5. Aster
— ? —
Aster
She’s sitting on the bed when I get home from my final studio session, still dressed, clearly not planning to sleep anytime soon, and the look on her face makes my stomach drop straight through the floor.
I’ve seen Flora angry before. I’ve seen her frustrated and disappointed and hurt. This expression is a different thing entirely, quiet and settled, like she made a decision some time ago and she’s just been waiting for me to walk through the door so she can tell me what it is.
“We need to talk,” she says.
“Okay.” I set down my bag slowly, buying time, trying to read her. “What’s going on?”
“Sit down.”
I sit on the edge of the bed, leaving space between us that feels like miles even though it’s barely two feet.
She’s wearing one of my old t-shirts and her hair is pulled back in a messy bun and she has never looked more beautiful to me than she does right now, when I’m terrified she’s about to say something I can’t take back.
“I’ve been trying to figure out how to say this for months.
” Her voice is steady but I can see her hands in her lap, pressed flat against her thighs like she’s trying to stop them shaking.
“And I keep chickening out because I don’t want to be the nagging wife.
I don’t want to be the person who holds you back from your dreams.”
“Flora, you don’t…”
“Let me finish.” She takes a breath, and I watch her gather herself and steel her spine.
“I love you. I have loved you since you sat in that diner booth for two weeks straight just to make me laugh. But Aster, I am so fucking lonely in this marriage that some days I forget what it feels like to be seen.”
That stops me cold. Lonely is not a word I have ever once applied to my own marriage, and she just used it about herself while sitting three feet away from me in a house I bought so she’d have somewhere to put down roots.
“I see you,” I say, but even as the words come out I can hear how hollow they sound, how automatic, like I’m reading off a card somebody handed me. “I see you every day.”
“Do you?” She finally looks at me, really looks, and her green eyes are wet but her gaze is completely steady. “When was the last time we had dinner together that wasn’t interrupted by a phone call? When was the last time you asked me about my day and actually listened to the answer?”
I open my mouth to respond and realize I can’t, because I’m searching my memory and scrolling back through months and coming up with nothing.
There was the anniversary dinner, but I was two hours late and we fought in front of a valet stand.
There was her birthday last week, and I know exactly where I was for the second half of it.
There was, God, when was there anything?
“I’m not asking you to give up your career,” she continues, and something in her voice hardens.
“I would never ask you that. Your music is part of who you are, and I fell in love with all of you, including the part that needs to be on a stage. But I can’t keep living like this. I can’t keep being an afterthought.”
“You’re not an afterthought.”
“Then what am I?” Her voice cracks on the question.
“Because three weeks ago you called me dramatic across a restaurant table and then again in the back of a car, and in between those two things I gave away a dog you never learned the name of, and last week you left my birthday cake on the table for a twenty-minute fix that took you past midnight, and you haven’t said one word about any of it since. ”
I reach for her hand but she pulls away, standing up from the bed, putting distance between us on purpose.
“The tour is two weeks.” I stand up too, desperate to close the gap she just created. “When I get back…”
“When you get back, we’re having a real conversation.
” She stops and turns to face me, and the devastation in her expression nearly takes my legs out from under me.
“About whether this marriage is working. About what happens next. I mean it, Aster. Either something changes or I need to figure out what that means for us.”
The word sits there in the air between us with everything attached to it that she didn’t say.
“Are you saying you want to leave me?”
“I’m saying I don’t know what I want anymore.
” Her voice breaks and she presses the heels of her hands against her eyes like she’s holding her whole face together.
“I’m saying I’m exhausted and lonely and I feel invisible.
I’m saying that when you come home, we need to figure out if we’re partners or just two people who share a house. ”
“Flora.” I cross the distance between us and cup her face in my hands, tilting it up so she has to look at me. Her cheeks are wet. “I love you. That’s never changed and it’s never going to.”
