3. Maya #2
This is the one language we’ve never lost. The one place where we still connect, still understand each other, still work. Seven years of marriage, and his kiss still makes my head spin. His hands still know exactly where to touch me to make me forget why I was angry.
He drags me against him, his hands sliding into my hair, and I’m already yanking at his shirt, buttons popping, fabric tearing at the seams. We fall back onto the bed in a tangle of limbs and gasping breaths.
The fight is still in my blood. I’m furious with him, with Amelia, with every night he chose work over us, but my body doesn’t care.
It wants. It aches. I hate that the wanting wins.
I bite his bottom lip hard enough to make him hiss. He answers by dragging his teeth along the side of my neck, not gentle. His hands shove my dress up to my waist. I scratch my nails down his back, feeling the skin give under them. He curses into my mouth and pushes my thighs wider with his knee.
“You always do this,” I say, voice rough. “You make me so angry and then you touch me like this and I still want you.”
He doesn’t answer with words. He pushes two fingers inside me without warning and I arch off the bed with a muffled sound. Chloe is asleep down the hall. I press my forearm over my mouth to stay quiet. He curls his fingers and I bite down on my own skin instead.
He pulls his fingers out and replaces them with his cock in one hard thrust. I rake my nails down his sides and he groans, hips snapping forward.
We move like we’re still arguing. Fast. Rough.
Teeth, nails, the slap of skin. He grips my hips hard enough to bruise and I twist underneath him, not trying to get away, just needing to feel the strength of him.
I wrap my legs around his waist and dig my heels into his back. Every thrust drags a sound out of me that I swallow against his shoulder. He bites the curve of my breast through my bra, then tugs the cup down and sucks hard enough to leave a mark. I fist the sheets with my free hand and hold on.
“Show me,” I manage between clenched teeth. “If this is all we have left, then show me.”
“You’re everything,” he breathes against my mouth, and even now, even furious, I notice that word is as close as he ever comes.
He shifts his grip and pulls me up to meet every thrust. The angle changes and I see stars. My head thrashes against the pillow. He leans down and kisses me like he’s trying to crawl inside my skin, teeth clicking, tongues sliding. I bite his tongue in return and he thrusts harder.
I come with a choked cry against his neck, body locking tight around him.
He follows a few strokes later, face buried in my hair, hips grinding deep as he empties inside me.
We stay locked together, breathing hard, sweat cooling on our skin.
The anger hasn’t gone anywhere. It just burned hotter for a few minutes.
“She has to go,” I whisper into the darkness. “As soon as she’s back on her feet. That’s non-negotiable.”
“She will.”
“Promise me, Oliver.”
“I promise.”
I close my eyes. Let myself drift toward sleep.
But at 3 a.m., I wake to an empty bed.
Oliver’s side is cold. The bathroom is dark. He’s not here.
I sit up, listening. The house is quiet, too quiet, and then I hear it.
Laughter.
Low and musical, drifting up from somewhere downstairs.
I slip on my robe and pad to the stairs, my feet silent on the carpet. The kitchen light is on, casting a warm glow across the hallway floor.
Oliver sits at the island, whiskey glass in hand.
Amelia is across from him in silk pajamas that leave very little to the imagination, her blonde hair tumbling over her shoulders in artful waves, her posture relaxed and inviting at once.
She’s leaning toward him, one elbow on the counter, chin propped on her hand.
“Remember that summer in the Hamptons?” she’s saying. “When you pushed me in the pool?”
“You were being insufferable. You told some girl I couldn’t dance.”
“You couldn’t dance.” She tilts her head, voice dropping low and intimate. “I’m sure you’ve improved since then.”
Oliver laughs. Not the polite laugh he gives at business functions or the tired laugh he offers when Chloe tells one of her knock-knock jokes. The real laugh. The unguarded one. The one that crinkles the corners of his eyes and leaves his whole face young and carefree.
The one I thought was reserved for me.
Something cold and ugly coils in my chest.
I step into the doorway. Clear my throat.
Oliver looks up, the laugh dying on his lips. “Maya. Hey. Couldn’t sleep?”
“Clearly neither could you.”
“We were just catching up. Amelia was telling me about…”
“It’s after three in the morning.”
Amelia rises smoothly, all graceful limbs and practiced smiles.
“I’m so sorry if we disturbed you. I couldn’t sleep either, came down for some water, and Oliver was already here.
We just got to talking.” She shrugs delicately, the silk of her pajamas shifting with the movement. “Old times, you know how it is.”
“I don’t, actually. I’ve never heard any of these old times. Not once in seven years.”
Her smile tightens, almost imperceptibly. A crack in the performance. “Well, we’ll have to fix that. I have so many stories about young Oliver. He was quite the troublemaker back then.”
“I’m sure he was.”
She moves past me toward the stairs, close enough that I catch a whiff of her perfume, expensive and floral, a scent no one wears to bed unless she’s expecting company.
At the doorway, she pauses. Looks back at Oliver over my shoulder.
“Sleep well,” she says. Something in her tone makes it sound like more than a simple goodnight. Like a promise. Or a threat.
Then she’s gone, silk pajamas whispering against her thighs as she climbs the stairs.
I don’t move from the doorway. Oliver doesn’t move from his stool.
“It’s not what you’re thinking,” he says.
“You don’t know what I’m thinking.”
“I can guess. And it’s not that. She’s an old friend. We were just talking.”
“At 3 a.m. In the dark. While your wife slept upstairs. Less than an hour after you were inside me.”
“I couldn’t sleep. She couldn’t sleep. We both ended up in the kitchen. That’s all it was.”
“She was in silk pajamas, Oliver. Practically see-through. And perfume. Who wears perfume to bed?”
“I didn’t notice.”
“Bullshit.”
His jaw tightens. “What do you want me to say?”
“I want you to say you understand why this looks bad. I want you to say you’ll set some boundaries. I want you to say that you won’t be having intimate little catch-up sessions in the middle of the night with a woman who’s living in our house and wearing lingerie.”
“Fine. I’ll be more careful about how things look.”
“That’s not good enough.”
“Then what is? What do you actually want from me, Maya?”
I don’t have an answer. Or rather, I have an answer, but I know he won’t give it to me.
Send her away. Tell her to leave. Choose me.
But he’s already made it clear that’s not on the table. That his loyalty to an old friend he hasn’t seen in a decade outweighs his loyalty to the wife who’s stood beside him for seven years.
“Come to bed,” I say finally, because I’m too tired to fight anymore. “It’s late.”
He finishes his whiskey in one long swallow, sets the glass in the sink, and follows me up the stairs.
In bed, he reaches for me. I let him pull me close, let his arm drape across my waist, let him press a kiss to my shoulder.
“You’re everything,” he mumbles against my skin, already half-asleep. “You and Chloe. Everything.”
I don’t answer.
At 6 a.m., still awake, I watch the sunrise paint the ceiling in shades of pink and gold.
Oliver is asleep beside me, breathing deep and even, completely untroubled. He slid into bed at 3:30 and was unconscious within minutes, like he doesn’t have a care in the world.
I’ve been lying here for hours, replaying the scene in the kitchen.
The way she leaned toward him. The way he laughed. The intimacy of it: two people sharing memories I’m not a part of, a history that excludes me entirely.
She looked at me like I was the intruder. Like this was her house, her husband, her life.
Like I was the one who didn’t belong.