Chapter 5
Chapter Five
Iwake to the feel of my husband’s lips against mine, and in so many ways it’s no different from all the other mornings he’s woken me exactly this way, the slow warm pull of him drawing me up out of sleep before I’ve decided to surface, the mattress dipping under his weight, the dark of the room still complete around us because it’s hours yet before any reasonable person would be awake.
But it’s different, and I know it’s different, even half asleep I know it, because this time I know the truth, and the truth is that everything I am to him is a means to an end.
The covers slip away, the cool air of the room moving over my skin and then his warmth replacing it, and my tears come even before his hands do, sliding sideways down into my hair where he won’t see them in the dark.
My body betrays me by wanting him exactly as much as it has always wanted him, every bit of it, and that’s the particular cruelty I wasn’t braced for.
I’d thought the knowing would armor me. I’d thought a heart broken this thoroughly would simply forget the language, would lie there cold and unmoved and let me keep my dignity.
But he has only to touch me and all of me answers him the way it answered on the very first night, when I crossed a vast pale room to him in a borrowed silk nightgown and he curved his hand around the back of my neck and I trembled under it and thought, so this is what it is, then, to belong to someone.
If I touch you, there’s no going back, he told me that night, his voice low in the dark the way it’s low now. I’ll see you as mine.
I believed him. That’s the thing that undoes me now, lying here in the dark six months later, the memory of how completely and how easily I believed him, how I lifted my chin and told him I didn’t like to share either and watched something go soft in that hard handsome face, something I was certain, so certain, that only I would ever get to see.
His mouth moves to my skin and my tears come faster, because he still kisses me the way he kissed me then, like a man who can’t quite help himself, and it used to make me blush down to the roots of my hair, the way he never once bothered to hide how much he wanted me.
You’re blushing again, he’d murmur against my cheek in the mornings, pleased with himself, pleased with me, and I’d hide my hot face against his shoulder and feel, for the whole length of a morning, like the single most wanted woman alive in the world.
Now the same mouth moves over me in the same dark and the same heat rises up in me to meet it, and all of it only makes my chest ache so badly I can hardly draw breath around it, because I understand at last that the wanting was never the lie.
The wanting was the one true thing. It was only everything underneath the wanting that I went and invented for myself.
He takes me the way he has always taken me.
Fiercely. Deeply. As though I am a thing he means to keep forever.
And I surrender to him the way I have always surrendered, helplessly and completely, a girl whose heart was stolen so early and so thoroughly that she gave up long ago on any hope of getting it back.
He held me through the worst of the nights after Dad, I think, even now, even with him moving over me in the dark.
He never once told me to stop. He only stayed.
I’d built so much on that staying. I’d taken it as proof of the very thing I wanted most in the world to be true, that a man does not hold a woman through the ugliest, graceless hours of her grief, night after night, unless some part of him has decided she is his to keep safe.
I was wrong about what it proved. I am learning, this week, that I was wrong about very nearly everything.
But my body has never learned how to be wrong about him, and it gives itself over to him the same as it ever did, and I let it, I let it, because these stolen ruined minutes in the dark are the only place left in my life where I’m still allowed to pretend.
When he finally draws back from me, I hold my breath.
I hold it, and I hope, and yes, I pray, the way you pray for a thing you already know in your bones you’ve lost, that this once, just this once, he’ll stay.
That he’ll gather me back in against his chest the way he used to and let me lay my palm over his heart and count the beats of it.
That he’ll fall asleep with his face buried in my hair and wake me in the morning the same way he woke me tonight, and that somewhere in the staying I’ll find the man I married again, the man I’m no longer entirely sure ever existed anywhere outside my own wishing.
But he doesn’t stay.
He never stays anymore, and there is no reason on earth he would start tonight, of all nights, and still the not-staying cracks me open all over again.
All I can do is keep my eyes shut and make my breathing go slow and even and counterfeit sleep, so that he won’t know I’m lying here awake to feel him leave, so that I get to keep the one small scrap of pride I have left to my name.
I listen to the rustle of clothes in the dark.
I listen to him dress, unhurried, the movements of a man with nowhere he particularly needs to be and certainly no reason to linger here.
Then his footsteps, soft and even on the carpet, crossing the room away from me. And then the door.
I start to cry in earnest the moment it clicks shut behind him.
I don’t understand how this happened. I don’t understand any of it, no matter how many times I turn it over in the dark, and it never once comes right, because I truly believed my father when he took my hand in both of his in that medicine-smelling room and told me Trey was the right one for me, that he would come to love me in his own time if I was only patient enough with him.
Dad was never wrong about people. It was the very thing he was famous for, all up and down the league, the eye that could look at a raw untested rookie and see the franchise he’d grow into ten years out, and he turned that same eye on Trey and on me and saw something there worth spending the last of his strength to arrange.
So how is this where it all led. How did the perfect husband and the marriage I never once let myself dream of curdle, in six short months, into a man who wants nothing on earth from me but a child and a clean quiet way out.
If Dad were still alive, I’d go to him. I’d perch on the edge of his big chair the way I always used to and tell him everything, all of it, and ask him how on earth it came to this, and I’d trust whatever he told me to do, no matter how hard it was to sit and hear. He always knew. He always, always knew.
But Dad isn’t here.
And so I find myself reaching for my phone in the dark with shaking hands, my eyes still streaming, before I’ve quite let myself think through what I’m doing or who exactly I’m doing it to, and I send the only message I can think to send to the only person left in the whole world who knew me before all of this, who knew me back when I was simply Richard’s daughter and not anyone’s means to anything at all.
Are you free tomorrow? I need to ask you something.