“I know you love me.” She doesn’t pull away, but she doesn’t lean into me either. “I’ve never doubted that for a second. But love isn’t enough if I never get to feel it. Love isn’t enough if I’m always waiting for you to show up.”
“Then let me show up now.” I brush her tears away with my thumbs, my heart going so hard I can feel it in my throat. “I know I can’t fix everything tonight. But let me at least remind you why you married me.”
“Aster.”
“Please.” My voice comes out rough. “Let me show you.”
She looks at me for a long moment and I can see the war happening behind her eyes, the anger and the hurt and underneath all of it the love that’s still there in spite of everything I’ve done to test it.
“Okay,” she whispers. “Show me.”
I kiss her and it isn’t gentle. It’s desperate and aching, all the accumulated hunger of too many nights apart compressed into one moment.
She tastes like tears and like that herbal tea she drinks before bed and like something underneath both of those that’s just her, just Flora, the woman who turned my entire life over in a diner at two in the morning.
She kisses me back just as hard, her nails digging into my shoulders, her body arching toward mine like she’s been starving for this too. Maybe she has been. Maybe she’s been starving in this house for a year and I’m only now noticing.
“I’m sorry,” I say against her mouth, between kisses. “I’m sorry I made you feel invisible. I’m sorry I chose the lights over you. I’m sorry for every night I came home late and every morning I left early and every single moment you needed me and I wasn’t there.”
“Shut up.” She pulls at my shirt, yanking it up over my head. “Shut up and show me.”
I kiss her hard first, my mouth on hers like I can pour every missed night into it.
My tongue slides against hers while my hands work her shirt off, then her bra, and I break the kiss just long enough to get the fabric out of the way before I’m right back on her, sucking her bottom lip before I move down to her neck.
I kiss and bite along the side of her throat and feel her pulse jump under my mouth.
She tastes like skin and salt and the last trace of her perfume.
“You’re so beautiful,” I say against her collarbone. “God, Flora, you’re so fucking beautiful.”
“You don’t have to…”
“I want to.” I get her pants undone and slide them down her legs with her panties, kissing every new inch of skin as it shows.
I press my mouth to the soft spot just above her hip, then lower, to the inside of her thigh, and she shivers when I lick a slow stripe up the sensitive skin there.
I spread her legs wider with my hands and settle between them on the bed, looking up at her, her face flushed and her curls wild against the pillow.
I start slow on purpose. I kiss the crease where her thigh meets her pussy, then drag my tongue right over her clit, and she gasps and her hips twitch up.
I grip her thighs to hold her steady and do it again, slower this time, licking her open so I can taste how wet she already is.
I suck her clit between my lips and flick it with the tip of my tongue, and I push two fingers inside her at the same time, and she’s tight and hot around them.
I curl them up and rub that spot inside her while I keep working her clit in steady circles.
“Aster, fuck,” she moans, her hands coming down to fist in my hair.
She tries to pull me up and I stay right where I am.
I add a third finger and thrust them in and out while my tongue presses flat against her clit, and she’s dripping now, soaking my fingers and my chin, and I don’t rush any of it.
I eat her like I’ve got all night, licking every fold, sucking her clit until her thighs start shaking around my head.
She comes with a sharp cry, clenching hard around my fingers, her whole body arching off the bed, and I keep licking her through it, gentling my tongue but not stopping until she’s whimpering and pushing at my shoulders.
I kiss my way back up her body, stopping to close my mouth over one nipple and bite it lightly, and then I’m at her mouth again, kissing her deep and messy so she can taste herself on my tongue.
“Look at me,” she demands, and I do. I look into those green eyes, bright with tears and pleasure at the same time. “Don’t look away.”
“Never.” I line myself up at her entrance. “I’m never looking away again, Flora. Not from this. Not from you.”
I push inside her slowly, watching her face the whole time.
She’s so tight and wet around me that I have to stop halfway just to breathe, so I kiss her again, slow and deep, while I sink the rest of the way in.
