8. Allison
ALLISON
Ipromised myself I’d tell him on our anniversary.
It sounded meaningful when I decided it.
The screening results came back low risk last week, and I printed them and put them in the drawer with the ultrasound pictures, and I thought, fine, the anniversary.
Five years married felt like a clean start and a real reason to call.
It also bought me another week, and when I think about that part too hard my face goes hot.
So I spend our fifth wedding anniversary being extremely busy.
I reject a whole delivery of geraniums because half of them have root rot and the supplier thinks calling it “minor” will change what roots do.
I walk through propagation two and rearrange trays that were fine where they were.
Every time my phone buzzes in my pocket, nerves prickle up the back of my scalp, and then it’s a supplier and I’m irritated with a man who hasn’t done anything yet.
My mother finds me in the glass office after lunch and shuts the door behind her.
“You said today.”
“The day’s not over.”
“That’s what people say right before the day’s over.
” She sets an envelope on my desk and leaves.
It’s an anniversary card, and inside, under the printed verse, she’s signed only her name.
There’s no advice and no underlining. For my mother, that’s practically a miracle, and I feel worse than if she’d lectured me.
He doesn’t call during the day. I tell myself he’s in meetings, and he probably is.
Everybody goes home, and the retail house goes dark, and the sky over the greenhouses turns orange and then purple and then finally black, and I’m still at my desk pretending to read invoices with my phone face up beside my hand.
My work pants are getting snug and my excuses are getting worse.
Tonight I’m in one of his old button-downs with the sleeves rolled, because it hangs straight down over the small curve low on my belly that nobody but my mother has noticed yet.
When his name finally lights up the screen, I answer before the first ring’s done. Pride has limits.
“Happy anniversary,” Gavin says.
I close my eyes, and I let myself be happy. He remembered. Other years his assistant sent roses on a company card, and today no flowers came. I’ve been a little hurt about that all day, right up until this second.
“Happy anniversary. Isn’t it the middle of the night there?”
“Way past it.” I hear sheets move. “I’m home. The house is very quiet and very beige. I didn’t send flowers because I didn’t want somebody else picking them out for you.”
It’s such a Gavin thing to say that the backs of my eyes sting. “I noticed.”
“Good or bad?”
“I haven’t decided.”
For a while we just talk like married people.
He brings up our reception, when the air conditioning died and his mother tried to have the cake moved into a conference room to save it.
I remind him that he took off his jacket and stood guard next to it because I said nobody was putting our dessert in a meeting.
“You told the hotel manager you’d invoice him for emotional damages,” he says.
“Did he move the cake?”
“No.”
“Then it worked.”
He laughs, low and warm right against my ear, and it goes straight down my spine. I’ve missed that sound so much I have to put my hand flat on the desk.
“Where are you right now?” he asks.
“The office.”
“Where in the office?”
I shouldn’t answer. “At the desk.”
He goes quiet, and when he talks again his voice has dropped low, the way it used to in the dark. “The desk.”
“It still handles invoices.”
“I remember its other qualifications.” More sheets. “Allison. Can I tell you what I’d do if I were there?”
I look at the scuff on the wall where the desk hit it that night in April. I never moved the desk. “You can tell me.”
“Sit up on it.”
I do, and the metal edge is cool through my jeans. Then I look up and remember I’m sitting in a glass box in the middle of a dark greenhouse with every light on. “Hold on. I’m in a glass office, Gavin. I’m basically a snow globe.”
“Turn off the lamp.”
I reach over and switch it off, and the whole place goes dark except for the red exit sign and the moon coming through the roof panes. “Okay. Now I’m a snow globe with mood lighting.”
“Better,” he says, and I can hear him smiling. “Unbutton your jeans.”
I tuck the phone against my shoulder and do it, and the zipper is loud in the empty office. I can hear his breathing change when he hears it.
“Now the shirt.”
My hand goes to the button at my collar and stops, and my fingers go cold on it. Under that shirt is the one thing I haven’t told him, and I’m not going to tell him like this, with my jeans open and my face hot.
“No,” I say. “Shirt stays on. You’ll have to work with what you get.”
He makes a low sound like I’ve wounded him. “You’re cruel.”
“You’re in London.”
“I’m aware.” He doesn’t push it. “Put your hand in your panties, then. Slow. Tell me how wet you are.”
I slide my hand down, and I’m already soaked, embarrassingly so, from nothing but his voice and a scuff mark on the wall. “Very,” I tell him. “It’s humiliating.”
“It’s the best thing I’ve heard in two months.” He’s breathing harder now. “Touch your clit. Just circles. Don’t rush.”
