5. Rye
RYE
Connor calls her on a Tuesday.
I know because I’m watching the kitchen camera when her phone lights up on the counter and she glances at the screen and goes still with the kind of stillness that tells me exactly who it is.
She’s made that face twice in the last six months: once when her lawyer called with the final paperwork and once when her sister called to say she’d run into Connor at a restaurant.
The look is the same. Something bracing in it. Something closed.
She doesn’t answer.
I exhale.
She sets the phone face-down on the counter and goes back to the Sunday dinner she’s making—the elaborate one, four hours, the kind she makes when she wants to feel like herself—and I watch her shoulders for the next twenty minutes.
The tension in them. The way she keeps glancing at the phone on the counter like she’s waiting for it to do something.
It buzzes twice. Text messages. She doesn’t look.
It’s been five days since the server room.
She’s back in her apartment—we haven’t discussed logistics, we haven’t discussed anything that resembles a formal arrangement.
But she’s been back and I’ve been there, and something has been building between us that I’ve stopped trying to name.
It’s more than what happened in the parking lot.
More than the couch. More than the blue server light and my name in her mouth and the footage playing on the monitor behind her.
She’s starting to perform for the cameras.
She doesn’t know I’ve noticed, or maybe she does and is deciding not to acknowledge it yet.
Yesterday morning she made coffee in the tank top she sleeps in, stood at the kitchen window for a long time watching the street.
The kitchen camera has a clean angle on her.
She knows it. She turned toward it once.
Small, deliberate. Then turned back to the window.
I watched that on loop four times.
But Connor. Connor’s texts are sitting on her counter and I don’t know what they say.
A problem I can solve immediately—I have a separate folder on the encrypted drive, the one with thirty-three items I never gave her.
One of those items is access to the email account he still uses for things he doesn’t want his new girlfriend to find.
I pull it up. Three messages: I miss you. I made a mistake. Can we talk?
The old folder has enough in it to end Connor’s career in a morning. I’ve been holding it for a year on the basis that using it would tell Aster more about what I am than I wanted her to know yet.
She knows now. She made her choice in the server room. She can know the rest.
I’m in my car outside his building in twenty-two minutes.
He opens the door in a gym shirt and joggers looking exactly like a man who has recently decided his ex-wife was worth wanting again.
He sees me. Something shifts in his face—the beginning of the smile he defaults to when he needs to manage a situation—and then he reads my expression and the smile doesn’t complete.
“Rye.”
“Connor.”
“I was going to call you?—”
“No you weren’t.” I step inside. He moves out of the way, which tells me everything I need to know about how this conversation is going to go. “Close the door.”
He closes the door.
I take out my phone and pull up the folder and hand it to him. He reads the first item—the most recent one, not the worst, but representative—and the color drains out of his face in a way that I find satisfying in a way I’m not going to examine.
“Where did you get this?”
“I’ve had it for four years. There are thirty-three more items. The most recent is nine months old.”
He’s quiet. He’s doing what people do when they’re calculating which version of this conversation they can still win. He’s not going to find one.
“You’re not going to contact her,” I say. “Not by phone, not by text, not through mutual friends, not accidentally on purpose at events you know she’ll be at. You’re going to leave her alone.”
“She’s my?—”
“She was your wife.” I take the phone back.
“You know what you did during eight years of marriage. You know what’s in this folder.
If I send the most recent item to your employer it won’t end your career but it will make the next year uncomfortable for you in ways you’d rather avoid.
” I put the phone away. “I’m not threatening you.
I’m explaining. You’ll leave her alone because you understand the value of leaving her alone. ”
He’s quiet long enough that the building’s HVAC hum fills the room.
“You were always going to do this,” he says. “She was always going to be the thing you?—”
“Yes,” I say. “Since before you asked her out. I want you to know that. I want you to know that I’ve known what she was since before you did and I watched you have it and not understand what you had.” I hold his gaze. “She deserved better. She has it now. Don’t contact her again.”
I drive back to her building.
She’s in the kitchen when I let myself in. The Sunday dinner is on the stove. She hears the door. Turns. Looks at me—the quiet assessment, the reading—and then her eyes move to something in my expression that I’m not hiding.
“What did you do?” she says.
“Connor won’t be calling again.”
A pause. “Rye.”
“He had thirty-three more items in the folder. I showed him enough.” I cross the kitchen. She stands her ground—she always stands her ground, one of the ten thousand things about her I have on file. “He won’t call.”
“You can’t just?—”
“I can.” My hands at her waist. She puts her hands on my chest—not pushing, that grip she has. “You were upset when he called.”
“I was fine.”
“You were bracing.” I move her back toward the counter, slow. “I’ve watched you brace before. I know what it costs you.”
“You need to stop doing things without telling me.”
