14. Hugo #2
I take my time, even though everything in me is screaming for more, faster, now. I learn her again, the places that make her gasp, the touches that make her shiver, the exact pressure and rhythm that draws those soft, desperate sounds from her throat.
She’s not passive. She never was, but I was too blind to see it, too caught up in my own distance to notice when she reached for me.
Now I see everything, the way her hands grip my shoulders, the way she tilts her hips toward mine, the way she takes what she wants instead of waiting for me to give it.
“Look at me,” I say when I finally push inside her.
Her eyes meet mine, and I hold them, refusing to look away, refusing to let this be just physical. I want her to see me. I want her to know that this isn’t about relief or satisfaction or the desperate need to touch her after so long apart.
This is about her. Only her. Always her.
“Hugo.” My name on her lips sounds like a prayer and a curse wrapped together. “Please.”
I move, and she moves with me, and the rhythm we find is familiar and new all at once, everything I remember and everything I missed and everything I was too stupid to appreciate when I had it.
She’s beautiful like this. Undone. Unguarded. The walls she’s built against me crumbling with each thrust, each gasp, each whispered word I pour against her skin.
“I love you,” I tell her, because I can’t not say it. “I love you, Lucille. I love you.”
She doesn’t say it back.
Her hands tighten in my hair, her breath coming faster, her body tensing in ways I remember, and I tell myself it’s enough. It’s enough to hold her through this. It’s enough that she’s here, that she’s letting me in, that she’s choosing to be with me even if she can’t say the words yet.
“Let go,” I murmur against her ear. “I’ve got you. Just let go.”
She does.
I watch her face as she falls apart, memorize it, catalog it, burn it into my memory so I’ll never forget this moment. The way her eyes flutter closed. The way her lips part. The way she says my name like it’s been pulled from somewhere deep inside her.
I follow her over the edge with her name on my lips and her body wrapped around mine, and for one perfect moment, there’s nothing in the world except us.
Afterward, we lie tangled on the guest bed, rain still hammering against the windows.
Neither of us speaks for a long time. I trace patterns on her shoulder, abstract shapes, meaningless except for the excuse to keep touching her, and she lets me, her head resting on my chest, her breathing slowly returning to normal.
“This doesn’t change anything,” she says finally, but there’s no conviction in her voice.
“I know.”
“The divorce is still…”
“I know.” I press a kiss to her hair. “I’m not asking for anything. I’m not going to use this as leverage or pretend it means more than you want it to mean. Whatever this was, whatever it is, it’s yours to define.”
She’s quiet for a moment.
“What if I don’t know how to define it?”
“Then you don’t have to. Not yet.” I tighten my arm around her. “I told you I’d keep showing up. That hasn’t changed. Whatever you need, space, time, another night like this, nothing at all, I’ll give it to you.”
Her hand finds mine in the darkness, and she threads our fingers together.
“I don’t know what I need,” she admits. “I thought I knew. I thought I needed to be free of you, to build my own life, to stop waiting for you to become someone different. And then you started actually becoming different, and now I don’t…
” She breaks off, frustrated. “I don’t know what I want anymore. ”
“That’s okay.”
“It’s not okay. My showcase is in ten days. I have a career to build and a reputation to salvage and a whole life that doesn’t include you, and instead of focusing on that, I’m lying here with you like nothing ever happened.”
“It did happen.” I lift her hand to my lips, kiss her knuckles. “And it’s still happening. And maybe that’s not convenient or easy or what either of us planned, but that doesn’t make it less real.”
She doesn’t respond, but she doesn’t pull away either.
We lie there in the darkness, listening to the storm rage outside, and I let myself believe that this might be the beginning instead of the end.
Then her phone buzzes.
She ignores it at first, we both do, but it keeps buzzing, notification after notification, until the sound is impossible to dismiss.
“That’s been dead all night,” she says, sitting up. “It must have finally charged.”
She finds the phone on the floor where it fell from her bag, and I watch her face as she reads the screen. Watch the post-sex softness drain away. Watch a cold, hard mask take its place.
“What is it?”
She doesn’t answer. Just turns the screen toward me.
It’s a video. I recognize it immediately, the industry mixer from two weeks ago, the moment Lucille threw wine in Ginny’s face. But the clip has been tampered with. It starts too late. It doesn’t show the conversation. It doesn’t show Ginny’s hand shoving Lucille’s shoulder.
It just shows my wife, wild-eyed and vicious, throwing a drink at a woman who appears to be doing nothing at all.
The caption reads: Hugo Kensington’s jealous wife ATTACKS innocent Ginny Davies at industry event. Is this the “volatile” behavior that ended their marriage?
The view count is already in the hundreds of thousands. And climbing.
“It’s edited,” Lucille says, her voice flat. “Someone cut out the part where she shoved me. They made it look like I just…”
“I know.” I sit up, cold dread settling into my stomach. “I know what they did.”
I take the phone from her hand and scroll through the comments, each one worse than the last. Crazy wife. No wonder he wanted Ginny. She should be locked up. Hugo deserves better.
And underneath it all, Ginny’s Instagram story from an hour ago: a tearful video about “living in fear” of Lucille’s “unprovoked violence,” complete with carefully applied mascara tears and a trembling voice that’s pure performance.
“She’s not done,” Lucille says quietly.
“No.” I set the phone down and pull her close, feeling her body tense against mine. “She’s not done. But neither are we.”
The storm outside is finally quieting, the rain fading to a steady patter against the windows.
But inside, I understand with cold certainty that the real storm is just beginning.