One Last Time Pretending We Were Whole
Chapter Three
Adrienne woke to the soft mechanical buzz of Wes’s campaign phone against the walnut nightstand.
He caught it before the second vibration. The mattress shifted beneath his weight, and the blue-white glow crossed his bare shoulder as he turned away from her.
“Crisis?” she asked.
“No.” His thumbs stopped. “Go back to sleep.”
The answer should have reassured her. Instead, it left her listening to the faint taps of glass under his hands.
Fifteen minutes earlier, his mouth had been at the base of her throat.
He had known exactly how to turn her onto her back without trapping her hair, how to slide his palm beneath her hip, how long to wait when she caught her breath.
Their bodies had remembered a language the rest of their marriage had misplaced.
It had started in the kitchen after midnight. Adrienne had come home to find him standing at the counter in shirtsleeves, eating cold pasta from a serving bowl because neither of them had been there when the housekeeper left dinner. He had looked rumpled and unexpectedly pleased to see her.
“You’re home,” he’d said.
“So are you. Should we notify the papers?”
He had laughed, tired but real, and held out the fork.
She had taken one bite, then another. For seven unhurried minutes, nobody had asked her to appear anywhere.
Wes had told her that a county chair in Alamosa kept calling him Walter.
Adrienne had told him about a resident who had tried to dictate a discharge note while still wearing a plastic isolation hood.
When she reached for the bowl, his fingers had closed around her wrist.
“I miss you,” he said.
The bluntness of it had taken the joke out of her mouth.
She could have asked which version of her he missed.
She could have mentioned the promise to talk after the debate, now two days old and untouched.
Instead, she had stepped between his knees where he sat on the counter stool.
His hand settled at her waist with the care of someone approaching a skittish animal.
“Wes.”
“Tell me to stop.”
She kissed him.
His hands paused at her ribs. “You’re certain this isn’t because we had a bad week?”
“We have bad weeks for a living.”
“That’s not an answer.”
Adrienne touched the faint line between his eyebrows. He looked more vulnerable asking permission than he ever did asking for votes. “I want my husband,” she said.
Something in his face eased, and for several minutes the title meant exactly what she needed it to mean.
The first contact was almost cautious. His lips were warm from the wine he had opened and barely drunk.
Then his hand moved into her hair and the caution went out of both of them.
He stood, sending the stool backward across the tile.
Adrienne caught the counter behind her, laughing against his mouth when he swore and righted it with one foot.
That laugh had made her reckless. She tugged his shirt free of his trousers and found the familiar plane of his stomach. He inhaled hard when her nails skimmed his side.
“Bedroom,” he said.
“Your shoulder?”
“Fine.”
“That wasn’t a medical assessment.”
“Good. I don’t want my doctor.”
For a moment, he sounded like the man who used to meet her after a midnight shift with grocery-store champagne and no plan for the next morning. She let him lead her upstairs.
Inside the bedroom, he stopped long enough to lock the door, an old habit from years when campaign aides had treated their houses like satellite offices. Adrienne stood behind him and undid the remaining buttons of his shirt. She pressed her mouth between his shoulder blades.
He turned so quickly that she took two steps backward. His gaze traveled over her face before he reached for the hem of her sweater.
“Yes?” he asked.
“Yes.”
He pulled it over her head. The sweater caught on one earring, and Adrienne freed it while he bent to kiss the center of her chest. He remembered the clasp of her bra.
He remembered that the scar along her left ribs was sensitive in a way she liked only after she was already aroused.
He remembered everything her body had taught him over nine years.
She wanted to believe memory was a form of loyalty.
She ran her thumb along the familiar ridge of his collarbone, finding the place where an old cycling fall had left the bone slightly uneven.
Wes caught her hand and kissed the center of her palm.
The gesture was tender enough to make every question she had carried upstairs seem temporarily ungenerous.
His mouth moved lower. Adrienne braced a hand on his shoulder, then loosened her grip when he glanced up. He waited until she nodded. Pleasure gathered with a humiliating ease, strong enough to empty her head of debate halls and blue medicine kits and conversations postponed to some cleaner future.
When her knees weakened, he lifted her. She wrapped her legs around him and felt the small hitch in his left shoulder.
“Put me down.”
“I’ve got you.”
“Your orthopedic surgeon would object to that sentence.”
He laid her on the bed with exaggerated obedience. “Better?”
“Marginally.”
She pulled him down by the waistband.
They undressed without grace. His cuff link struck the floor; one of her socks remained on until she kicked it away. Wes reached for the drawer, and Adrienne covered his hand with hers.
“I’m still on the pill,” she said.
His eyes returned to her face. “Are you sure?”
She knew he meant more than contraception. “I’m sure.”
He entered her slowly, holding his weight away from her until she caught his hips and drew him closer.
