2. Elise
— ? —
Elise
Rowan’s knee has been against mine for the last forty minutes.
Not pressing. Just there, warm through the thin cotton of my dress, the outside of his thigh against the outside of mine on a bench seat wide enough for three people and currently holding two.
I could move. I’ve thought about moving roughly nine hundred times since we passed the last exit.
Instead I’ve been sitting very still, watching the highway unspool past the window, listening to my almost-ex-husband explain to me why our marriage failed.
“I’m just saying,” Simon says, “that a marriage is two people. That’s all I’m saying.”
“You’ve said it four times.”
“Because you’re not hearing it.” His hands flex on the steering wheel. “I made mistakes. I’ve never denied that. But you checked out years before I did anything, Elise. You want to talk about who left first, we can talk about who left first.”
Beside me, Rowan’s knee doesn’t move.
Four months ago I sat on Lilia’s couch and let her tuck a blanket around me while my whole life came apart.
Four months ago I’d have taken this bait, would’ve listed every dinner I ate alone and every anniversary he forgot and every time I asked him what was wrong and got nothing back.
I’d have fought him for the truth like the truth was something worth winning.
Now I look out the window at the pines going by and think about how much longer this drive’s going to take.
“Okay,” I say.
“Okay what?”
“Okay, you’ve said your piece. Are we done?”
His jaw works. He hates this more than he hated the screaming. When I screamed, he had something to push against.
He’d wanted me up front, too. Made a whole thing of it in the driveway, standing there holding the passenger door open like a man doing me a favor, and I walked past him and got in the back without a word.
Then Rowan got in beside me, and Simon stood in the road looking at the two of us through the window.
“So I’m the chauffeur now,” he’d said.
“You’re the one who wanted to drive.”
I didn’t have to come. The cabin isn’t mine, the grandmother was never mine, and in four months’ worth of paperwork the marriage won’t be mine either.
But Patricia had already decided I was too fragile to sit in a room with her son and stay civil, and I’d rather set myself on fire than prove her right.
That’s the reason I gave myself, anyway.
The other one was sitting six inches to my left with his knee against mine, and I wasn’t ready to look at it straight.
Four months is enough time to learn a lot of things. I learned my rental has a radiator that clanks at three in the morning and that I don’t mind it. I learned I own eleven mugs and only ever use two. I learned a person can sign the same page in eight different places and feel absolutely nothing.
I also learned that Rowan Maine answers his phone.
He came the day I moved out. Showed up in an old shirt with his sleeves shoved up and carried the mattress down two flights by himself because he said a mattress is a two-person job and he wasn’t going to make me be the second person.
When I thanked him, standing in the middle of a rental I hadn’t chosen surrounded by boxes I hadn’t opened, he looked around at all of it and said, you should never have been in that house in the first place.
Not the house. He wasn’t talking about the house.
He answered at two in the morning six weeks ago when I found one of Simon’s mugs in a box I’d already taped shut and cried about it like an idiot. He stayed on the phone for an hour. He didn’t once tell me to get over it.
And three weeks ago he sat on my couch helping me sort the last of the paperwork, and at some point his arm ended up along the back of the cushions, and I was close enough that if I’d leaned back even slightly I’d have been against him.
Neither of us moved for a long time. Then he said, low, like it cost him something, I’ve been waiting a long time to be allowed to be this angry on your behalf.
I didn’t move away. He didn’t take his arm back.
We haven’t talked about it since. But it happened, and we both know it happened, and it’s been sitting between us for three weeks like a lit match nobody’s willing to drop.
“Mom thinks you’re being dramatic about all this,” Simon says.
There it is.
“Does she?”
“She says you’re rushing into something you’ll regret. Her words.” He checks the mirror, checking for damage. “She’s known you years, Elise. She’s not your enemy.”
Patricia has known me five years and has never once, in those years, said my name without making it sound like a spelling error. But Simon’s always been able to hold two things in his head at the same time as long as one of them makes him look good.
“Patricia doesn’t get a vote in my marriage,” I say.
“So it’s still a marriage now?”
“It’s a legal formality with a bad memory attached to it.”
Beside me, Rowan exhales through his nose. Almost a laugh. Simon’s eyes go to the mirror and back.
“You could try being civil for three days,” he mutters. “That’s all. Three days, we clear out the cabin, the realtor lists it, we’re done. Then you never have to look at me again.”
“That’s the first thing you’ve said today that sounded good.”
He turns the radio on. Some station playing something with too much guitar. It’s the sound of Simon losing an argument, and I’ve heard it enough times to recognize it.
The highway goes flat and empty ahead of us. Farmland, a silo, a billboard for a diner forty miles out. Nothing but road.
And Rowan’s hand comes to rest on the seat between us.
Palm down, fingers spread, the side of his little finger just barely against the outside of my thigh where my dress ends. It’s nothing. It’s a man putting his hand down on a car seat. It’s the least remarkable thing that’s happened in the last four hours.
Heat goes through me like I’ve been dropped in water.
I don’t look at him. I keep my eyes on the road ahead and my hands folded in my lap and I don’t look at him, because if I look at him he’ll see my face and I don’t know what my face is doing.
A minute passes. Two.
His hand moves to my knee.
Just above it, actually. The bare skin where the hem ends, warm palm and the weight of it, and it isn’t accidental and both of us know it isn’t accidental.
It’s the same hand that carried a mattress down two flights of stairs.
It’s attached to the same arm that stayed along the back of my couch for an hour while I pretended to read a settlement agreement.
Simon’s talking about exit numbers. Something about whether we take the county road or stay on the highway another twenty minutes, whether the county road still floods, whether we should’ve left earlier.
