3. Nora
NORA
Something hot moves through his face. Then he crosses the kitchen.
The first kiss isn't soft. It should probably scare me how much I need that.
His mouth hits mine and I grab his shirt in both fists, dragging him closer. He tastes like salt and black pepper and the toothpaste he used after his shower. Familiar. Too familiar. My body recognizes him so fast it makes me furious.
Daniel makes a low sound and backs me into the counter. The edge bites into my hip. I don't care.
"If you ask me to talk about this, I'll scream."
His breath catches against my mouth. "Upstairs."
"Yes."
We don't make it gracefully. I knock my hip on the table.
Daniel almost trips on the third stair because he's kissing me while climbing, which is objectively poor planning for an engineer.
I'd make fun of him if his hand weren't under my sweater, hot against my ribs, making every thought in my head come loose from its hinges.
In the bedroom, the suitcase is open on the bench at the foot of the bed. That stops me.
Folded shirts. Socks. The field notebook he takes to every site. The gray sweater I bought him in Edinburgh. All of it neat and ready to leave.
Daniel sees me looking, and for once he doesn't say anything.
Good. If he apologizes, I might break.
I pull my sweater over my head and drop it on top of his packed clothes.
His eyes go dark.
"Nora."
There's warning in it. Want too. So much want that my knees almost forget their job.
"What?"
He looks at me in my bra, breathing hard, hair half down from where his fingers pulled at it on the stairs.
"You know what you do to me?"
I look down before I can stop myself.
His cock is hard against the front of his jeans, obvious, thick, straining. Something low in my stomach twists so sharply I have to put a hand on the bedpost.
This is the man under the careful husband with a five-month plan. The one who wants me so badly he looks angry about it.
"Show me," I say.
He does.
He comes to me starved, finally done pretending hunger is polite.
His mouth is on mine, then my throat, then the place where my pulse is beating too fast under my skin.
His hands are everywhere and still not enough.
He unhooks my bra with the ease of years, impatient when the clasp catches, and then his mouth is on me before I can make a joke about it.
He lowers his mouth to my breast, and my anger slips. Not gone. Nothing that simple. It just breaks open into something hotter. I clutch his shoulders, head tipping back, as his tongue moves over my nipple and his hand closes around my other breast. He knows the pressure I like.
He knows me. That's the part that ruins me. He knows me and he's still leaving.
I push at his shirt, and he pulls it off. Then his jeans. Then mine. It happens fast, messy, our clothes scattered with no dignity at all. My jeans catch on one ankle and I kick too hard, sending them into the suitcase.
Daniel huffs one laugh.
"Don't," I warn.
"Wasn't going to."
"You were."
"A little."
My husband. Stupid at the worst possible time, human at the worst possible time.
I laugh once, and then my eyes fill. I pull him down to me.
The mattress takes our weight. The suitcase shifts against the bench. Somewhere outside, rain starts again, tapping the window like impatient fingers.
His cock presses against my thigh, hot and heavy, and I reach down because I need the proof of him in my hand. He groans into my mouth when I wrap my fingers around him.
His hand slides between us. I close my eyes when his fingers find me.
"You're wet," he says, rough and low.
"Don't sound surprised."
His fingers move through me, slick and sure, and then two of them push inside without the slow build I expect. My back arches.
"There she is," he says.
I hate that my body likes that. I grip his wrist. Not to stop him. To hold on.
He knows how to touch me. He knows the pressure and the rhythm and the exact angle that makes the room disappear. He's forgotten me in ballrooms. He hasn't forgotten this.
His fingers curl, and I gasp into his shoulder. His thumb finds my clit and he keeps touching me until my thighs start to shake. I feel the edge coming, too fast and not fast enough.
"Come for me," he says.
It shouldn't work.
It does.
My orgasm hits hard enough that I make a sound I'd be embarrassed by if I had room for embarrassment. I come around his fingers with my face pressed to his neck.
"God," he says. "I missed that."
Not I missed you. That would almost be kinder.
I missed that.
We've been married six years. We don't use condoms anymore. We haven't for a long time. For a while we were trying. Then we were half-trying. Then we stopped timing anything because Daniel was always gone at the wrong week, in the wrong city. At some point we stopped talking about it.
Bare is just how we are now. Not because we sat down and decided it. Because marriage is full of defaults nobody checks until one of them hurts.
It doesn't occur to him to ask anything. The awful thing is, it doesn't occur to me to expect him to.
He pushes my thighs apart with his knees, guiding his cock to me with one hand. The head presses against me, and then he pushes in.
Too much. Too good. Too late.
I suck in a breath and grab his shoulders. He pauses, more instinct than restraint, and then he sinks the rest of the way inside me with a groan that sounds like it has been dragged out of his chest.
"Christ," he says. "You're so tight."
His body is heavy and hot and familiar, and he's all the way inside me, thick and deep and not gentle enough to let me pretend this is comfort.
This isn't comfort. This is proof.
He wants me. He wants me so much he forgets to be careful. He just doesn't want me enough to stay.
"Move," I say.
He does.
He fucks me like he's angry too. Not at me. At the fight, maybe. At how much he wants me. At the fact that wanting me hasn't made him change his mind. His hips drive into mine, hard and deep, and I meet him because I need to. Because if this is the last night before he goes, I want all of him.
His mouth drops to my ear. "So fucking good," he says, low and rough. "You feel so good. Always so tight for me."
Then he keeps his eyes closed.
That is the part that gets in.
