4. Rowan
— ? —
Rowan
My brother has been talking about the same forty minutes of his life for two hours.
Not in order. That’s the thing about Simon, he doesn’t tell you a story, he circles one, coming back around to the same three or four points from slightly different angles, and every angle leaves him standing in a better light than the last. He made mistakes.
Marriage is two people. She checked out first. Mom thinks she’s being dramatic.
Somewhere back around the second hour I stopped hearing the words and started hearing the shape of it, and the shape is a man doing damage control on a story he’s already lost.
Elise stopped listening long before I did.
I’ve been watching her do it. There’s a thing she does now that she didn’t used to, a way of turning her head toward the window and going somewhere else while her body stays in the seat, and every time she does it I want to put my fist through something.
Because I know when she learned it. I watched her learn it, over about five years, at family dinners and Christmases and her own birthday, while my brother talked over her and her face slowly stopped bothering to react.
“You could try being civil for three days,” Simon says.
“That’s the first thing you’ve said today that sounded good.”
There it is. Dry and quick, and it lands, and he doesn’t even know he’s bleeding.
She’s still in there. Four months out from the worst thing that’s ever happened to her and she’s still the fastest person in any room she’s in, and my brother stood next to that for five years and thought he’d settled.
I turn the laugh into a breath through my nose. It doesn’t entirely work.
Here’s what I know that he doesn’t.
I know she walked past the open passenger door in the driveway this morning and got in the back without a word, and that he’ll spend the whole drive thinking she did it to punish him.
She didn’t. Sitting next to him for three hours would have cost her something and she’s done spending herself on him.
I know she’s wearing the green dress because she wore it the day she cleaned out her desk when she left the office, and that she has no idea I remember that.
I know that six weeks ago she called me at two in the morning about a coffee mug, and apologized eleven times during that call for wasting my time, and that when I hung up I sat on the edge of my bed in the dark for twenty minutes because I couldn’t work out where to put what I was feeling.
And I know that three weeks ago I sat on her couch with my arm along the back of it, close enough that she could have leaned into me, and said the truest thing I’ve said out loud in five years, and neither of us has mentioned it since.
I’ve been waiting a long time to be allowed to be this angry on your behalf.
She didn’t move away. That’s the part I’ve been carrying around for three weeks like a stone in my shoe. She didn’t move away, and she didn’t say anything either, and I’ve spent twenty-one days deciding whether that was an answer or a stay of execution.
I put my hand on the seat between us somewhere past the county line.
That’s all. Palm down, fingers spread, close enough to be a question and vague enough to be nothing.
I’ve spent years being good at this. Reading a room, reading a face, knowing exactly how much to offer and when to pull it back.
I was very good at it and I was good at it because none of it ever mattered.
It matters now. My heart is going like I’m twenty-two.
She doesn’t move.
Then I put my hand on her knee, and she still doesn’t move, and something in my chest goes quiet and lethal and certain.
I want to be honest about what happens next, because I don’t get to tell myself a flattering story about it later.
I could have waited. Three days at the cabin, a hundred opportunities, no brother four feet away with his eyes coming up into the mirror every thirty seconds. Waiting would have been smarter. Waiting would have been the decent thing.
I didn’t want to be decent. I’ve been decent for five years.
I was decent at their engagement party when I stood up and gave a toast and watched her laugh at something he said.
I was decent at the wedding. I was decent every single time I sat across a table from the two of them and watched her get quieter, and being decent has never once gotten me anything except a front-row seat to a woman I want being slowly worn down by a man who couldn’t be bothered.
So no. Not waiting.
And there was something else I’d been chewing on since the two a.m. call.
She kept saying she was fine. Eleven apologies and about six I’m fines, and every one of them was a door closing.
She’s been fine at everyone for four months.
Fine at her lawyer, fine at her mother, fine at whoever’s left of her friends.
Fine is what she’s got instead of a wall.
I wanted to see what was behind it.
