Chapter 27
Chapter Twenty-Seven
HE CAME, HE LEFT
HUDSON
She’s asleep next to me with no careful positioning, just like everything else, she’s spread out.
Now I guess we won't have to lie to Immigration about one thing. I know what it’s like to share a bed with her.
And even though she has made no concession to the idea that anyone else exists in this space with her, I wouldn’t change a thing.
She claimed the majority of the pillows, of which there are too many. She has her one arm thrown above her head, her other, across my chest. So I’ve kept my breaths light, afraid too brash a movement and she’ll wake up. Though the longer I stay here, I don’t know if that’s true.
Her face is the most unguarded I’ve ever seen it, which says something, because by nature, she’s not a guarded person. The brightness she forces into every room, every conversation, the dark humor she deploys before anyone else can, all wrapped in a coat of optimism none of us deserve.
She’s just here, sleeping and sated, in a bed she abandoned for the one next door, and in an apartment that— I stop the thought before it finishes itself.
I've been awake long enough to watch the sky shift from gray to pale gold, which means I've been lying here longer than I should have.
Long enough to know better. I have had the conversation with myself that I always have eventually, the one that starts with ‘I should tell her’ and ends somewhere I'm not ready to go.
I know what’s sitting in a folder in my office, that I have been avoiding, and I know that I am not going to ruin this morning before she's even fully conscious.
I watched her mouth move for a good thirty seconds last night, behind that glass, and I couldn't hear her.
The booth is soundproof. My biggest regret?
I should have hit record. At best I got the occasional muffled, distorted sound, no clarity around what she was actually saying.
But then her mouth took the shape of a sentence I have dreamed about. Not imagined. Dreamed.
Just behind glass, so I would never know for certain. And she did that on purpose.
‘I want you to fuck me,’ she had said. To herself. Directly to me.
And when she stepped out of that booth and confirmed it, there was no amount of self-control I could possess.
Whatever I had managed to maintain for the duration of this so far, however many cold showers, or legal briefs and renovation plans I buried myself in to avoid lying in the dark thinking about her on the other side of the apartment.
None of it was designed for that moment. None of it would have held.
I'm pretty sure sleeping with her has fucked everything up.
I'm certain it's fucked me up.
She doesn’t look at me like anyone does.
Not moved by my apartment or my salary, the dinners, or the cases I’ve won.
It’s the small things that catch her off guard.
Every time I do something for her, she looks genuinely surprised, like she’s still recalibrating who I am against who she decided I was.
I guess that's my fault. I gave her every reason to decide wrong first.
And what I have to reckon with, what I've been reckoning with for longer than I’d like to admit, is that if this goes wrong, I won't be able to fix it by being more impressive.
There is no achievement that covers this.
And she's made it more than clear she doesn't want me swooping in to solve things.
Even if that's how we got here. Even if I can’t fucking help myself.
I’ve done my best to not just stare at her as she sleeps like some kind of fucking creep. But I’ve looked at the booth through the open door, looked out the window at the office building across the street, but I always come back to her. Looking at her instead of all of it. Including myself.
Her eyes open slowly, blinking as she’s rising from deep sleep, and she finds me immediately, which does something to my chest I can’t explain away, but not as much as the smile pressed into the pillow where her hair is wild and splayed across it.
“You’re still here,” she says, not accusatory. But sounds surprised, and she says just to be sure it’s true.
“Where else would I be?” She adjusts herself, sitting up in bed and reaching for a shirt that’s on the floor so she’s not as exposed.
“I’ve been your neighbor long enough to know that your overnight guests don’t often get breakfast. I just figured you would have gotten back to reality already, let me sleep it off a little longer.” Even as she says this, putting distance between us emotionally, she leans into me.
It’s not said cruelly, I don't know that she could be cruel, but it stings more than it should, no matter how honest it is.
“You’re right,” I say, letting out a deep sigh that I know she feels in all the ways it’s expelled.
She throws her hands over her face and laughs, a little in disbelief, maybe at the idea that after months of being my wife, we have finally shared a bed.
I understand why it happened, I had told her on our wedding night, if the time became too difficult, to come to me.
And that's what she did. In her own way.
And then she came for me. That is something I won't soon forget.
“Louisa,” I begin, and her head shifts up against my shoulder so she can see me.
“That was.” Her cheeks flush red, and I can see the delicious contentment on her face.
“It was amazing,” I say. Which is true, but not even a fraction of what I mean.
The world pales in comparison to what it really was to have her under me, with me, next to me, now.