His face is turned into my hair, his breath hot at my ear, his hips working hard and steady between my legs. He's inside me, bare and deep, saying filthy things like he's half out of his mind, and I feel farther from him than I did across the kitchen table.
His eyes are closed and his mouth is at my ear and he could be anywhere. I could be anyone.
The thought is so sharp I almost say it out loud.
Then he shifts, gets deeper, and pleasure cuts through the thought before I can use it to protect myself. I cry out. He covers my mouth with his, swallowing it, but he still doesn't really look at me. Not the way I need.
His thumb finds my clit again, slick and firm, and he keeps fucking me deep while he touches me. It's too much. It's exactly enough.
"Come again," he says in my ear. "Come on my cock. Let me feel it."
I come with his name in my mouth. Not loud. Not pretty. Just ruined. My body locks around him, and I can't think about Singapore or Charlotte or the suitcase open at the end of the bed.
He doesn't stop when I come. He grinds deep, groaning at the way I clench around him, his forehead dropping to my shoulder.
He lifts his head then, finally, and looks at me. Really looks. His pupils are blown wide, his face stripped down to need.
For one second, he is with me. Then his eyes close again and he starts to come.
His whole body goes tight over mine, and the first pulse of him inside me makes him groan from deep in his chest. He drives in harder, deeper, like he wants to get every inch of himself into me before he lets go.
"Fuck," he says. "Fuck, I'm coming. I'm coming so deep in you."
Every pulse of him registers. Hot and deep. Too intimate for two people about to be separated by an ocean.
When he finally stops, he's breathing hard against my throat. His weight is heavy on me. The rain taps the window. His suitcase sits open. His cock is still inside me.
I stare at the ceiling and try not to cry.
Then he lifts his head and kisses me. Deeply. So deeply I almost forgive him by reflex.
When he pulls back, his fingers slide into my hair, spreading it over the pillow. My hair is dark now. Brown, close to my natural color, because bleach takes maintenance and money and a person who isn't too tired to sit in a salon chair for three hours pretending life is normal.
"I miss the blonde," he says, voice rough and absent, like he's talking from somewhere half-asleep. "From when we first got together."
The words go straight through me. Not because of my hair. Because Charlotte is blonde.
Charlotte with her smooth pale hair and black dress and hand on his sleeve. Charlotte, here too, in our bed, between my body and my husband while he's still inside me.
I hate myself for thinking it. I can't stop thinking it.
"Hey," he says.
"Don't."
He rolls to the side and pulls me with him, his arm around my waist, his breath warm in my hair. The old position. My back to his chest. His knee between mine. His hand spread low over my stomach.
I put my hand over his. Not because I forgive him. Because I'm weak, because I love him, because tomorrow morning he'll be gone and tonight I'm still allowed to know the weight of him.
"The car comes at five-thirty," he says quietly.
I laugh once. It sounds terrible.
"What?"
"You just fucked me like that and now you're confirming pickup time."
He goes still behind me.
"I'm sorry," he says.
"I know."
I'm so tired of knowing.
We sleep badly. Or I do. Daniel drifts off around three, because his body is rude and efficient even in crisis. I stay awake and listen to the house.
At five-thirty, his alarm goes off. He shuts it down fast. Neither of us moves.
For one minute, we pretend. Then his phone buzzes. The car is downstairs.
Daniel gets up.
I keep my back to him while he showers. While he dresses in the practiced way of someone trying not to wake a person who is already awake. I hear the zipper on the suitcase. The wheels rolling over the floorboards.
At the bedroom door, he stops.
"Nora."
I sit up. I don't want him to remember me hiding under the covers.
He looks awful. Good suit. Travel coat. Hair still damp. Like a man going to his own execution, except he's not. He's going to a business-class seat and a tower with his name all over the invisible parts.
"The car's here," he says.
I nod.
Of course he says that. Not don't worry. Not I'll miss you. Logistics — the language he trusts most.
We go downstairs together. The suitcase waits by the door. His passport is in his hand. His phone buzzes twice. He turns it face-down on the hall table without looking.
That should count for something.
Not enough.
He picks up his coat.
"I'll call when I land."
There are a hundred things I could say.
Don't.
Come home.
Choose me.
I don't say any of them. I'm too proud to beg for something he should want to give me.
So I nod.
Daniel steps close and kisses me. It's gentle and brief and almost unbearable. His hand comes to my face. His thumb brushes under my eye, though I'm not crying.
Not yet.
"I'll fix this," he says.
He means it. That's another thing that doesn't help.
"You have to notice it's broken first," I say.
His face folds.
The driver knocks again. Daniel picks up his suitcase.
For one second, his hand tightens on the handle like he might put it down. My heart rises so fast it hurts.
Then his phone buzzes again on the table, and his eyes flick to it. Only for a second. Only a second.
Enough.
He opens the door. Cold January air rushes into the hall.
"Nora," he says.
I stand very still.
He waits like I might give him something to carry.
I've already given him too much.
"Goodbye, Daniel."
He leaves.
The door closes behind him with a soft click. Not a slam. Nothing dramatic. Just the ordinary sound of a man walking out of his house with a packed suitcase and a future waiting at the curb.
I stand in the hall until the car pulls away. Then I go back upstairs.
The bed is wrecked. The sheets twisted. His pillow dented. My sweater still lies half in his open suitcase's empty space on the bench because he packed around it instead of moving it.
That's what breaks me. Not the door, not the car, not the five months.
My sweater, left behind in the place where his things used to be.
I sit on the edge of the bed and press both hands to my stomach because something aches there, low and strange and mean.
I think it's grief. So I breathe through it.
I don't know any better yet.