Chapter 9 The Fix
Colt
I don't sleep.
I sit on the couch in the living room where Summer just took my life apart and I stare at the wall and I try to make the pieces fit back together in a way that doesn't make me the villain.
She's right about the birthday. There's no spin on that.
I forgot my wife's birthday. The whole day, not just the dinner.
The actual date she was born. And the fact that I don't know how it happened doesn't change the result.
The chair was empty. Her family saw it. She smiled through it.
And I texted her don't wait up like she was a roommate I was being polite to.
That part I can own. That part I hate myself for.
The rest, though.
Cheyenne's hand on my arm. The table at The Butcher Block.
The midnight phone call. The dinner party seating chart.
Summer recited the evidence like a prosecutor and each piece, individually, has a reasonable explanation.
The dinner at The Butcher Block was a working dinner.
Cheyenne touching my arm is how she talks.
She does it with everyone. The phone call was about the pitch.
The seating chart was my mother's doing.
Each piece is defensible.
Summer isn't reading the pieces. She's reading the pattern. It's what she does for a living, taking a pile of unrelated details and finding the line that runs through all of them, the one that was there the whole time. And the line she's drawn through this one leads to a man replacing his wife.
That's not what I'm doing.
I'm not.
I press my palms against my eyes. What I keep coming back to is the birthday.
Specifically, that I didn't know. Not that I forgot the dinner.
That I didn't see the text message. That I didn't know the date.
That my own brain skipped over the fact that Summer was born twenty-four years ago today, and the skip wasn't conscious, and I can't figure out how that happened.
I'm losing her. I know I am. And I don't know how to stop it.
I don't want Cheyenne. That's the part I keep coming back to under everything else.
I don't want her. I have never wanted her.
I want my wife. The girl from the diner.
The woman writing a book at our kitchen island in my old rugby shirt.
The one who is asleep right now twenty feet from me in a room she had to escape to because she couldn't lie next to me anymore.
I love her, I want her, but I am losing her and I don't know what I have been doing for so long that has built that into the truth.
***
The next three days, I try.
Sunflowers, because that's the only language I have. A reservation at The Butcher Block for Saturday night, because reclaiming the restaurant feels like the kind of gesture that matters even though I don't fully understand why she needs gestures when I'm standing right here telling her I love her.
I come home on time. Two nights in a row.
Six thirty. Six fifteen. I walk through the door and Summer is in the kitchen and I say, "What's for dinner?
" and she says, "I made chicken," and we eat together at the table like a normal married couple.
The conversation is functional and polite and completely hollow.
She's watching me. I can feel it. Not the way she used to, warm, easy and full of affection. She watches me now like a subject she's researching, studying what I do when I think no one's looking.
Saturday night, I take her to The Butcher Block.
The hostess seats us at a table near the window. I think about ordering wine and reading the menu and asking Summer how the writing is going.
Summer is in a black dress. Simple. Understated. Beautiful. I tell her so.
"Thank you."
Two words. No volley. No banter.
We order. We talk. I ask about her book. She tells me. I listen like I should have been listening all year, with my phone in my pocket and my eyes on her face.
She sees me trying. I know she does.
But the trying has a quality she doesn't trust. I can feel her assessing it. Weighing it. Deciding whether the man across the table is real or a performance. Everything feels so off, where is the comfortable ease we used to have?
I'm real. I am. I'm trying. I'm here. I just need her to give me a chance.
Dinner ends. The drive home is quiet.
At home, I take her coat. She stands in the hallway and looks at me and something passes between us that isn't forgiveness or anger. It's need, raw and chemical, the oldest language we speak.
"Come here," I say.
She comes.
She kisses me with the anger first. Hard. Teeth on my lip. Her hand fisted in the front of my shirt like she is holding me in place. I taste her wine and her sweet tea and the back of her throat and when I try to slow it down she bites me and pulls me back into the heat.
She isn't letting me be tender tonight.
I lift her. Her legs come around my waist. I carry her up the stairs because I can't let her go for the time it would take to walk up beside her.
In the hallway upstairs I push her against the wall. Her hands are in my hair. The sound she makes against my mouth is sharp. A challenge. Prove it, the sound says. Prove you're still in here. Prove I'm not fighting for a ghost.
I press my forehead to hers. We are nose to nose.
"Summer."
"Don't talk."
"Look at me."
