1. Imogen #3
I don’t get the chance. Because he crouches down in the open door of the car, in a suit that costs more than some cars, and takes my ankle in his hand.
“What are you doing?”
“Your feet are covered in sand.”
He’s already brushing the grit from the sole of one bare foot, unhurried, his palm warm and certain around my heel. He does it thoroughly, patiently, the way he does everything he’s decided matters.
Then he slips the shoe back on as if it’s the most natural thing in the world for a grown man to be kneeling in a parking lot at golden hour cleaning his wife’s feet. He does the other one the same way.
And then he doesn’t get up.
Hendrix stays crouched there in the door, one hand still curved around my ankle, and his thumb starts to move, tracing back and forth over the knob of bone there, as if he’s got all the time in the world and nowhere he’d rather be than kneeling in the sand with his hand on my leg.
He looks up at me, and he holds it. That look, steady and far too knowing, and that thumb keeps up its lazy, deliberate stroke against my skin until the heat crawls up my neck and into my face.
I’ve been married to this man for almost three years. He has seen me at my absolute worst, ugly-crying, food-poisoned, furious.
But somehow it’s this, him kneeling in a gravel lot with sand on his sleeves and his thumb drawing slow circles over my ankle, that makes me feel about nineteen years old and caught.
“Stop it,” I manage, and I aim for annoyed although it lands somewhere closer to breathless, which he absolutely notices.
“Stop what?” His thumb doesn’t stop. If anything it slows, more deliberate, and the corner of his mouth goes up, the closest he comes to an actual insufferable smirk.
“That. Whatever your face is doing. Whatever your hand is doing.”
“I’m cleaning your feet, Imogen. It’s a service.” His thumb sweeps once more, unhurried, and holds. “You’re welcome.”
I try to hold his eyes out of pure spite. I lose. I break and glance away, out at the water with my face on fire, and I hate that he saw it, and I hate more that his low, quiet exhale of a laugh tells me he felt my pulse jump right there under his thumb.
As we’re driving back, the sun’s gone gold and low. Neither of us has said a single sensible thing in hours, and I can’t remember the last time I felt this loose in my own skin.
***
The ice cream doesn’t survive the drive.
We get home and haul the bags into the kitchen, and I flick on the light over the stove instead of the big overheads because the day feels too soft for anything bright, and when I dig into the first bag, the pint is already sweating through the carton, gone half to soup in the corners.
“It’s soup,” I announce, holding the pint up between us as proof. “Look at this. This is a crime scene. This is your fault.”
“I fail to see how.”
“You drove us to the ocean, Hendrix. For hours. With ice cream in the car.”
“You bought the ice cream.” He’s got his head halfway into the refrigerator, shoving aside the mustard and the tragic half a lime to make room for three cheeses we will realistically never finish.
“I distinctly remember warning you it wouldn’t survive the drive.
You said, and I quote, ‘it would die doing what it loved.’ This is what dying doing what it loved looks like. You should be proud.”
“I didn’t think you’d add a forty-minute detour to a beach.”
“That’s a planning failure on your part.
I regret nothing about the beach.” He straightens up, and there’s no heat in it, just that flat, dry certainty he delivers everything with, but his eyes have gone warm at the corners in the way that gives him away.
“Put it in the freezer. Some of it might reincarnate.”
“That’s not how ice cream works.”
“You don’t know that. It’s been a strange day. Anything feels possible.”
I get the sad pints into the freezer and turn back around, and he’s still standing there with the refrigerator wide open, one hand on the door, staring into it like it owes him an answer.
“You’re letting all the cold out,” I tell him.
“I’m surveying.”
“Surveying what? There’s mustard, half a lime, and the cheese we just bought. It’s not a big investigation, close it.”
“I’ll close it when I’ve reached a conclusion.” He does not close it. He leans on the open door, unhurried, and the light spills out across the floor between us as the whole rest of the kitchen goes soft and low around it. “You’re very bossy about appliances.”
“I’m bossy about the electric bill.”
“We could buy the electric company.”
“That’s not the point, Hendrix, close the fridge.”
“Make me.”
And it’s a stupid thing to say, and it’s a stupid thing to feel my stomach flip over, but I cross the kitchen barefoot to reach past him and shut the door myself, and he catches me by the waist before I get there and pulls me in instead.
