29. Rhodes #2
“I’ve got you.”
“The hotel. We can-”
“Are you sure?”
She pulls back just enough to meet my eyes. Her lips are swollen. Her breath is ragged.
“If I weren’t,” she says, “I wouldn’t be standing in this hallway.”
The hotel is three blocks away. We make it in silence, walking fast, her hand locked in mine. The elevator takes forever. The hallway stretches on for miles.
The door barely shuts before she’s on me, shoving me back into it, her mouth hard and furious. This isn’t the careful reunion I’ve rehearsed on a hundred weak nights. She kisses me like she’s still angry, and she’s earned every bit of it.
“Maren,” I start, and she bites my lip hard enough to sting, and whatever I meant to say is gone.
“Don’t.” She’s already working my shirt open, palms cold and flat on my chest, and she shoves the jacket off my shoulders like it offends her. “Don’t talk, don’t apologize. Shut up and let me have this.”
So I let her run it. She walks me backward to the bed and I go, because tonight the pace is hers and I’ve learned the hard way what it costs to take what isn’t mine to take.
I get the zipper of the green dress down and it pools at her feet.
She stands there in the low light, chin up, daring me to look away.
I don’t. I take in the new softness at her hips, the silver marks low on her belly she earned bringing my son into the world, and I put my mouth to them before I can think better of it.
The sound she makes is filthy and involuntary and it goes straight through me.
She fists my hair and drags me lower, and I set my teeth to the inside of her thigh and then give her exactly what she won’t say out loud, until her knees buckle and she’s cursing at the ceiling.
She doesn’t let me stay there. She hauls me up, shoves me flat on my back, and climbs on, pinning my wrists to the mattress like she doesn’t trust my hands. “Mine tonight,” she says. “All of it.”
“Yours,” I tell her, and when she sinks down onto me we both stop breathing. Then she starts to move, hard and selfish, taking exactly what she needs and daring me to complain.
“Look at me,” she orders, so I do, and I keep looking as she shatters above me, my name cracking apart in her mouth. I grip her hips hard enough to bruise and follow her under, a decade of guilt tangled into it that I couldn’t explain if she asked.
After, she doesn’t curl into me the way she used to.
She rolls onto her back, one arm flung over her eyes, careful not to let any part of her touch any part of me now that it’s done.
I stare at the ceiling and let the truth land.
This fixed nothing. If anything it’s worse, because now we both know the one thing that never broke.
Our heads don’t trust each other. Our bodies never got the message.
I wake to gray light filtering through curtains I forgot to close.
Maren is still asleep beside me. Her hair is tangled on the pillow. Her face is soft, unguarded in a way I almost never get to see.
I watch her for a moment. Just a moment. Then I get up, careful not to wake her, and walk to the window.
Boston sprawls below me. Early morning traffic. A jogger on the sidewalk. A city waking up to an ordinary Sunday.
Nothing feels ordinary.
Last night plays through my mind in fragments. Her hands in my hair. The sound of my name in her mouth. The way she held on like she was afraid to let go.
The way she cried after, silently, and wouldn’t tell me why.
I hear the sheets rustle behind me.
“Hey,” she says, voice rough with sleep.
I turn. “Hey.”
She’s sitting up, clutching the sheet to her chest. Her eyes are wary again. The walls are back.
I expected this. I prepared for it.
That doesn’t mean it doesn’t hurt.
“I should get home,” she says. “Before Rowan wakes up. Camila stayed with him, but-”
“I’ll drive you.”
“You don’t have to.”
“I know.” I don’t move toward her. Don’t crowd. “I want to.”
She studies me. Whatever she’s looking for, she doesn’t seem to find it this time.
“What does this mean?” she asks quietly.
I take a breath. Let it out slowly.
“I don’t know.”
“That’s not-” She stops. Presses her lips together. “I thought you’d have something. Some plan.”
“For what?”
“For us. For what happens now.”
I walk back to the bed. Sit on the edge, far enough to give her space. “It doesn’t have to mean anything tonight.”
