17. Fran #3
I go back to the buckets because if I am going to be trapped in a sex crime I am at least going to finish this weekend’s Bartlett order.
My hands are shaking. I sort. Tall left, short right.
Blush, coral, peach, you traitor. I can feel him looking at me.
I can feel the mess between my legs every time I shift my weight.
The cold is coming back now that we aren’t all over each other, seeping in, making a joke of the heat we just made.
He takes off his flannel without asking and holds it out.
I stare at it.
I take it. I put it on. It is huge and it smells like him and I hate that it helps. I button it over the dress and do not say thank you.
He watches me for a long moment before he says my name. “Fran.”
“Don’t.” I do up another button, as if the extra inch of his warmth will make me less obvious.
“I wasn’t going to say it meant something,” he says, but there’s a smile hiding in it.
“Good.” It is not good.
“I was going to say your hair.” He gestures, helpless, at the side of my head. “There’s a petal.”
I rake it out. White dahlia. I drop it in a bucket like evidence.
We wait.
It is the longest fifteen minutes of my life.
He stands with his back to the far rack and his hands in his pockets and his mouth still reddened, and every so often he looks at the door like he might be able to open it with longing.
I sort flowers I have already sorted. The silence is not the nice kind.
It is the kind that has his come in it. At one point he starts, “If you want to talk about-” and I say, “I will climb the shelving,” and he shuts up, and I almost laugh, and I do not let myself.
A bang from the other side. Muffled voice. Then the door jerks, catches, jerks again, and swings open on farm-bright light that feels like a search warrant.
Hannah from processing, earbuds in, looking curious. “Junie sent me. Said you’ve been in here forever and she couldn’t raise you.”
“The release jammed.” I am already moving, bucket in hand, flannel on, chin up, a woman who has absolutely not just been fucked against the coral family. “Unit’s out of use until the tech repairs the mechanism. We’ll prop it open and move the stock safely for now.”
Hannah’s gaze flicks past me. Logan. His knees. There are petals stuck to the wet denim from when he was on the floor with his mouth on me. Hannah’s eyebrows twitch. Then her earbuds win. She shrugs and holds the door.
I walk out like nothing happened.
Behind me, Logan picks up two buckets and follows. He does not say a word. I can feel him anyway. All the way across the shed. All the way into the light.
Nothing. I said it. I can live in it.
I have lived in worse.
***
That night I wear his shirt to bed.
I don’t know why. It was in the laundry pile, mixed in with my things, and my hand closed on it and my brain, traitor, put it on.
Too big. Hem at mid-thigh. Sleeves past my hands.
Sawdust and soap and the ghost of the flannel he put on me in the cooler.
I lie on my back in the dark with the baby elbowing my bladder and his shirt on my skin and I stare at the ceiling and I replay it anyway.
The cold. His mouth. The shelf biting my palms. I’ll take nothing. The way he held my belly like it was the point of him. The way I said it didn’t mean anything while I came on his cock.
The wanting has never been the problem. I wanted him in my father’s office.
I wanted him through nineteen months of marriage.
I wanted him when I left. I wanted him on the wet concrete this morning with petals in his hair.
I still want him now, on the other side of the wall, on my couch, close enough that I could walk twelve feet and ruin my whole speech.
I pick up the phone.
His contact, the call button, my thumb hovering over it.
I shouldn’t. It’s midnight. One desperate, clothes-on fuck in a cooler does not undo anything. Calling him now would be a message I am not ready to send. It would mean something. I have a whole policy about that.
I lower the phone.
Then I drop it.
It lands on my face, corner first, right on the bridge of my nose, and I yelp and grab and my stupid fumbling thumb hits the button before I can stop it.
It’s ringing.
“No no no-” I stab at end call. My hands are useless. Sleep and panic and his shirt. The screen flashes connected.
His voice, rough, right there. “Fran? Are you-”
I hang up so hard I almost throw the thing.
I lie there with the phone on my chest and my face on fire and the baby kicking like it wants in on the humiliation. Silence from the other side of the wall. I wait to die. I do not die. I consider moving to another state. I consider the logistics of never making eye contact again.
Thirty seconds.
The phone buzzes.
I look.
Logan: I’m here. Whenever you need me.
I stare at it until the screen goes dark. Then I stare at my own reflection in the black glass, in his shirt, with a fading mark on my nose from a phone and a bruise on my palm from a shelf.
I do not reply.
I put the phone on the nightstand facedown.
I do not call him back.
I fall asleep in his shirt anyway, which is nothing. Which means nothing. Which I will deal with in the morning, when I am better at lying.