19. Flora
— ? —
Flora
The paparazzi are waiting at the gate.
Of course they are. News of our return leaked somehow, somebody at the airport or a neighbor with a tip line, and now there are cameras everywhere and flashes going off and voices shouting questions through the car windows.
It’s been two weeks. Two weeks and a scandal and a nationally televised interview, and apparently that’s all it takes to turn my own driveway into a hostile environment.
There are maybe twenty of them and I recognize two.
That’s the detail that gets me as we come up the hill.
There’s a man in a gray shirt who has been photographing this gate for three years, who once waited four hours in August to get a picture of me carrying a rescue cat to the car, and who said thank you ma’am afterward. He’s standing at the front of the pack.
“Don’t react,” I tell Aster. “Just get inside.”
Dylan is driving, having picked us up from the airport himself to avoid the chaos of a rideshare with a stranger’s phone in it. My car is still in long-term parking, which is the least of what I left there. He gets through the gate as fast as the crowd allows and parks in front of the house.
We make the run together, hands linked, faces blank.
Questions come at us from the perimeter.
Are you back together. Is the divorce still happening.
What did you think of Cecilia’s interview.
We don’t answer any of them. The front door closes behind us and the noise cuts off like somebody unplugged it.
And then I’m standing in the foyer.
The trash bags are still here.
Fourteen of them, piled in the middle of the marble floor exactly where I left them the morning I walked out. Nobody moved them. Nobody cleaned any of it up. They’re just sitting there, slumped and sagging, a monument to the worst day of my life.
“I forgot about these,” I say quietly, which isn’t true. I have thought about these bags roughly once an hour for two weeks. What I mean is that I forgot they would still be here.
“I couldn’t deal with them.” Aster is staring at the bags like they’re ghosts. “After you left. I walked past them every day for four days before I came after you, and I never once managed to pick one up.”
I stand there for a while looking at the wreckage of my own rage. It’s strange seeing it from the outside. I remember doing it and I remember why, and I also remember that I was a person who could not stop, and both of those are true.
Then I walk to the nearest bag and start pulling clothes out of it.
“What are you doing?” Aster asks.
“Unpacking.” I shake out a suit jacket and check it for damage, and there’s a smudge of driveway dirt across one shoulder that I rub at with my thumb until it comes off. “If we’re going to face whatever comes next, I want this house to feel like ours again. Not like a crime scene.”
So we unpack, the two of us, on our knees on the marble in the clothes we flew in.
It’s the strangest evening of my life, or it’s in the running.
Two weeks ago I was on this floor in the middle of the night making a sound I didn’t recognize, filling bag after bag with a man’s clothing because I could not think of anything else to do with my hands, and now that same man is kneeling next to me pairing his own shoes and asking me whether the gray one goes with the navy ones or the blacks.
It takes hours. The suits are wrinkled and some of them are badly wrinkled, and I insist on hanging every one properly, smoothing the fabric down, organizing them by color the way I used to before everything fell apart.
Aster works beside me putting shoes back on shelves and folding pocket squares, rebuilding the closet I took apart in one night with a box of garbage bags.
Neither of us says much. There’s something about the repetition of it, hanger after hanger, that makes talking unnecessary.
We used to be good at this, the not-talking.
Long drives, airports, the hour after a party when your face hurts from being pleasant at strangers.
Somewhere in the last year the silence between us stopped being comfortable and turned into a thing I had to get through, and I don’t know exactly when that happened, and tonight it isn’t happening.
At some point he starts humming without noticing he’s doing it and I let him get four bars in before I say anything, because I haven’t heard him do that in our house in about a year.
“I remember this one,” I say, holding up a charcoal jacket. “You wore it to the premiere. The night everything happened.”
He reaches for it. “I should probably burn that. The shirt already went in a hotel bin.”
“No.” I take it back and hang it carefully. “It’s just a jacket. She doesn’t get to ruin your clothes too.”
Around ten he goes and gets us both water without being asked, and hands me mine, and goes back to the shoes.
Close to midnight we find the watches. They’re at the bottom of the sixth bag, loose, because I didn’t bother with the boxes when I was throwing them in, and two of the faces are scratched now.
He picks one up and turns it over and I brace for something, an expression, a comment, anything.
“Huh,” he says, and puts it in the drawer.
That’s it. Forty thousand dollars of scratched watch and he says huh. A year ago he’d have called somebody about it before the end of the night.
By midnight the foyer is empty and the closets are full again. We stand in the bedroom, exhausted and somehow lighter than we’ve been in weeks.
“Come here,” I say.
Aster looks at me, uncertain.
“Come here,” I repeat, and this time I reach for him.