"I am looking at you. Talk less."
I get the zipper of her dress down at the bedroom door. The dress falls. She steps out of it without looking at it. She is looking at me, every second, and the look isn't soft. The look is find me. Find the woman you forgot last week. Look at her now. Show me you are still here with me.
I look. I don't look away.
She is in a black bra and nothing else and her chest is moving fast and her eyes are wet and not crying.
"Bed," she says.
She pushes me down on it. Climbs into my lap. Puts her hands on either side of my face and holds me there and looks at me like she is doing an inventory with her head tilted to the side. Calculating. The man she married. The version that left. The version sitting under her now. She is checking.
"Tell me you see me."
"I see you."
"Tell me you're here."
"I'm here."
"Tell me who you want."
"You. Only you. Always you."
She kisses me harder than she has ever kissed me. Her bra unhooks under my hands. She pulls it off without breaking the kiss and her bare chest is against mine and the skin contact is its own argument. This is different. Harder. Faster. Teeth.
I roll her under me. She lets me. I get my mouth on her neck and down her chest and onto her breast. She arches. I keep going. Lower. Her stomach. Her hip. The inside of her thigh. She tries to pull me back up.
"Now, Colt. Now."
"Not yet."
I put my mouth on her. She is wet and ready and angry and her hand grabs my hair and she doesn't let me take it slow.
Faster, the grip says. I give her what she's asking for.
Tongue on her clit. Fingers inside her. Hard.
The rhythm she breaks for, and she breaks for it fast. She isn't quiet.
She says my name and she says fuck and she says I missed you and the third one almost takes me apart on the spot.
I come back up and she pulls me up by my hair. Like a punishment. She kisses me and tastes herself.
"Take your pants off, Colt."
I take them off.
She watches me. The whole time. Without blinking. Like she is daring me to be the man she just had her mouth on and not the man who forgot her birthday.
I am that man. I am still that man. I have to be.
I get over her. She wraps her legs around me. I push into her in one slow stroke because I want to feel her stretch around me and I want her to feel me feel it. She lets out a long breath. Her hands come up to my face. She holds it there.
"Look at me."
"I am."
"Don't you fucking dare look away."
"I'm not. Look at me back."
We hold each other's eyes. I start to move. Slow at first. She is staring at me like she is reading a book. Her pupils are huge. The root beer brown of her eyes is a thin ring around the dark. She is trying to find me. I am trying to be findable.
"Faster."
I go faster. She arches up to meet me. Skin on skin. Her hands move from my face to my shoulders. Her nails go in. She wants the mark. I want to give it to her.
"Harder, Colt."
I give her harder. Her breath catches. She keeps her eyes on mine.
She doesn't ask me whose this is. That was the old game, the call and answer we used to trade in a bed that worked.
Tonight she doesn't trade it. She holds my eyes and says nothing and lets the quiet stand, and the quiet asks a harder thing than the question ever did.
I get a hand between us and put my thumb on her clit.
She breaks again, harder than the first time, and she doesn't let go of my eyes.
She comes looking right at me. Like she is daring me to see it.
I see it. I see her. I see all of her, and I am hers.
We fuck like we're angry. Both of us. Angry at each other. Angry at the distance. Angry at the fact that this, right here, skin on skin, is the only conversation we know how to have without screwing it up.
I bury my face in her neck and I bite down, not breaking the skin, but needing that primal contact with her. I let go and she is whispering something into my hair, the same thing, over and over.
Stay with me. Stay with me. Stay with me.
I can't tell if she is asking or commanding. I say it back into her skin.
"I'm with you."
She holds me. Tight. Too tight. Like she is afraid to let go.
***
Afterward, we lie in the dark. My arm around her. Her head on my chest. The ceiling fan turning slow circles. Everything feels suspended. Everything feels okay.
The dinner. The trying. The sex. How she held me after. That was the bridge. The crossing. We're on the other side now and I'm going to be more present and she's going to see I'm here and we're going to be fine.
My phone buzzes on the nightstand.
I don't look at it. I don't reach for it.
But my hand twitches. Toward the nightstand. An involuntary micro-movement. The muscle memory of eleven months of reaching for every notification.
I catch it. Pull my hand back. Tuck it under my head.
Summer is breathing evenly against my chest.
I close my eyes and fall asleep thinking we've turned a corner.
I sleep like a man who thinks he just fixed his marriage.