18. Az #3
I nod frantically against his hand. He follows in two sharp thrusts, a bitten-off groan buried in my shoulder, his whole body locking as he empties into the condom with my belly cradled like treasure and my dress rucked up like evidence.
We stay folded over the bench for three breaths. Four. Five. A bead of sweat drops from his chin onto my spine. His hand slides off my mouth. I taste salt from his skin and the ghost of my own teeth.
“Still mad,” I whisper, voice ruined.
“I know.” He pulls out with aching care, deals with the condom, tugs my dress down like he’s restoring a crime scene, rights his jeans.
His hands are shaking. So are mine. Potting mix streaks my forearm in a dirty bracelet.
“Still the best terrible decision I’ve ever been invited into. Still not asking for a medal.”
I straighten. My knees wobble. Outside, the heat finally cracks into something that smells like the promised storm riding in under the scorched edge of the day.
Inside, dahlias stand witness in their trays, ridiculous and over-the-top, exactly the flower I told him mattered on a Silver Lake curb a lifetime ago when we were nobody’s disaster yet.
“Don’t follow me to the house,” I say.
“Wouldn’t dream of it.”
“Don’t text me first. Don’t stand under my window. Don’t be poetic about soil.”
“Okay. No poetry, no windows, no premature texting.”
“And Eli.” I look at him over my shoulder, lips swollen, hair wrecked, pregnancy and spite and satisfaction braided so tight I can barely breathe around them. “Next time you forget water, I’m not bringing a jar. I’m bringing a hose, and I’m aiming for your face.”
His smile is small and wrecked and hopeful in a way that almost cracks the anger clean in half. “Yes ma’am. I’ll hydrate. I’ll earn the next terrible decision if you ever offer it.”
“Don’t count on it.”
“I’m not counting. I’m just… leaving the door open.”
On legs that don’t entirely belong to me, I walk out of the greenhouse, pulse still hammering against my throat, my hand pressed to the warm curve of my belly. The plastic door flaps shut behind me with a soft slap. The evening air hits my wet mouth like a confession I’m not ready to file.
I do not look back.
I also do not stop wanting to, and that, more than the orgasm, more than his hand over my mouth, more than the dahlia stakes watching us sin among the starts, is the part I will lie awake about later with his hoodie on and my phone glowing and the door still theoretically open.
The path back to the porch has never felt longer.
Every step reminds me where he was, deep, careful, devastating, and every step also reminds me that forgiveness is a different country from wanting.
I can visit one without emigrating to the other.
Tonight I am a tourist with dirt on my arm and a pulse that won’t settle.
I make it to the porch before I let myself sit down. The wood is still warm from the heat of the day, and the cicadas are screaming in the fields, and somewhere in the barn Lupe has stopped making noise, which means she probably saw me walking back and decided to give me privacy.
I don’t know what just happened.
No. That’s a lie. I know exactly what happened. I kissed my husband in the greenhouse and then I kissed him more than that and then I walked away because I’m twenty-eight weeks pregnant and angry and confused and my heart is beating so fast I can feel it in my teeth.
There’s a hoodie on the porch rail.
His hoodie. The gray one with the torn pocket, the one he’s been wearing on cool evenings outside the bunkhouse. He must have left it there this morning, forgotten in the heat.
I pull it on over my dress because I’m cold.
That’s the excuse. I’m cold. Autumn heatwave, ninety-five degrees at nine PM, and I’m cold, and his hoodie smells like him, like soap and sweat and that cologne he’s worn since I met him, the one I bought him another bottle of three Christmases ago because I liked how it mixed with his skin.
I go inside. I lock the door. I stand in my grandmother’s kitchen in my husband’s hoodie and I press my hands to my stomach and I feel June kick once, twice, like she’s asking what’s wrong with me.
“I don’t know,” I tell her. “Your father is a lot.”
She kicks again. Agreement or protest. Hard to tell.
***
At one in the morning, I give up on sleep.
I’ve been lying in my grandmother’s bed staring at the ceiling for three hours, watching the shadows shift, feeling the ghost-touch of his hands every time I close my eyes. The hoodie’s still on. I couldn’t take it off.
My phone is on the nightstand.
I pick it up. I pull up his contact. I hit call.
One ring. I hang up.
My heart is pounding so hard the bed is shaking. I’m an idiot. I’m a pregnant idiot who just called her estranged husband at one in the morning and hung up before he could…
The phone buzzes.
A text. From him.
still awake. still yours. door’s open.
I read it six times. I read the last two words until they blur.
Door’s open.
I don’t get up. I don’t go to the bunkhouse. I stay exactly where I am, in my grandmother’s bed, in his hoodie, with his words glowing on my screen.
It doesn’t change what he did.
But I fall asleep with the phone still in my hand.