The fridge stays open. The cold air and the light pool out around our feet, and I’ve got both hands flat on his chest, tipped back to glare up at him, and he looks entirely unbothered about being glared at.
“You did that on purpose,” I say.
“I have no idea what you’re talking about.” His hands settle low on my back. The refrigerator hums behind him, steady, the only sound in the room. “Dance with me.”
“What has gotten into you? There’s no music.”
“There’s a refrigerator.”
“That’s not even connected.”
“It has a beat. Sort of. If you’re generous.” He’s not letting go.
“You can’t dance without music,” I point out, biting back a smile. “You can’t dance with music. You’re arguably the worst dancer I have ever personally witnessed, and I have spent my entire life around dancers.”
“Then teach me.” His thumb moves once at the small of my back, and I feel it everywhere. “You used to teach me. Late, when you couldn’t sleep. You’d count under your breath and push me around the living room and tell me I had the natural rhythm of a filing cabinet.”
“You do have the natural rhythm of a filing cabinet.”
“So… teach me anyway.”
And because I am, at my core, a person who cannot resist a man asking to be led, I start to count.
“Five, six, seven, eight,” I murmur, and I press one hand into his shoulder and take his other hand in mine and start to move us both.
Slow, no music, just the count in my throat and the hum of the open refrigerator along with his breathing gone careful, the way it does when he’s concentrating on not being terrible. He follows me. That’s the thing about Hendrix that nobody who reads his interviews would ever believe.
This commanding, exacting man who bends whole sentences to his will in public, in a quiet kitchen with no witnesses, hands himself over completely and lets me push him around by the shoulders and just trust that I won’t let him fall.
He steps on my foot almost immediately.
“Ow… Still a filing cabinet. You.”
“That was a deliberate artistic choice.”
“Five, six, seven, and turn… no, your other, Hendrix, your other, oh my God!”
I’m laughing, the kind that comes up from somewhere I’d forgotten I had access to, and he spins me too hard and has to catch me against his chest until we’re both breathless, grinning in the half dark, and this, this exact thing, is the reason I don’t fully regret it.
The count runs out. Neither of us picks it back up.
He just keeps me there, both arms looped loose around my back.
I give up standing on my own and let my head drop against his chest, right over the steady thud of his heart.
His chin comes to rest on the top of my head.
Then, low and rumbling under my ear, wildly, catastrophically off-key, he starts to hum.
There’s no tune to it. There’s no tune anywhere near it.
It’s the sound of a man who has never once carried a melody deciding to carry one anyway, badly, for me, and I feel it more than hear it, buzzing through his chest into my cheek, and I close my eyes, smiling into his shirt where he can’t see it as I let myself have this.
All of it. The hum, the arms, the ridiculous filing-cabinet swaying that has stopped pretending to be dancing.
His heartbeat is steady under my ear as it blurs together, and my mind loosens, slips its mooring, drifting back the way it only does when I feel this safe, all the way to the beginning.
Because here is the part nobody tells you about an arranged marriage.
I was nine the first time my mother explained it to me, sitting me down at her vanity with her rings clicking against the glass while she took the pins out of her hair.
“You won’t marry for love, darling,” she said, watching me in the mirror, not unkind about it, just certain. “Girls like us never do. We marry well. Love, if you’re lucky, comes after. Or it doesn’t, and you build a good life anyway.”
I remember spinning on the little velvet stool and asking, “Then who? Who will I marry, Mother?”
“The Carver boy, most likely. It’s been arranged since before you were born.” She said it the way she’d tell me it might rain. “You’ve met him. The serious one, always writing in that notebook.”
And that was that.
Two families, old money and older egos, who’d decided before either of their children could walk that the Hearst girl and the Carver boy would grow up and marry, braiding the bloodlines into one enormous tree.
Our mothers were pregnant at the same charity gala when they shook on it, apparently.
Someone probably thought it was charming.
Nobody thought it was real. Not our fathers, who trotted it out as a joke at holidays, my dad clapping Frank Carver on the shoulder and calling us the merger.
Not the quiet boy with ink on his fingers, who spent every family function bent over that notebook and never once looked up at the girl in the pointe shoes he was supposedly promised to.
Not even me. I had ballet. For a long time ballet was the only thing I intended to marry, and I told my mother so, and she smiled at me in the mirror as if I’d said something adorable and doomed.