Chapter Two #3
He kissed her before he let himself think any further about it, and she met him with a hunger that had nothing gentle in it, her hands already working the buttons of his shirt, her mouth hot and certain against his, and he backed her toward the bed with his hands sliding over red lace and warm skin, memorizing the shape of what he was about to do wrong in the same motion he was doing it.
She undressed him with the kind of practiced ease that told him exactly how many times before this one she had imagined this exact moment, and he let her, let his hands map every inch of her the way she guided them, let himself fall into forty minutes of wanting nothing beyond the next touch, the next breath, the low sound she made against his ear that had nothing to do with love and everything to do with two people using each other to forget who they actually were.
Afterward, tangled in sheets that smelled like someone else’s detergent, he lay staring at a water stain on the ceiling shaped like nothing in particular, and felt the guilt arrive the way it always arrived, patient and total, waiting until his body was finished wanting before it came to collect what it was owed.
“This is the last time,” he said.
“You said that the last time.” Selene propped herself up on one elbow, watching him with an expression that was almost gentle, which was somehow worse than if she had been cruel about it.
“I am not asking you to leave her, Marcus. I want to be honest about that much, at least. I just wanted, for a few afternoons, to remember what it felt like before either of us became the people we turned into.”
He had stayed forty minutes that day, start to finish, and had driven home afterward and kissed his wife hello and eaten dinner across the table from her and felt nothing so much as a low, constant static of self loathing underneath every ordinary word, and had told himself, driving to the clubhouse the next morning, that it was finally, actually over.
It had not been over, not the way he needed it to be.
It had taken three more weeks and a stranger’s photographs and a diner booth to make it irreversibly over instead of merely promised, and even now, brake gripped and engine still running twelve miles down a river road, some rotted, familiar part of him was already doing the math on how long it would take to reach that door.
He did not go in. He sat on the shoulder of the road for eleven minutes, engine idling, staring at a building that meant nothing to anyone else in the world and meant everything to the worst version of himself, and he thought about Callie’s face that morning, soft for just a second before she went back to the invoices, trusting him completely in a way she had no reason not to, because he had never once in nine years given her a reason to look at him twice.
He thought about the vote in six weeks. He thought about Vance’s voice, the longer you sit on it, the more it costs when it finally comes out.
He thought about his own father, a man who had spent thirty years letting things fester until they broke everything around him, a man Marcus had sworn at seventeen he would never become, and he sat on that shoulder feeling exactly like the thing he had promised himself he would never be.
He turned the bike around before the twelve minute mark.
He did not look at the motel sign in his mirrors.
He told himself that it counted for something, riding away instead of walking in, and some small honest part of him knew it counted for less than nothing, because the ride away only mattered if it was the last one, and he still had not made himself believe, all the way down, that it would be.
By the time he got back to the clubhouse, the sun had shifted enough that the yard sat half in shadow, and Vance was still there, waiting, like he had known Marcus would come back needing something to do with his hands that was not thinking.
“Sacramento,” Vance said again, holding out the folder Marcus had left on his bike that morning. “Thursday. You want to send someone, or you want to go yourself.”
Marcus looked at the folder for a long moment.
Somewhere upstairs, behind a window with the blinds half drawn, his wife was still bent over numbers that did not add up, building something out of nothing the way she always did, trusting the floor under her feet because he had never once given her a reason not to.
“I’ll go myself,” he said, and did not examine too closely whether that decision was about the club, or about needing to be anywhere but here, anywhere but twelve miles down the river road, anywhere his own hands could not find their way back to a door he had promised himself he would never walk through again.
Vance studied him for a moment that went on slightly too long to be nothing.
“Whatever it is,” he said finally, “fix it before she has to find it. That is the only version of this that does not end with you losing everything worth having.”
Marcus took the folder and did not answer, because Vance was right, and because he had run out of ways to explain to himself why knowing that had not yet been enough to make him do it.