Once I’m all the way inside her I start to move, long deep rolls of my hips instead of just thrusting, my mouth on hers like I’m trying to crawl inside her.
My hand comes up to cup her breast and my thumb rubs circles over her nipple while I fuck her.
She wraps her legs around my waist and pulls me deeper.
I break the kiss only to move down and get my mouth on her other breast, tongue working her nipple while I keep thrusting, my cock dragging against her with every stroke.
I can feel how close she is again by the way she flutters around me, so I reach between us and rub her clit in tight circles while I suck harder.
“Fuck, Aster, right there,” she gasps, her nails digging into my back.
I thrust harder but keep the angle where she needs it, my thumb working her clit and my mouth moving between her breasts, and she comes again with a broken moan, squeezing my cock so tight I almost go with her.
I keep moving through it, kissing her open mouth, swallowing every sound she makes.
I don’t stop. I slow down just enough to draw it out and then speed up again, driving into her while I kiss her neck and suck a mark right under her ear, my hand still on her breast, pinching her nipple between my fingers.
She’s shaking underneath me with her legs locked around me, and I keep going until my own orgasm builds hot at the base of my spine, and then I thrust deep and come inside her with a groan, my mouth pressed to hers the whole way through it.
Afterward we lie tangled together, sweat-slicked and breathing hard. Her head rests on my chest and her fingers trace lazy patterns over my skin and for a few perfect minutes everything feels like it used to.
“When you get back,” she says quietly, breaking the spell, “we’re talking. Really talking. No more putting it off.”
“I know.”
“And I need you to actually show up for that conversation. Not just physically. I need you to be present.”
“I will be. I promise.”
“And the week after you’re back, we’re in Baja. I booked it this morning. Nine days, a house with no signal, non-refundable.” She lifts her head to look at me. “Say yes, Aster. Out loud.”
“Yes.”
She puts her head back down on my chest without saying anything, and I lie there wondering how many of those I’ve broken without ever noticing I’d made them.
I tighten my arms around her and try to memorize the feeling of her body against mine, the smell of her hair, the sound of her breathing as it slows down toward sleep.
Two weeks is nothing. I just have to get through two weeks and then I’ll fix all of it, cancel projects and clear my schedule and be the husband she deserves.
Her breathing evens out and I think she’s fallen asleep, but then she speaks again, so soft I almost miss it in the dark.
“When was the last time you slept in this bed two nights in a row?”
I search my memory again, desperate for an answer, and come up with nothing at all.
“I don’t remember,” I admit.
She doesn’t say anything else. She just curls tighter against me and eventually her breathing changes into the slow rhythm of actual sleep, and I lie awake for hours staring at the ceiling and thinking about everything she said.
The car service arrives at dawn. I’m already awake and have been for hours, watching Flora sleep in the gray light coming through the curtains.
She looks peaceful like this, her face soft, her curls spread out across the pillow, the freckles on her nose that I used to kiss every morning before I left, back when leaving meant driving to a studio across town and coming home the same night.
The horn honks outside and Flora stirs. She doesn’t open her eyes, but her breathing changes and becomes too controlled and too even. She’s awake. She’s pretending not to be.
I should wake her properly. I should kiss her and tell her I love her and promise one more time that things will be different when I get back, and I should give her something to hold onto while I’m gone.
But I don’t want to see that look in her eyes again, the exhausted hopeless one that says she’s heard all my promises before and stopped believing any of them.
So instead I pull the covers up over her shoulder, gentle and careful, and I press my lips to her forehead so lightly she probably can’t even feel it.
“I love you,” I whisper. “I’ll fix this. I swear I’ll fix this.”
She doesn’t respond. Her breathing stays in that same too-controlled rhythm.
I grab my bag and slip out of the room, and the last thing I see before I close the door is her hand reaching across the bed toward the empty space where I should be.
Two weeks. I can do two weeks standing on my head, and when I get back I’ll be better and I’ll be present and I’ll be the man she married.