The familiarity was almost unbearable. She knew the small crease that formed beside his mouth when he fought for control.
He knew when to change the angle and when not to.
She met him with an urgency that made the headboard touch the wall, once, then again.
“Addie,” he said into her neck.
Nobody else called her that. The private name struck somewhere deeper than his body did.
She closed her eyes and let herself have the fiction. There was no election clock downstairs, no strategist at the edge of every conversation, no empty place at the dinner table. There was only the roughness of his breathing and his hand laced through hers against the pillow.
Her climax arrived hard enough to bend her beneath him. Wes slowed, watching her until she opened her eyes, then moved again with measured strokes. She held his face between her palms when he came.
For a while they stayed joined, breathing into the same inch of space. His forehead rested beside hers. Sweat cooled at the base of her spine.
“Come with me Wednesday,” he murmured.
“Where?”
“Anywhere. We’ll disappear for forty-eight hours.”
She brushed damp hair from his temple. “Governors-elect don’t disappear.”
“This one can.”
It was a promise offered in darkness, beyond the reach of calendars. Adrienne knew better than to accept it at face value. She kissed him anyway.
Later, he brought her water without being asked. He found her discarded sock and tossed it onto the bed. They shared the shower, where he stood behind her and washed shampoo from her hair. The domestic tenderness of it hurt more than the sex.
She stood at the vanity afterward, rubbing moisturizer into skin made dry by hospital soap, while Wes searched the closet for a clean T-shirt. Her green silk dress hung at the back beside three suits the campaign had approved and never used. He pushed them aside without noticing.
“Do you still want the cabin after the transition?” she asked.
“Of course.”
“We haven’t been in two years.”
“Then we’re overdue.” He pulled on the shirt and came behind her. Their reflections fit together easily: her face without makeup, his hair damp, his hands resting low on her hips. “January. No staff.”
“Your protection detail may have opinions.”
“They can guard pine trees.”
She met his eyes in the mirror. “And phones?”
His smile faded only at the edges. “We’ll make rules.”
Adrienne had once believed rules were what busy people made to defend what mattered. Lately, they marked the line where one more exception began. Still, when he bent to kiss her shoulder, she leaned back against him.
Now, at 1:17, his attention belonged to the phone.
“Who is it?” she asked.
Wes set the device facedown. “Laurel needed a call confirmed for morning.”
“Laurel needs you to confirm calls after one?”
“Apparently.” He leaned over and kissed her shoulder. “Sleep. You have rounds.”
Adrienne turned onto her back. “We still haven’t talked about Tuesday.”
“I know.”
“You said we would at home.”
His face tightened in the faint light from the hallway. “I came in after midnight. You were exhausted. Then this happened.”
This. As if their bodies had wandered into each other by clerical error.
“It happened because we chose it,” she said.
“That’s not what I meant.”
“Then what did you mean?”
He reached for her hand. His thumb moved across her knuckles, soothing them both. “I don’t want to ruin tonight by turning it into another argument.”
“Another argument requires a first one.”
“Adrienne.” Weariness flattened her name. “Three days. Let me get through three days.”
She withdrew her hand, not sharply enough to qualify as a fight. “You keep asking for smaller pieces of time as if they don’t add up.”
He pushed himself onto one elbow. “I’m asking you not to decide what this is while neither of us has slept.”
“I haven’t decided anything.”
That, at least, was true. She had spent the week constructing reasonable explanations because unreasonable ones demanded action.
Laurel’s knowledge could come from competence.
The late calls could be campaign necessity.
Wes’s impatience could be exhaustion. Each explanation worked when examined alone.
Together, they required more effort than Adrienne wanted to admit.
Wes reached for the lamp. “I love you.”
She could hear the expectation in the pause after it. “I love you too.”
His shoulders eased. He switched off his side and settled onto his stomach, one arm angled toward her pillow. Within minutes, his breathing deepened.
Adrienne left her lamp on.
The light made sleep impossible, but she was tired of helping darkness pass for peace.
She lay on her back and inventoried the evidence of the evening the way she reviewed a chart before signing it: the words spoken, the questions avoided, the observable changes.
Wes had touched her with care and listened for approval, yet the encounter had followed his timing from the moment he came through the door.
Even tenderness had been fitted around the campaign.
She had agreed because she wanted him, because habit could survive inside disappointment, and because admitting the distance aloud would require an answer neither of them had made room to give.
His forearm rested across the border between their pillows.
Months ago, she would have moved beneath it.
Tonight she watched the slow rise of his shoulder and wondered when comfort had become another task she performed without being asked.
At 1:34, the campaign phone lit beneath the edge of a policy brief. Wes had failed to turn it facedown completely. A notification appeared before the screen dimmed.
LAUREL SHAW
I wish tonight were ours.
Adrienne read the six words twice while her husband slept beside her.