The first time in the cabin was desperate and furious, two people colliding after months of starving. This is not that. This is me choosing him with my eyes open, in our bedroom, in our own bed, knowing exactly what I’m doing and doing it anyway.
The room is exactly as I left it. That’s the thing I keep bumping into tonight. My book is still face-down on the nightstand at page two hundred and something, open to the page I was on when my phone went off, and I have no idea what that book is about anymore.
I turn on both bedside lamps, and then the one on the dresser as well. He notices me do it and doesn’t say anything about it, but the cabin was dark and the storm was dark and everything for a month has happened in half-light, and I want to see him and I want him to know I’m looking.
I undress him slowly. I kiss his chest as I push his shirt off, then his stomach as I unbutton his pants, and I get him completely naked and push him onto his back, and when he’s lying there looking up at me his eyes are wet.
“I don’t deserve this,” he whispers.
“Probably not.”
“You should hate me.”
“I tried. Turns out I’m not very good at it.”
I make love to him with the lights on, mapping his body the way he mapped mine in the cabin, every touch a promise I’m making with my hands because I’m not ready to make it with my mouth.
I kiss down his body, slow and deliberate, sucking a mark onto his hip before I take his cock in my hand and stroke it.
I kiss the head, lick a stripe up the underside, and then I stop, because I’m not letting him come yet.
I climb over him instead and straddle his hips.
I sink down onto him slowly, watching his face, and he fills me so perfectly that I have to bite my lip at the stretch.
I start riding him in slow rolls of my hips, and when I feel him getting close I stop completely and lean down to kiss him deep, my tongue in his mouth while I hold still.
He groans and his hips twitch up and I pin his wrists to the pillow above his head.
“Let me,” I say. “Let me show you.”
I start moving again, slower this time, riding him in long deep strokes and grinding my clit against him on every downstroke.
When he gets close again I stop, kiss him hard, and close my mouth over his nipple while I stay still on top of him.
He’s breathing hard underneath me and his whole body is asking for it.
“Flora, please,” he says when I start moving for the third time. “Please let me come.”
I keep riding him, speeding up just enough to get myself there.
I lean down and kiss him, then move to his neck while I keep his wrists pinned, and I’m soaked around him now, so I grind down harder and come with a moan, my walls clenching around him, and I still don’t let him finish.
I keep riding through my own orgasm, slower now, watching his face twist with the effort of holding back.
“Please,” he gasps. “Flora, I need to come.”
I lean down and bite his bottom lip and kiss him deep while I finally let myself move faster. I ride him hard and he comes with a broken groan, pulsing inside me while I kiss him through it.
Afterward I stay where I am, sprawled across his chest with all three lamps still burning.
“I’m not saying this fixes it,” I say quietly. “I’m saying I’m done pretending I can sleep in a different building from you.”
“I know.”
“I’m choosing to be here. With you. That has to count for something.”
“It counts for everything.” He pulls me closer against him. “It counts for everything, Flora. And I’m not confused about what tonight was.”
“Good.”
“I know exactly how much rope I’ve got,” he says into my hair. “Say it again.”
“Say what.”
“That you’re choosing to be here. Just say it one more time and then I’ll stop asking, I swear.”
“I’m choosing to be here.”
He doesn’t say anything after that. He just holds on, and after a while his breathing changes, and I lie in my own bed in my own house next to my own husband and feel something in my chest unclench that has been clenched since a Tuesday in a restaurant on our anniversary.
I don’t know how long we lie there. Long enough that the lamps start to feel too bright and neither of us gets up to do anything about it.
We’re almost asleep when his phone buzzes on the nightstand. Then again. Then a third time.
“Ignore it,” I murmur.
“It’s Dylan.” He reaches for the phone and frowns at the screen, and then his whole expression shifts. “Shit.”
“What?”
He shows me the messages.
Cecilia’s walking in Friday on some producer’s arm, apparently. She’s told people.
“Three days,” I say.
“On somebody’s arm.” He says it to the ceiling. “After what she said on television.”
“Good.” My voice comes out like steel and I don’t recognize it, and I like it. “Then she can watch us walk in together. She can see exactly how much damage her little stunt didn’t do.”
He looks at me for a long moment, and whatever he was going to say, he doesn’t say it. He pulls me back down against his chest, and neither of us says anything for a while.
“What are you going to wear,” he says eventually, into my hair.
“Green.”
He laughs, and I feel it move through his chest under my cheek, and it’s the first time either of us has laughed in this bed in longer than I want to count.
He knows exactly which dress. He bought it for me in the second year, in a shop I’d have walked past, and I’ve worn it to two things and both of them were his.
“Friday,” he says. “We face her Friday.”
“Together.”