“I’ll tell you everything tomorrow.” My mouth at her neck. She tilts her head—the small automatic tilt that means she’s already lost the argument with her own body. “You can be angry about it.”
“I am angry about it.”
“I know.” My hands find the waistband of her jeans. “Are you going to make me stop?”
She says nothing. She pulls me in harder by the shirt.
I lift her onto the counter and step between her thighs.
She’s already angling her hips toward me, already reaching for my belt, already doing what her body does before her brain catches up—the same pattern I’ve been watching for eight years, except now I’m inside it instead of watching from a server room.
I get her jeans off her—she lifts for me without being asked.
Then her legs come around me, she gets my belt open, and when I push my cock inside her the first time, her pussy so wet she takes me all the way on the first stroke, she makes a sound that goes straight through me.
“You can’t do things like that,” she says, not stopping. “You can’t just—you have to tell me first.”
“I know.” My hand in her hair, pulling back to look at her face. “Next time I’ll tell you.”
“Promise me.”
“I promise.” I’m not sure I mean it. Neither is she. She pulls me deeper by the back of my thigh. The dinner is on the stove. Connor’s text is face-down on the counter. I’m inside her in the kitchen the camera has been watching for eight years—and every single one of those years is in this room.
“You’re mine,” I say against her mouth.
“I know.” She’s not fighting it. She stopped fighting it in the server room, maybe before. “I know I’m yours.”
“Connor was going to take that back.” My cock driving into her, my hand gripping her thigh, holding the angle. She gasps, her pussy clenching around me. “He was going to call until you answered and talk his way back into something that was never his.”
“He never had me the way you—” She breaks off as I drive my cock deeper. “God. The way you?—”
“Say it.”
“The way you do.” Her head drops back against the cabinet. “He never—no one has ever?—”
“I know.” I know because I’ve watched her face in the kitchen light for years. This is the first time she’s made this expression—not performance, not patience, not the managed version of herself she maintained through eight years of a marriage going wrong. This. Raw. Real. Mine. “You’re soaking.”
“Obviously.”
“You were soaking before I touched you.”
“I was angry.”
“You were angry. You were soaking. Both things are true.” I find her clit with my thumb and she grabs the counter behind her. “That’s been true since the restaurant. Since the parking lot. Since the first time you pulled me in by the shirt instead of pushing me away.”
She comes against my hand. She comes again when I follow her, my cock buried inside her, my cum filling her, and I don’t pull out—she’s stopped expecting me to, a decision she made somewhere in the last two weeks and never said out loud. I know because I’ve been watching.
She’s carrying me everywhere she goes—my cum inside her at the kitchen table right now. She knows that. She’s stopped pretending she doesn’t.
The Sunday dinner doesn’t burn—I reach past her and turn the burner off while she’s still catching her breath. She looks at me. Laughs. The unguarded one, the June laugh, real.
I have it live now. Not on a server. In my hands.
She stays for dinner. She sits in her chair at her kitchen table. I sit across from her. She asks what was in the folder and I tell her the first four items. She is quiet for a moment.
“You had that for four years and you didn’t use it until now.”
“I used the first four when I needed you free. I used the rest when I needed you protected.”
She looks at me. “That’s the most insane love language I’ve ever encountered.”
“I know.”
“I should probably have more feelings about it.”
“You can have them later.” I lean back in the chair. “How’s the chicken?”
She picks up her fork. “It’s good.” A pause. “You need to tell me things before you do them.”
“I will.”
“And you need to talk to me about the cameras. What we’re actually going to do about them.”
“What would you like to do about them?”
She’s quiet for a moment. Eating. I watch her face, which I have been watching for eight years and which I am apparently going to watch for a great deal longer. The careful quality of her expression when she’s deciding something she’s already half-decided but wants to arrive at on her own.
“I want to keep the kitchen one,” she says. “So you can see when I’m cooking.”
I don’t say anything.
“The living room is fine.” She doesn’t look up from her plate. “The hallway is redundant. The bedroom—” She pauses. “The bedroom we’ll revisit.”
“Okay,” I say.
“I’m angry about it.”
“I know.”
“I’m also not making you take it down right now.”
“I understand.”
She looks up and we look at each other across the kitchen table that I’ve watched her sit at for eight years and something passes between us—something the cameras could never have caught—that feels like a beginning.
“How long have you had the key?” she says.
“Four years.”
She nods. Goes back to the chicken.
“There’s another one,” she says. “To this door. In your wallet. Next time you use it, knock first.”
I take the key out of my wallet and set it on the table between us.
She picks it up and holds it for a moment and then sets it back.
“Keep it,” she says. “Just knock.”
I pick the key up. Put it back in my wallet.
The Sunday dinner is the best thing I’ve eaten in years.