I do what he says, and my hips jump off the desk the first time. It’s been so long since anybody but me touched me, and even this is only me, but it’s his voice telling me how, and that’s what has my thighs shaking. “What are you doing?” I ask him. “I want to know.”
“I’ve got my cock in my hand,” he says, like it costs him nothing to admit it. “I’ve been hard since you said desk. I’m lying on my side of the bed and I keep looking at yours.”
“Tell me what you’re thinking about.”
“You on that desk in April. Your legs around me. The sound you made when I pushed into you and the rain was so loud I thought nobody on earth could hear you but me.” His breath stutters. “I think about that every night, Allison. I think about it in client meetings. It’s a problem.”
“Good,” I say, and he laughs, rough and breathless.
“Put two fingers in yourself. Pretend it’s me.”
I lean back on one hand and do it, and I’m so wet it’s easy, and I’m shaking.
I can hear him on the other end, the rhythm in his breathing and the tiny catch every time I make a sound.
I talk to him too. I tell him I miss his cock, that I miss how heavy he feels on top of me, that I want him to come inside me the way he did on this desk.
I can’t believe my mouth. He groans like I’ve hit him.
“Say that again.”
“I want you to come in me.”
“Christ, sweetheart. Come for me first. Let me hear it.”
It doesn’t take long. I come with my fingers inside me and my heel braced on the edge of the desk, hard enough that I have to bite my wrist, and he keeps talking me through it in that low voice, telling me how good I am, how much he wants to taste me, and I don’t stop, and it rolls into another one before the first is over.
I lose track of everything but his voice and the moonlight and the cold metal under me.
Then I hear him go. He says my name, low and broken, and then just breathes while I listen, my hand still between my legs and my whole body humming.
Neither of us says anything for a while. It’s the closest I’ve felt to him since the night he left, and he’s on the other side of an ocean.
“Happy anniversary,” he says finally, and he sounds so wrecked and pleased with himself that I laugh.
“You’re very proud of yourself.”
“Extremely.” His voice goes soft. “I miss you so much I don’t know what to do with it.”
I put my free hand on my stomach under the shirt. This is it. I’m warm and open and he’s listening. I’m also so scared my mouth has gone dry. “Gavin, there’s news I need to tell you. I had some medical tests.”
“What tests?” All at once he sounds wide awake. “Are you all right?”
Then I hear a knock on his end of the line. It’s a real knock, on a door, and he stops talking.
“Hold on,” he says. “Somebody’s at the front door.”
I hear him move, and a door, and footsteps on stairs.
Then another door opens and a woman’s voice says, “I’m so sorry.
I know what time it is.” It’s Rebecca. “This client contract has to be signed before their people fly out in the morning, or they sign with somebody else. Their man’s waiting in the car. ”
“Wait in the office,” Gavin says, and I hear the door close again.
I’m sitting on my desk with my jeans open, my husband’s barely caught his breath in London, and his business partner is downstairs holding papers.
All the warmth drains out of me, and I start to shiver.
I know it’s work, and I believe him that it’s work.
It’s just that it’s always work, at every hour, and he always opens the door.
“I’m sorry,” he says, back on the line. “It’s a client contract. A big one. Listen, the hiring’s going faster than we planned. If it keeps up, we might be ready to open early.”
I get my hopes up before I can stop myself. “So you’d come home early.”
He pauses, and I know the answer before he gives it. “The base might need me longer after it opens. The first months are when the clients decide whether they’re staying. Nothing’s final, I’m telling you before it is.”
“Past November.”
“Possibly.” He sounds miserable about it, and he still says it. Downstairs, I can almost hear Rebecca waiting. “What tests, Allison?”
I look at the drawer where the ultrasound pictures are.
The heartbeat’s still on my phone, saved under his name.
I could play it for him right now. He’d be on a plane by morning, and he’d be coming home for the baby.
I asked him to stay for me in April, and he didn’t.
I want him to come home because I’m worth the trip, and if I tell him now, I’ll never know if I was.
“Routine,” I say.
It comes out easier than the first lie did, and that scares me more than anything else tonight. My fingers have gone numb around the phone.
“Routine for what?”
“Nothing you need to worry about.” I hear it after I say it. It’s the same kind of sentence Rebecca used on him.
“Are you sure?”
“I’m sure. Go sign your papers.”
“I love you,” he says. “Happy anniversary.”
“I love you too.”
The call ends. I sit in the dark for a while, and then I button my jeans and slide off the desk. I stand at the glass with the greenhouses silver and quiet under the moon and one hand pressed flat against my stomach, and I tell myself I’ll try again, and I don’t believe it.
Then there’s a flutter under my palm, so soft I think I’ve made it up. I hold my breath.
There it is again, right under my hand.