That’s the whole reason I stopped.
It’s not a nice reason. I got her right to the edge with my brother’s eyes in the mirror and her hand flat on her lap holding her dress down and her breathing gone to pieces, and I took my hand back and wiped it on the inside of her thigh and sat there like nothing had happened, because I needed to know whether she’d come after it.
She sat next to me for the next hour vibrating like a struck wire and she didn’t say one word about it.
God, she’s stubborn. I’d forgotten. Or I hadn’t forgotten, I’d just stopped being allowed to notice, which is a different thing.
At the rest stop Simon slams the door hard enough to rock the car and stalks off toward the building, and I know his routine well enough to time it, and I say so, and she says ten minutes and something in her voice has changed.
Say it, I tell her.
And she does. She asks me why, and I tell her the truth, which I hadn’t planned on. Then she looks at the glass doors and does the math and says, then finish it.
Here’s what I don’t say to her afterward, while she’s putting herself back together with her hands shaking so badly she can’t get her dress straight and her face wrecked in a way that ninety seconds isn’t going to fix:
I’d have taken twenty years of this. Any version. Any terms. Four months ago I was a man who’d made his peace with sitting across a table from her twice a year and being a good uncle to children she was never going to have with him.
I don’t say it because she’d take it as a promise and she isn’t ready to be promised anything. She’d hear forever and start looking for the trapdoor, because the last man who told her forever spent a year in bed with her best friend and then told her she was imagining things.
So I hand her back her hair. Left side. And I get out my phone and sit there like a man who’s been waiting fifteen minutes for his brother to buy coffee, and she says you’re unbelievable, and she has no idea.
Simon comes out with two cups and hands one over his shoulder without looking.
He doesn’t notice her face. I watch him not notice it. Her mouth is swollen and her throat is blotched red and her eyes are still glassy and he takes the lid off his coffee and blows across it and starts talking about the county road.
I’ve spent months furious with my brother for what he did at the end.
Sitting here watching him look directly at her and see a woman who’s a little warm because it’s a hot day, I find I’m angrier about all the years before it.
The affair was one decision, repeated for a year.
This is what he actually did. He had her, every day, and he never once bothered to look at her hard enough to see anything.
“You two are being weird,” he says.
Elise doesn’t blink. “We’ve been in a car with you for four hours. Weird is a low bar.”
He drops it. Of course he drops it. But his eyes come up into the mirror twice more before the exit, and the second time he holds them there a beat too long, and I make a note of it.
He isn’t smart enough to work it out on his own.
He is absolutely petty enough to notice.
We pull back onto the highway with an hour of light left and Simon’s picked his subject for the last leg, which is himself, and how reasonable he’s being about all of this. I stop tracking it around the on-ramp.
Elise has her window cracked. The wind pulls a piece of her hair loose and she doesn’t fix it. She’s got that after-look, loose in the shoulders, still flushed, and she catches me watching and doesn’t turn away this time. That’s new. An hour ago she’d have gone to the window.
Her hand leaves her lap and settles on my thigh.
Just like that. No warning. No look. The pads of her fingers rest there first, light, almost absent. Then her palm flattens and she drags it higher, slow and steady, until it settles directly over my cock.
I go still.
She doesn’t say a word. Just stares out at the road ahead like she’s bored out of her mind, thumb brushing once across the denim, then again.
The pressure is deliberate. She gives me the same pace I used on her earlier.
Easy, unhurried, making a point. My cock thickens under her hand before I can stop it.
Simon’s voice cuts through the quiet. “I figure we start with the upstairs bedrooms, they’ll be the worst. Get the big stuff out to the truck first, then the boxes. I already told the realtor when to come, so we don’t have a lot of slack.”
I nod at the rearview mirror when his eyes flick up. My face stays blank. Or I hope it does. Elise’s hand curves more firmly around the shape of me, stroking once from base to head through the jeans like she has all the time in the world.
Jesus Christ.