3. Maren #3
“I know.” I’m not sure I do, but I say it anyway. “I’m not accusing you of anything. I just-” I pull back enough to look at him. His eyes are dark, wary. “It was strange. Seeing someone else where I’m supposed to be.”
“You’re right,” he says quietly. “It shouldn’t have happened. The photo, the, any of it.”
“It’s not even about what happened. It’s about what it looked like. What it felt like.”
He cups my face in his hands, thumb tracing my cheekbone. “I’m sorry.”
“I know.”
“I’ll talk to Rachel. Set clearer boundaries.”
“Okay.”
He kisses me then, soft and achingly tender. I kiss him back, and for a moment everything else falls away. The doubts, the distance, the months of loneliness. It’s just us, the way it used to be. The way it’s supposed to be.
When we finally break apart, I’m breathless, and his eyes are dark with wanting, and the couch suddenly seems very small.
“Bed?” he asks, voice rough.
“Yeah.” I stand, pulling him with me. “Bed.”
We don’t make it upstairs gracefully. He catches me on the landing, laughing into my neck, and I have to remind him we have neighbors and a banister older than our marriage.
By the time we reach the bedroom he’s tugged the Yale sweatshirt off over my head, and then he just stops and looks at me, and I let him, even though being looked at like this after months of being looked past makes my throat go tight.
“There you are,” he says, and the softness in it undoes me.
I kiss him before he can say anything else that’ll make me cry. He kisses me back slow and deep, walking me toward the bed until the backs of my knees hit the mattress.
We undress each other the way you do when you already know the map.
He remembers I’m ticklish under my ribs.
I remember the spot at the base of his spine that makes him exhale hard.
It’s old and it’s brand new at once, both of us careful, both of us a little afraid the other will vanish if we move too fast.
He lays me back and just looks, the way he used to before looking became something he did on his way out the door. Then his mouth is on my throat, working lower, and he closes his teeth around one nipple until my hips come up off the mattress on their own.
“There she is,” he murmurs, like he’s found something he’d misplaced.
His hand slides down my stomach, slow enough that I could stop him. I don’t. When his fingers push into me I’m already soaked, humiliatingly ready, and the sound he makes against my skin is low and filthy.
“Christ, you’re wet.” His thumb finds the spot that makes me jolt, works it in slow circles while he watches me try not to make noise. “You going to let me hear you, or are we still pretending?”
“Less talking.” I get the words out and he laughs, pleased with himself, and curls his fingers until talking stops being an option for either of us.
He works me open like he’s got all night and a point to prove, and I clamp a hand over my own mouth out of eleven years of habit even though there’s no one in this house to hear.
When I come it’s fast and stupidly grateful, clenching around his hand, and he strokes me through it until I’m pushing at his wrist, too sensitive, half-crying for reasons that have nothing to do with how good it feels.
“Up,” I tell him, hauling him over me, done being handled. “Now.”
“So demanding.” But he’s already notching against me, already pressing in, and the drag of it pulls a noise out of me I haven’t made in a year. He curses into my hair. “Fuck. I forgot what you do to me.”
He takes me slow anyway, deep and patient, both my wrists caught in one of his hands, watching me like he’s waiting to be forgiven. For a while there’s no magazine photo, no cold half of the bed. Just his weight and his mouth at my throat and the low, sure roll of his hips.
I come a second time with my fingers laced through his, and he follows a beat later, shaking, pressing the word sorry into my collarbone so quietly I almost lose it.
After, he holds on. He tucks me under his chin and traces slow circles low on my back, and I lie there listening to his heart and letting myself pretend.
Pretend this is who we are now. Pretend that tomorrow he’ll still be here when I wake up.
I wake up to an empty pillow and a cold bed.
For a moment, I think I dreamed it all. The grocery store, the cooking, the couch. The way he held me, the way he kissed me, the way he said let me try.
Then I hear it. His voice, low and tense, drifting up from downstairs.
“I told you not to call me today, Rachel. I don’t care what they want, no. No. Handle it yourself for once.”
I lie there in the dark, staring at the ceiling, and wait.
The front door doesn’t open. His footsteps come back upstairs. The bed dips as he slides in behind me, arms wrapping around my waist, lips pressing against my shoulder.
“Sorry,” he murmurs. “Didn’t mean to wake you.”
“You didn’t.”
“Go back to sleep.”
I close my eyes. His breathing evens out. He stays.
But I can’t stop thinking about Rachel’s name in his mouth, even now. Even here. Even on his first real Sunday home in months.
I can’t stop thinking about how fast she called when she realized he wasn’t answering.