Hurt flickers across her face. Or anger.
“So you can just sleep with me and leave?”
“That’s not what I said.”
“That’s what it sounds like.”
“Maren.” I wait until she looks at me. “I’m not leaving. But I’m also not going to treat last night like it fixed something. We don’t work that way.”
She flinches like I’ve hit her.
And I realize, she expected me to push. Expected me to assume we were back together, that sex meant reconciliation, that I’d wake up and start making plans for our future.
Part of her wanted me to.
Part of her wanted to be mad at me for it.
“I don’t know what I’m doing,” she says, and her voice cracks. “For a few hours, it felt easy. Being yours again. And I hate that. I hate how easy it was to forget everything.”
“You didn’t forget.”
“I did. I forgot what it felt like when you wouldn’t come home, forgot crying in the bathroom so you wouldn’t hear me. I forgot-” She stops. Swallows hard. “I let myself pretend we could just pick up where we left off.”
“We can’t.”
“I know.”
“But we can start somewhere new.”
She looks at me. Her eyes are wet, but she’s not crying. “What does that even mean?”
“I don’t know yet. I just know I’m not going to disappear because we slept together. And I’m not going to assume we’re fixed because we slept together. I’m going to keep showing up for Rowan. I’m going to keep showing up for you. And we’re going to figure this out one day at a time.”
She doesn’t say anything. Just sits there, the sheet clutched in her hands, looking at me like I’m the most terrifying thing in her world.
Maybe I am.
“I should get dressed,” she finally says.
“Okay.”
I give her privacy. Stand by the window while she finds her clothes. Watch the city wake up while she puts herself back together.
When she’s ready, I grab my keys.
We walk to the car in silence. The drive to Jamaica Plain takes fifteen minutes. Neither of us speaks.
When I pull up outside her building, she reaches for the door handle.
“I’ll text you about pickup tomorrow,” she says.
“Okay.”
For a second I think she’s going to say something else, about last night, about us, about the impossible knot we’ve tied ourselves into. She doesn’t.
She gets out. Walks up the steps. Lets herself in without looking back.
I sit in my parked car for a long time, staring at the building where my son is waking up, where the woman I never stopped loving just walked away from me again.
I meant what I told her. I’m not going to disappear. I’m not going to pretend last night fixed us.
But I don’t know how to prove that to someone who’s already braced for me to break her heart a second time. I don’t know if there’s a version of this where we both come out whole.
I start the car.
And I drive back to an empty hotel room, carrying the smell of her on my skin and no idea what happens next.
My phone rings before I’ve gotten the key card out of my wallet. Diane. She never calls this late unless something’s on fire.
“Rhodes.” Her voice has the flat, careful tone she uses right before she wrecks my night. “Rachel resurfaced today.”
The name lands like a dropped glass. I haven’t heard it out loud in three years. “Resurfaced how.”
“She filed. Wrongful termination and a list of things her lawyer knows won’t hold up.” A pause. “That’s not the part that should worry you. The part that should worry you is that the same lawyer spent this afternoon shopping her story to two outlets. An insider account of the Calloway marriage.”
I sit down on the edge of the hotel bed and feel the old cold slide down my spine.
She has no case. Diane’s right about that.
But a case was never the point. The point is the noise.
Rachel gets to stand in front of the same cameras that made Maren a punchline once and sell her version of all of it, the affair that never happened and the man she says ruined her.
She gets to drag Maren back into the exact hell she clawed her way out of.
And if one reporter looks hard enough at where I’ve spent the last two weeks, they’ll find a flower shop in Jamaica Plain. And a three-year-old with my eyes.
“What do you want to do?” Diane asks.
For three years I wanted a reason to fight for something. Rachel just handed me one. It’s the last one I’d have chosen.
“Nothing yet,” I say. “Don’t engage. I need to think.” I hang up before she can argue, and I sit there a long time, because I already know the next thing I have to do, and it’s the thing I want to do least.
I have to tell Maren.