ”
“Shut up.” My voice breaks on it. “Don’t be sweet. Not now. I can’t do sweet right now, just…” and I pull him back down, and he lets me have it my way, hard and fast and furious.
His mouth on my throat, my collarbone, his hands careful of exactly one thing without me having to say it, mindful and reverent low on me even while the rest of it is teeth and heat and want.
I hook a leg around him and he lifts me and my back is against the wall and the whole world narrows to this, to him, to the storm and the firelight and the raw insistent rhythm of a thing we are both too far gone to stop.
It is not gentle. I don’t want gentle. I want to feel a thing that isn’t grief for once,
I want to burn the day down to the ground, and he gives it to me exactly like that, holding me up against the wall of a maintenance cabin with the rain coming down, his forehead dropped to mine, both of us past words, and when it breaks over me
I bury my face in his neck so I don’t say the thing I’m not ready to say, and I feel him shudder and hold me tighter and not say it either, because he knows the rules, even now, even here, he knows the one thing I can’t hear yet.
Afterward, we slide down the wall together onto the blanket on the floor, tangled and breathing hard and slick with rain and heat, and the storm keeps on, and neither of us speaks, because speaking would mean deciding what this was, and I am not ready to decide.
I turn away from him. I curl onto my side facing the fire, and I pull the blanket up, and I wait to feel him reach for me, to spoon up behind me, to make it into the thing it can’t be.
He doesn’t.
He stays exactly where he is, a careful foot of space between us, close enough that I can feel the heat of him and far enough that it isn’t a claim, and I understand that he is holding the rule I set even now, even with my body still humming from his, and somehow that restraint undoes me worse than if he’d pulled me against him.
“Brooke,” he says quietly, to my back.
“Don’t.”
“I wasn’t going to say it.” A pause. “I know I don’t get to say it. I just wanted to say your name.”
And I lie there in the firelight with my back to my husband and my body wrecked and my chest a warzone, and I don’t answer, and eventually his breathing evens out, and the storm softens.
I fall asleep on the floor of a cabin in the middle of nowhere with a foot of respectful space between me and the only person who has ever fit.
***
I wake before dawn, cold.
The fire’s burned down to embers, gray light bleeding in around the door, the rain finally stopped, and it takes me a second to remember where I am, and then I feel the weight across my shoulders, and I look down, and it’s his jacket.
He’s draped his jacket over me at some point in the night, tucked it around me while I slept.
Adrian isn’t beside me anymore.
I sit up, holding the jacket to my chest, and I find him across the room, sitting on the floor with his back against the door, knees up, awake, or asleep sitting up, I can’t tell in the dim.
He’s shirtless still, his shirt long dry on the stove rail, and he gave me his jacket instead of putting it on himself, and he’s positioned himself between me and the only door, and I understand, all at once, what he did.
He didn’t sleep. He sat up against the door all night, cold, keeping watch, so that I could sleep safe on the floor of a strange cabin in the middle of nowhere, and he gave me his jacket, and he kept the foot of space even in his sleep, and he asked for nothing, not one single thing, not even to lie next to me after.
I don’t wake him.
I just look at him, in the gray light, this man I married and left and can’t stop wanting, sitting guard at a door in the cold, and I feel the whole tangled mess of it rise up in my chest at once.
The anger that I can’t fully put down and the want that I can’t fully deny and the grief for the two years we lost and the terribly dangerous hope that maybe… maybe.
I don’t know which one is going to win.
I only know that last night I stopped being able to pretend it was just the anger.
And that scares me more than the dead car, the storm, the whole ruined day, all of it, combined.