“You are amazing,” I say, and it comes out rougher than I intended, less controlled.
“I need you to know that, whatever happens, whatever we—” I stop.
Her face is trying to understand something I don't, even as I say it.
“I don't want you to think last night was a lapse in judgement.”
She’s very still as her eyebrows pinch together. “Ahh,” she says, as if it's that simple.
“It was.” I look at her. “It was the opposite of that, it was a conscious choice, something I’ve thought about before last night.” Her hand is on my chest as she curls into the crook of my body. “I need you to know that before we talk about anything else.”
“Okay,” she says finally, a quiet agreement she is tucking somewhere careful for later. The only lapse of judgement was not being honest before it happened. But being with her, I don't think there is a single part of me, even the ones that keep me contained, that could regret it.
We stay like this, knowing there’s an end to this conversation that is not the blissful morning we could suspend ourselves in. I move, adjust my body to get up, but her hand crawls up my neck to pull me into a kiss I am desperate to give her, but I can’t.
“I should go,” I say, and try to say it not like the fucking coward I am. “I have to get to work.” Lame excuse.
“Can’t we just stay like this a little longer?”
“That’s not a good idea,” I say. And her face contorts, her body sitting up now. Her eyes are more open than they've been yet.
“Right, of course,” she says. “So, it’s amazing, but not worth the continued risk?
” She pulls her knees up to her chest, bringing the comforter with her.
I get out of bed and begin to slip on my clothes.
She looks at me for a long moment as I stand here more dressed than she is.
But she doesn’t realize just how exposed I feel.
The brightness she woke up with dims, just slightly, which is worse than any biting edge.
“What does it mean, Hudson?” she asks, genuinely. “To you, what did this mean?”
I open my mouth. The honest answer is there, I can feel the shape of it, but it dies there.
“It means,” I say carefully, “that we agreed not to be with other people for the duration of this, and that was always going to be difficult, and I think last night was—”
“Don’t,” she says. Quiet. Final.
“I'm just saying it's understandable that—”
“Don’t tell me what last night was a natural consequence of, like you understand anything more than your own motives.
” The room is very quiet, she always fills the room with noise, in the shower, at the kitchen sink, when she tells me about all the smallest parts of her day.
But she lets the quiet overtake us now. So I try to claw some of it back.
“I’m not trying to diminish it,” I say. “But I don’t want anyone to get the wrong idea.” It’s me, I am the one who could get the wrong idea. And that’s more terrifying than anything we’ve been up against yet.
“You’ve been thinking about how this ends since before you opened your eyes,” she says. “I can tell. I know what it looks like when you’re already writing the conclusion before even asking the question. This is your M.O., just making decisions for everyone around you.”
“That's not it,” I say, trying to keep my resolve, but it sounds cold.
“It’s okay. I know what this is.” She pulls the covers back, moving to sit on the edge of the bed, her back to me. “I've always known what this is.” I’m staring at the back of her, her hair a mess from last night, the back of her head holding the sounds we screamed into the pillow.
“Look.” She turns back, and there it is, the joke assembling itself, the armor she reaches for when everything else has run out. “Our first real marital fight.” She gestures vaguely between us as she stands to get dressed herself. “That'll be good for the paperwork.”
The smile she’s forcing almost works. And that almost makes it worse. But it doesn't. And what's underneath it is something I don't have a clean argument for, something I would give a great deal to not have put there. But I did. Because she’s not wrong.
“And given that it’s our first fight? It’s also the first time I’m going to kick you out.” She positions her hands on her hips, a stance I know too well, but this time fueled by something much worse than neighborly hate.
“Hudson?” she says calmly.
“Yeah?”
“I'd like you to leave now.” It’s delivered quietly. I don't counter, which used to happen, but now happens with some regularity.
I pick up my shoes, and walk out the door.
I stand in the hallway between her apartment and mine, in the inches of air that has held the best and worst versions of us. The small man, Mr. Ambrose, sees me leaving and shuffles back into his apartment nervously. As if I’m the person you want to avoid. Right now, might be true.
And when I step back into 7A, I stand in the entry long enough to understand that the conversation I keep waiting for the right moment to have is running out of moments. It’s how the thing that could be explained becomes a lie for no reason other than cowardice.
Before the morning becomes a pattern of something I can't walk back from without taking something from her that she didn't know she’d given.
I make coffee, sit at my desk, and pull out the folder from the drawer. I already know what's inside, and that’s the problem I’ve been living with since the day the board approved everything I asked for and handed me the bill.
Staring at the deed to her apartment.