I could move my leg.
That’s the whole thing, right there, the entire decision, and it takes up about a quarter of a second and the rest of my life at the same time.
My leg’s right here. All I have to do is shift it three inches toward the door and this stops, and he’ll take his hand back and neither of us will ever mention it, the way we haven’t mentioned the couch.
I don’t move my leg.
His thumb starts a slow circle against the inside of my knee.
“Elise.” Simon’s voice.
“What?”
“County road or highway?”
“Whatever’s faster.”
“That’s not an answer.”
“Then take the highway.”
The circles keep going. Slow and patient and completely unhurried, like he’s got all afternoon, like there isn’t a man four feet in front of him who used to be my husband and technically still is. My whole body’s gone quiet and hot and narrowed down to one square inch of skin above my knee.
His palm slides higher.
Under the hem now, up the outside of my thigh, and the dress rides up an inch, then another. I put my hand flat on my lap to hold the fabric where it is.
Not because Simon can see. He can’t. Between the seat backs and the angle and the fact that he’s driving, everything below our shoulders might as well be in another car.
It’s the mirror. That’s the only thing that reaches us back here, that narrow rectangle with his eyes in it, and it’s enough. He looks up into it every thirty or forty seconds the way anyone does, without thinking, and every single time he does it my heart stops.
Simon changes lanes.
Rowan’s hand goes still, high on my thigh, and waits.
Then it moves inward, and I have a choice to make, and I make it. I shift. Just slightly, just enough, letting my knees fall a fraction apart so his hand can reach where it’s going.
I let him in. That’s what it is. I want to be very clear with myself about it, even now, even with my pulse going in my throat and the highway noise filling the car. Nobody’s doing anything to me. I moved. I’m the one who moved.
Rowan’s fingers slide higher under my dress, slow and sure, until two of them press against the thin fabric of my underwear.
He rubs once, feeling how wet I already am, then hooks the edge aside and sinks both fingers straight into my pussy.
The stretch makes my breath catch but I keep my hand flat on my lap, holding the fabric down.
He works them deeper without any hurry, filling me until they’re buried to the knuckle. I shift my hips back against his hand on purpose and spread my knees wider on the seat. My cunt gives around him and I feel the slick starting to coat his fingers on the next slow pull.
Simon glances up into the rearview. I hold my face completely still. Just blank and tired. His eyes drop back down to the road.
Rowan leans in, mouth right against my ear, voice low enough that it doesn’t carry.
“All those years and you’re already this wet for me. Didn’t know you could be this filthy on the way to clean out that cabin.”
His fingers start moving in steady strokes while his thumb settles on my clit.
He rubs in tight circles, like he’s testing what makes me react.
Every time he curls his fingers I have to lock my jaw to stay quiet.
I can feel how soaked I’m getting. It makes soft, wet sounds with every thrust of his hand.
Simon speaks again, irritation clear in his voice. “Elise. You still got the house keys in your bag or did you leave them in the glove box again?”
Rowan angles his hand and rubs that spot inside me hard right as I answer.
“They’re in my bag,” I say, keeping it level. “Left pocket.”
Simon mutters and changes lanes. His eyes flick to the rearview again. I meet his gaze and hold it, eyebrows up like I’m just waiting for him to finish talking. Nothing on my face gives anything away.
The second he looks away, Rowan pushes his fingers deeper and works my clit faster.
I roll my hips once, pushing back onto his hand because I want more of it.
My thighs start to shake. I clamp them tight around his wrist, trapping his hand there while my pussy flutters hard around his fingers. I’m right on the edge.
He slows his movements just enough to pull me back from it, then starts again, harder. His thumb circles faster, fingers thrusting in a steady rhythm that makes me clench every time they sink in. I clamp my thighs around his hand again, tighter this time, because I’m getting close fast.
The moan tries to come out. I turn it into a rough cough at the last second and reach for the water bottle in the cup holder. My fingers shake as I unscrew the cap. I take a long drink, swallowing while Rowan keeps his fingers buried deep inside me, stroking slow and deliberate.
He doesn’t wait long. The second I put the bottle back he starts fucking me with his fingers again, thumb rubbing tight and relentless over my clit. I’m right there again in seconds. My cunt is squeezing him on every stroke and I can feel how close I am.
Then he stops.
He pulls his fingers out of me slowly, all the way, and wipes them across the inside of my thigh. He drags the wetness there for a second, then tugs my underwear back into place and smooths my dress down over my knees.
Rowan’s other hand stays resting on his knee the whole time, casual and visible. My pussy is still throbbing and empty, right on the edge.
I sit there with my heart slamming and my thighs shaking and my face on fire, staring at the back of Simon’s headrest, at the billboard for the diner sliding past, at my own hands in my lap, and I can’t get my breathing to level out.
My dress is smoothed. Anyone looking at me would see a woman sitting quietly in a car.
I’ve never wanted to scream so much in my life.
He did that on purpose. He got me right up to the edge and then he put me down and stepped back and let me sit in it, and the worst part, the absolute worst part, is that I know exactly why.
He’s making a point. He’s telling me something without saying a word, and the something is: I can do that to you, and I can stop, and you’ll still be thinking about it in an hour.
He’s right. That’s what’s unbearable. He’s completely right.
I risk one look sideways.
He’s watching the fields go by with his arm on the door frame and his jaw relaxed, for all the world a man enduring a long drive with his brother and his brother’s wife. He doesn’t look at me. He doesn’t need to.
In the mirror, Simon’s eyes flick up. Find me. Hold a second longer than they need to.
“What?” I say.
“Nothing.” He looks back at the road.
The blinker starts ticking.