7. Elise
— ? —
Elise
Simon is gone when I come down in the morning.
Rowan is in the back bedroom taking a bedframe apart with an Allen key.
I stand in the doorway for a second watching him do it, sleeves shoved up, one bolt already out and set on the windowsill in a neat little row, and then I close the door behind me.
“You had no right,” I say.
He doesn’t look up. “Good morning.”
“You don’t get to decide what I’m doing this for.”
“I didn’t decide anything about what you’re doing.” He fits the key into the next bolt. “I decided what I’m doing.”
“That’s very neat.”
“It’s not neat, it’s the only part I control.
” He turns the key. The bolt drops onto the stripped mattress.
“You can do whatever you want, Elise. You can go find him at the dump and throw the necklace at him again. You can put your hand on my arm at dinner and watch his face. That’s yours.
But if you want me in it, I’m not doing it as a weapon. ”
“You think I don’t know the difference?”
“I think you’ve been living inside a war for four months and everything looks like ammunition.”
I sit down on the mattress because my legs have decided that’s what’s happening.
He puts the Allen key down.
“Last night was the first time since we got here that we were alone,” he says. “No mirror. No brother in the next room. And the second it was just us, you crossed that kitchen, and about ninety seconds later you found that necklace.”
“So?”
“So I don’t know which one of those you were reaching for me about. And neither do you.”
The room is very quiet. Somewhere outside a bird is doing something repetitive and unbearable.
“That’s not fair.”
“No,” he agrees. “But it’s true.”
I look at my hands for a while.
Here’s the thing I’ve been circling since about four in the morning, lying in a squeaking bed in his jacket, and I’ve been circling it because saying it out loud costs me something and I have not had a great week for spending.
“I wanted you before any of this.”
He goes still.
“When I worked for you.” My voice sounds strange to me, flat and far away, like someone else is using it.
“I used to move things around in my afternoon so I’d have a reason to be in your office at four.
I knew your coffee order before you told me.
And then Delphine from the third floor told me about the woman you took to the Halloween thing, and about the one before her, and I decided I wasn’t going to be a name on that list. So I stopped. I got very good at stopping.”
“Elise.”
“I’m not finished.” I put my hands flat on my knees.
“Then your brother asked me out and he was persistent and he was there, and I told myself that what I’d had for you was a stupid crush I’d invented in an office, and I married him, and for five years I was extremely careful not to think about it. ”
The bird has stopped. The house is enormous and silent around us.
“So don’t stand there and tell me this is about Simon,” I say. “Simon is the reason I’m free. He’s not the reason I’m in this room.”
Rowan crosses the space between us in about two steps.
He stops just short, close enough that I have to tip my head back, and puts one hand on the side of my face and holds it there.
“Say the last part again.”
“Which part?”
“You know which part.”
“He’s not the reason I’m in this room.”
And he kisses me.
Properly. On the mouth, finally, both hands on my face, and it goes on long enough that I lose track of the bedframe and the bird and the fact that there’s a dead woman’s furniture stacked against the wall.
Whatever I expected, it isn’t this. It isn’t desperate and it isn’t filthy.
It’s a man who’s been holding his breath for five years being told he can stop.
When he pulls back, neither of us says anything for a second.
“Okay,” he says.
“Okay.”
“Not here.” His thumb moves once across my cheekbone. “Not on a stripped mattress in his grandmother’s back bedroom with two hours before he’s back.”
“That’s restrained of you.”
“It’s not restraint. I’ve got about two hours of it left in the tank and I’d rather spend it somewhere I can take my time.”
Downstairs, distantly, the front door bangs open.
“I’m back,” Simon calls up. “Dump closes at one, so if there’s another load we go now.”
Rowan takes one step back and picks the Allen key up off the floor and goes back to the bedframe like nothing has happened at all.
I stand up and smooth my dress and go to the door and put my hand on the knob, and then I stop, because there’s one more thing and if I don’t say it now I’ll lose my nerve.
“Rowan.”
“Mm.”
“Tonight.”
He doesn’t look up from the bolt. But his mouth moves.
“Tonight,” he says.
***
Simon decides to cook.
He announces it around six, standing in the kitchen with a bag of groceries he drove twenty minutes each way to get, and there’s something almost touching about how pleased he is with himself.
He bought a chicken. He bought actual vegetables.
