4. Az #3
“That’s a lot of pressure,” I murmur against his chest, smiling because the joke arrives already warm between us. “What if I miss a show? Does your entire career collapse into rubble?”
“Probably.” He kisses the top of my head like punctuation. “I’ll risk the rubble. You’re worth the structural damage.”
“I love you,” I say. “Even though you almost gave me a concussion before we got the dress off.”
“I love you too. Even though you’ll never let me forget the concussion thing, and you’ll tell our future children, and they’ll side with you because you’re meaner and more charming.”
“Never forgetting. I’m putting it in our wedding album under ‘groom-related injuries.’“
“We don’t have a wedding album.”
“I’m making one specifically to document your failures.” I tip my chin up so I can see his face in the neon wash, soft mouth, stunned eyes, hair wrecked. “Also your successes. Mostly the part where you said wife against my skin until I came so hard I saw game-show applause.”
He grins, crooked and shy and filthy all at once. “Note to self: vocabulary kink, documented in triplicate. Laminate it. Frame it next to the marriage certificate.”
“Documented, laminated, and filed under ‘reasons I said I do.’“
He reaches blindly for the champagne, pops it with a muted thuck that makes us both flinch then giggle, and we drink it warm from the bottle because glasses feel like overkill for people who just fucked on polyester flowers.
Bubbles go up my nose. He licks them off my upper lip with an absurd amount of focus.
We talk in pieces between kisses that keep turning slower and deeper, Bakersfield summers, the flower shop’s broken cooler, the front-row promise, whether Hank’s handkerchief is dry yet.
The second time is quieter, almost secret.
He lays me on my side facing the neon window, curls behind me, slides in from behind with one hand splayed on my stomach and his mouth at my ear murmuring wife, wife, my wife like a metronome keeping time for the rest of our lives.
His other hand works between my thighs with devastating patience.
I come with his fingers on my clit and his cock buried deep and the neon blinking pink-blue-pink across the wall like a dirty lighthouse.
He follows with a shudder and a laugh he tries to muffle in my hair, fails, and lets the whole motel hear how happy he is.
Afterward we don’t sleep so much as drift, tangled under scratchy sheets that will leave waffle patterns on our skin, his heartbeat steady under my palm, my thigh thrown over his hip like a claim.
“We have time,” I whisper into the dark between the freeway noise and the dying ice in the bucket.
“We have so much time,” he whispers back, and kisses the sore spot on my forehead one more time like a vow he can keep without a judge.
I believe him. In this room with the bolted TV and the flat champagne and the bruise blooming under his mouth and the word wife still echoing in my bones, I believe him completely, and for tonight, belief feels like the best kind of filthy forever.
Present: 12 Weeks
I wake up cold.
The other side of the bed is empty. Not just empty, untouched. The pillows still neatly arranged, the comforter still tucked in at the corners. Eli didn’t come home last night.
Or maybe he did, and he slept somewhere else. The guest room, maybe. The couch.
The house feels like a museum of a marriage that used to live here.
I check my phone. Nothing from him. But there’s a delivery notification, something about the front door, so I drag myself out of bed and down the stairs in yesterday’s clothes because I fell asleep too exhausted to change.
There’s a bouquet on the doorstep.
Roses.
Red ones, long-stemmed, expensive-looking. The kind of roses that people who don’t know anything about flowers think are romantic. The kind of roses I’ve told Eli a hundred times I hate.
“I run a flower shop,” I’ve said. “I’ve seen what roses can do. They’re temperamental and overdone and they die within three days no matter how much you baby them. Give me dahlias. Give me peonies. Give me literally anything else.”
He used to know this. The first night we met, sitting outside a taco truck in Silver Lake, I told him I hated roses. “Dahlias,” he repeated. “Got it.”
The card is tucked between the stems. I pull it out and flip it open.
The handwriting isn’t his.
It’s loopy, feminine, familiar. Brynn’s handwriting, because of course it is.
From Eli. Rest up mama! ??
He didn’t even order them himself. He told Brynn to send flowers, and Brynn chose roses because Brynn doesn’t know me, because Brynn has no idea what I like or want or need, because Brynn is not his wife but somehow she’s the one standing in for him at every single moment that matters.
I stare at those roses on my doorstep, red and perfect and wrong, and I think about the motel room with the flat champagne, the front-row promise, the man who used to know exactly who I was.
Whiskers appears at my feet, winding between my ankles.
“He sent roses,” I tell him. “Through Brynn.”
He meows once, dismissive, and walks away.