17. Aster
— ? —
Aster
She comes to my cabin the next night.
I’ve been lying awake for hours staring at the ceiling, replaying that kiss in the closet and her whispered words afterward.
That never happened. Except that it did happen, and I can still feel her mouth on mine and taste her tears and hear the ragged sound of her breathing as she ran back out into the storm.
I’ve counted the beams in this ceiling so many times over the past week that I could draw them from memory.
Nine, with a knot in the fourth one shaped like a comma.
I know the exact sound the woodstove makes when it settles.
I know that the third floorboard from the door announces anybody who steps on it, which is how I know she’s coming about a second and a half before the door opens.
The door opens without a knock.
Flora stands in the doorway, backlit by moonlight, wearing nothing but one of my old t-shirts that she must have taken out of the laundry basket on the porch, which means she planned this at least as far back as the laundry.
Her hair is wild and her feet are bare and her phone is in her hand like she forgot to put it down, and she’s looking at me like she’s about to do something she’ll regret.
“I need you to understand something,” she says.
I sit up. “Okay.”
“The kiss didn’t mean anything.”
“Okay.”
“I was emotional. The notebook, the storm, it was a moment of weakness.”
“Okay.”
“Stop saying okay!”
“What do you want me to say?”
She crosses the cabin in three steps and climbs onto the bed, onto my lap, her hands fisting in my hair as she crushes her mouth against mine.
I have thought about this for weeks in a way that was mostly punishment, and not once in any version of it did she arrive barefoot and furious and wearing my shirt.
Lying in a bed too narrow for one person, remembering what my own wife feels like, and understanding that the memory was all I was going to be allowed.
So when she actually kisses me my brain does something stupid with it, some circuit that has been shorted out for a month firing all at once, and for a couple of seconds I cannot make my hands work.
This time there’s no pulling back. No whispered denials, no running out into the rain. She kisses me like she’s trying to crawl inside my skin and I kiss her back just as desperately, my hands finding her waist and pulling her closer until there’s no space left between us at all.
“This doesn’t fix anything,” she gasps against my mouth.
“I know.”
“I’m still angry at you.”
“You should be.”
“I hate you.”
“You don’t.” I roll us over, pinning her beneath me, and she arches up into the contact. “You love me. You’ve always loved me. That’s why this hurts so much.”
“Don’t tell me how I feel.”
I silence her with my mouth.
What follows isn’t gentle. It’s months of starvation released all at once.
I yank the shirt over her head and she’s naked underneath it, and I crash my mouth into hers, kissing her hard and angry, biting her bottom lip before my mouth finds her neck.
I suck a mark right over her pulse point and she scratches down my back with her nails, and I shove her onto the narrow bed and follow her down, already hard and aching for her.
“I missed you,” I say against her collarbone, tracing the freckle constellation I wrote about in my notebook.
Fifty-three of them, and I kiss every single one I can reach, biting some of them on purpose.
“Every night, Flora. Every night I lay in some hotel room thinking about this. About you. About how you feel when I’m inside you. ”
“Shut up.”
“No.” I pull back to look at her, flushed and wild-eyed and furious even now, and I hold her gaze. “I’m done being quiet. I love you. I want you. And I’m going to spend the rest of my life proving it, starting right now.”
I kiss her again, rough and deep, while my hand pushes between her legs, and she’s already wet.
I rub her clit hard with my fingers and then push two inside her without warning, and she gasps into my mouth and I swallow it, fucking her with my fingers fast and deep while my thumb circles her clit.
I bite her neck again and then move lower, closing my teeth on her nipple just hard enough before I soothe it with my tongue.
She’s cursing and pulling at my hair. I pull my fingers out and line myself up and slam inside her in one hard thrust, and she cries out and I kiss her to muffle it, my tongue in her mouth while I start moving.
“Look at me,” she demands, and something turns over in my chest. “Don’t look away.”
“Never.” I thrust deeper and she moans.
I don’t go slow. I fuck her hard and fast with the narrow bed creaking under us, one hand on her breast, tugging her nipple between my fingers, the other gripping her hip hard enough to leave marks.
She scratches my back again and wraps her legs tight around me, meeting every thrust. I kiss her jaw, her throat, and suck another bruise onto her collarbone while I drive into her over and over, and she’s so tight and hot and angry and it’s perfect.
I reach between us and press right where she needs me while I keep pounding into her.
“Aster,” she gasps, her voice still furious even as she starts to flutter around me. “Aster, please.”
I thrust harder, kissing her mouth again, swallowing her moans while my thumb works her faster.
She comes hard, her whole body locking up around me, squeezing my cock so tight I see stars, and I keep moving through it, fucking her through the orgasm until my own hits.
