Chapter 8 #2
She could see it. She didn’t want to see it and she couldn’t stop.
Alexis in her kitchen, taking Barb’s casserole.
Alexis putting her hand on Ryan’s arm in the front hall.
Alexis in her guest room with her pills.
Alexis on the dock at Gull Cay in the red evening light, holding him, with her hand flat on his back.
The same hand.
Jess found her ten minutes later. Jess took one look at her face and said, “Who do I kill?” and Scarlett said, “Nobody. Get me out of here.”
* * *
The car ride home was completely silent.
Ryan sat on his side of the back seat. She sat on hers. The driver had the radio on low. Ryan kept looking at her. She could feel it, like heat on the side of her face. She watched the palm trees go by and didn’t look back.
He tried once. “Scarlett. What happened? Did someone—”
“Not in the car.”
He stopped.
They went in through the side door into the kitchen. Ramona had the day off. The house was quiet. The late afternoon light came in low and gold across the kitchen island, and across the spot where the lilies had been.
Scarlett put her keys down on the counter. She put her purse down. She turned around.
“Barb Hughes,” she said, “wanted me to know how devoted Alexis was to you.”
Ryan’s face went still.
“She wanted me to know Alexis was here every time she came by. In my house. Holding you together.” Her voice was rising.
She didn’t try to stop it. “They all said thank God he had her. That’s what they said, Ryan.
My friends. My donors. While I was—while they thought I was at the bottom of the ocean—they stood in my kitchen and thanked God you had her. ”
“Scarlett—”
“Don’t. Don’t you dare say my name like that.
” She was shaking. Three weeks of holding it steady, and it was all coming up, and she couldn’t have stopped it with both hands.
“I came up those stairs and I told you I was sick. I told you I needed you. And you looked at her. You looked at her first. Like you had to check. Like you needed her permission to come with your own wife.”
“I know.”
“Give me ten minutes.” She threw it at him. “Do you know what I was doing in those ten minutes? I was on the back of your boat with a woman who had just drugged me. And do you know what you were doing?”
“I was talking to her.”
“You were talking to her! And then you went to sleep on a couch.” Her voice cracked all the way through. “I was in the water. I was in the water in the dark for seven hours, screaming your name, and you were asleep on the salon couch because you didn’t want to have a fight.”
He didn’t look away. He stood there by the island with his hands at his sides and his face gray and he let it hit him. He didn’t say I didn’t know. He didn’t say that’s not fair. He didn’t say one single thing in his own defense.
“And then,” Scarlett said, and now she was crying and she was furious that she was crying, “then you stood in Nassau in front of every camera in the world, and she put her hand on your arm, and you let her. And you let her hold you on that—”
On that dock.
She caught it just in time. She bit it off. On that dock at Gull Cay, in the red light, while I watched from a window.
“—you let her hold you,” she finished. “On the news. You let her put her hands on you. After everything. You let the woman who pushed me into the sea comfort you.”
“Yes,” Ryan said.
His voice was barely there.
“Yes. I did all of it. Every single thing you just said. You’re right.” He took a breath that shook. “Hit me if you want. Scream at me. I’ll stand here. I’ll stand here as long as you need. I deserve every word, and it’s not even close to enough.”
* * *
She did hit him.
Not hard. She crossed the kitchen and she shoved him in the chest with both hands, as hard as she could, and he rocked back half a step against the island and then stood still again.
So she shoved him again. And he didn’t move that time.
He stood there and took it and looked at her with his wet red eyes.
So she grabbed his shirt in both fists.
She meant to shake him. She meant to scream in his face.
She had his shirt bunched in her hands and her face was a few inches from his and she could feel his breath, and he smelled like his aftershave and the chlorine from the pool deck, and her heart was slamming, and his was too, she could feel it through his shirt under her knuckles.
She didn’t know who moved.
Later, she would lie awake trying to decide, and she never could. Maybe she pulled. Maybe he leaned. But one second she was holding his shirt and hating him, and the next second her mouth was on his.
* * *
It wasn’t a gentle kiss. It wasn’t a sweet, careful, second-chance kiss. It was hard and angry and it hurt a little. She bit his lip. He made a sound deep in his chest, low and helpless, the sound she had remembered in the shower, and it went straight through her.
His hands came up. And stopped. They hovered an inch from her waist, shaking.
He pulled his mouth away. “Scarlett,” he said against her lips, rough. “You said don’t touch you. You said—”
“I know what I said.”
“Tell me to stop.”
She took his hands and put them on her waist herself.
“Don’t you dare be gentle with me,” she said.
* * *
He lifted her onto the kitchen island.
He did it the way he used to, easily, like she weighed nothing, and the stone was cold through the damp hem of her dress.
She wrapped her legs around him and pulled him in.
His mouth came down on hers again, open and hungry, and this time his hands didn’t stop.
They went up her back. Into her short hair.
Down her bare arms and back up again, fast and greedy, like he was trying to make sure every part of her was real.
His hand touched her back between her shoulder blades and she flinched.
He felt it. He froze.
“Not there,” she said. “Anywhere else. Not there.”
He moved his hand. He put it on the back of her neck instead, warm and firm, and he kissed her throat, and she tipped her head back and let him.
Nine years. Nine years, and her body knew every single thing about his.
She knew where to put her hands. She knew the exact place under his jaw that made him shudder.
She knew how he liked to be kissed and she did the opposite, rougher, meaner, because she wanted him to feel it.
She yanked his suit jacket down off his shoulders.
She pulled his shirt out of his pants and got her hands under it, on his hot bare skin, and dragged her nails down his back hard enough to leave marks.
He groaned into her neck.
“Good,” she said. “Good. I hope it hurts.”
“It does.”
“Good.”
He found the zipper of her dress. It was at the side, just like the green dress, and for one second her whole body remembered the black water. Her fingers numb, tearing at a zipper. The dress floating away.
Then his mouth was on her shoulder, and his hands were warm, and it wasn’t cold. It wasn’t dark. The kitchen was full of gold light, and she saw his face.
She pulled the zipper down herself.
* * *
He got the dress down to her waist. She wasn’t wearing a bra under it. His breath went out of him in a rush and he looked at her for a second, at her breasts, at her body in the late light, the way a starving man looks at food.
“Don’t look,” she said. “Touch.”
He touched. His hands covered her breasts, and his thumbs moved over her nipples, and she arched into it with a sound she didn’t recognize as her own.
Then his mouth. Hot and wet, pulling at her.
She held his head there with both hands in his hair.
She pulled his hair, hard. He made that sound again.
Her hands found his belt. She’d undone that belt a thousand times, and her fingers were clumsy with anger and want, and she got it open. The button. The zipper. She pushed her hand inside and found him hard, so hard, and hot against her palm.
He swore against her breast and his hips jerked forward.
“Scarlett. God. Scarlett—”
“Shut up,” she said, and kissed him to make him.
He pushed her dress up her thighs. She lifted her hips off the cold stone so he could drag her underwear down her legs, and it caught on one ankle and she kicked it away across the kitchen floor.
His fingers slid between her legs, and she was wet, embarrassingly wet, and he felt it and made a sound like he was in pain.
“You want this,” he said, low, almost disbelieving.
“I hate that I want this.”
“I know.”
“I hate you.”
“I know.”
His fingers moved inside her, and she stopped being able to talk.
* * *
She didn’t let it go slow. She didn’t let him take his time the way he used to, early on, when they had whole Sunday mornings. She pulled him closer with her legs and reached down and guided him into her herself, and they both gasped at the same time, loud in the empty kitchen.