He’s found a radio on top of the refrigerator that gets exactly one station and he’s put it on low and rolled his sleeves up.
“You don’t cook.”
“I cook.”
“You made pasta throughout our marriage.”
“Then I’m rusty.” He points a wooden spoon at me. “Sit down. Both of you. You’ve been hauling garbage for two days and I’m making dinner and nobody’s allowed to say anything about it.”
It’s the nicest thing he’s done in about five years and he’s doing it because he can feel something slipping and this is the move he’s got. Simon has never once apologized with words. He apologizes by cooking, or buying something, or being charming at you until you get tired of being angry.
I know exactly what this is and I sit down anyway, because the alternative is a fight in a kitchen.
Rowan comes in from outside with the last of the porch debris and washes his hands at the sink and Simon shoos him away from it with the spoon, and for a minute the two of them are almost easy with each other.
Brothers in a kitchen. I watch it and feel nothing except the precise awareness of where Rowan is standing relative to me.
We’ve been careful all day. Extremely careful. Two feet of distance minimum, no eye contact that lasts, nothing that couldn’t be explained.
Tonight, he said.
It isn’t tonight yet. It’s six-fifteen and there’s a chicken in the oven and my almost-ex-husband is moving slightly to a radio station out of Utica.
The kitchen table is enormous.
It’s the only thing in this house worth anything, a slab of oak somebody’s great-grandfather probably built in place, and we uncovered it this morning and I spent an hour with wood soap getting a decade of dust off it.
It’s where they ate. All of them, every summer, for fifty years.
Simon has a story about carving his initials underneath it that he’s told me twice this weekend.
I’m sitting at it now with a glass of wine I didn’t ask for, watching Simon’s back while he stands at the stove.
Rowan comes to lean against the counter to my left, arms crossed, about six feet away. Which is fine. Which is a completely normal distance for a man to stand from his brother’s wife in a kitchen.
“How long on the chicken?”
“Forty minutes. Maybe fifty.” Simon doesn’t turn around. He’s got the pan going and he’s doing something with garlic that smells genuinely good. “There’s a whole thing with the potatoes, I looked it up.”
“You looked it up.”
“There’s a video.”
Rowan makes a sound that might be a laugh. He looks at me.
That’s all. He looks at me, and I look back, and it lasts about two seconds longer than it should, and my stomach drops out of me.
Not here. Not now. Not with him standing right there.
My chair is scraping back and I’m standing up.
There’s no box tipping over this time, no necklace, no excuse.
The only thing moving me across this kitchen is me.
Rowan is still leaning against the counter when I stand up from my chair.
I cross the kitchen without looking at him first and stop right in front of him.
The radio is playing something old and quiet out of Utica.
Simon’s back is to us at the stove, eight feet away, poking at the chicken with a wooden spoon.
I look straight at that broad stretch of Simon’s shirt for a full second. Then I reach for Rowan.
He takes the invitation. Both hands catch my waist and he lifts me onto the edge of the oak table like I weigh nothing.
The wood is cool under my thighs. His initials are carved into the underside, right where my ass hits the slab now.
Rowan shoves my dress up and steps between my legs without a word.
His mouth finds mine immediately. No hesitation this time.
He kisses me deep and open, tongue sliding against mine like he’s been waiting all day for it.
I fist the front of his shirt and kiss him back just as hard.
My hands go straight to his belt. I get it open, drag his zipper down, and pull his cock out.
He’s already thick and hard. I stroke him once, twice, feeling the heat of him in my palm.
Rowan breaks the kiss only long enough to hook his fingers into my underwear and yank them down my thighs. I lift my hips and they drop to one ankle. He doesn’t bother pulling them all the way off. He just lines up and pushes inside me in one slow, steady thrust.
The stretch punches the air out of my lungs. I wrap my legs around his hips and he sinks all the way in until his hips meet the backs of my thighs. For one second we both stay still, cock buried deep in my cunt on the same table his family ate at every summer.
Simon keeps talking at the stove. “These potatoes are taking forever. You want me to mash them or just roast them with the garlic?”
Rowan’s hand comes up fast and covers my mouth, palm flat and firm.
His other hand grips my hip and holds me in place.
He starts fucking me in short, controlled strokes that don’t rock the table.
Every thrust is deep and deliberate. He keeps his eyes on my face while he works his cock in and out of me.