I bury myself deep and spill into her with a groan against her neck, still kissing and biting at her skin.
Afterward she stays on top of me with her head on my chest, both of us breathing hard, and I can feel her heart going against my ribs.
“This doesn’t mean I forgive you,” she says quietly.
“I know.” I press a kiss into her hair. “Then let me earn the next one. And the one after that. However long it takes, Flora. I’ll wait.”
She doesn’t answer. But she doesn’t leave either.
I lie there in the dark listening to her breathe and I do the arithmetic I’ve been doing since the day she walked out of our house, and every number in it is a number I put there.
She didn’t leave because a woman kissed me in a hallway.
She left because I gave her a year of being alone in a house she furnished by herself, and then I handed her one more reason on top of it and called the reason bad luck.
She’s asleep on my chest and she is not mine again, whatever that word is even supposed to mean between two people who never actually stopped being married.
I know the difference. I’m not going to insult either of us by pretending tonight was a verdict, and I’m not going to do the thing I would have done a year ago, which is decide that the hard part is over because the good part has started.
The shed isn’t finished. That’s what I keep thinking about, lying here, which is possibly the least romantic thought a man has ever had with his wife asleep on him.
The shed isn’t finished, and I told her mother I’d finish it, and if I leave here with it half-built then everything I’ve said for a week is worth exactly what my promises have been worth for the last year.
But her hand is on my ribs and she came here on her own two feet and neither of those things was true this morning.
We fall asleep wrapped around each other, and somewhere in the night she reaches for me again, and this time it’s slower and softer.
She climbs on top of me in the moonlight coming through the cabin window and takes me in her hand, stroking until I’m hard again, and then she sinks down onto me inch by inch while I watch her face.
She braces her hands on my chest and starts to move, rolling her hips in a steady rhythm.
Neither of us says anything at first. The only sounds are our breathing and the wet slide of her around me.
I reach up and cup her breasts, thumbing her nipples while she rides me, and she leans down and kisses me, long and slow, her tongue sliding against mine while she keeps moving.
I kiss her back with one hand moving down to grip her ass and help her rock against me.
She sits back up and takes me deeper, her eyes locked on mine in the dim light.
I slide a hand between us and rub her clit with my thumb in slow circles while she moves, and she comes first, clenching around me with her head tipping back as she shakes through it.
I keep my thumb on her through the orgasm and then thrust up into her from below, chasing my own, and she leans down again and kisses me hard as I come, both of us staying joined and breathing each other’s air until the shaking stops.
We drift off again with the window open and her hair across my throat.
Her phone buzzes on the floor by the bed, where she dropped it when she climbed onto me, and I’m awake instantly, because years of tour schedules have trained me to surface at any sound at all.
Flora is still asleep against my chest, her breathing slow and even, her face peaceful in a way I haven’t seen since before any of this happened.
The phone buzzes again. And again.
I reach down carefully, trying not to wake her, and angle the screen so I can read it.
The group chat is flooding in, all in capitals.
WHERE HAVE YOU BEEN
FLORA ANSWER YOUR PHONE
THE INTERVIEW AIRS TOMORROW
THEY JUST PUT OUT A TEASER
SHE’S CRYING ON CAMERA
IT LOOKS REALLY BAD
I read them twice, my stomach going down with every line. Tomorrow. Cecilia’s interview airs tomorrow, and we’re still up here in Vermont while she tells her version of events to several million people.
There’s a version of this that I could stop.
I have the number of a publicist who could put out a statement before breakfast. I have lawyers who’d love the work.
A month ago that’s exactly what I’d have done, moved fast and handled it and told my wife about it afterward, and I’d have felt like I was taking care of her while I did it.
Flora stirs against me and murmurs something into my chest that isn’t a word.
I should wake her. I should show her the messages and let her decide what she wants to do about them, because that’s what a husband does. He includes her. He treats her like a partner instead of somebody who needs to be handled.
But she looks so peaceful. For the first time in weeks she’s actually sleeping instead of lying there carrying the whole weight of it.
I set the phone back down on the floor, screen side down.
Tomorrow. We’ll deal with all of it tomorrow, together, the way she asked me to do things about nine hundred times before I started listening.
I lie there for a long time with my hand on her back, listening to the cabin settle around us.
The thing is, I’m right. She does need the sleep. She hasn’t slept properly since the night her phone went off and turned her life over, and there is nothing she can do about a broadcast that hasn’t happened yet, and waking her would buy her eight hours of lying in the dark with her jaw clenched.
Every word of that is true. It was true four days from the end of a promotional tour, too, standing in a hotel bathroom deciding I’d tell her in person where I could hold her while she raged.
I pull her closer and close my eyes, and I don’t let myself think too hard about the last time I decided that something could wait until she’d had a chance to calm down.