Tear You Apart (14 page)

Chapter Twenty-Two

I can’t spend too much time away from the gallery; Naveen does expect me to work for my paycheck, after all. And though I suspect if I went to him and told him the real reason I want to sneak away for an hour or so at lunchtime, he’d smile and give me a thumbs-up, I don’t want him to know. I don’t want anyone to know.

I carry the weight of my secret like a stone, and hold it in both my hands because I don’t want to let it go.

The ping of a text woke me this morning. Will, playing at being casual, inviting me to watch him shoot some pictures in a warehouse. Professional. Neutral. Distant.

He wants to pretend this is all accidental, but for me it isn’t a game. I haven’t simply let it happen. I’m falling because I jumped, and not because I tripped. This is on purpose and I own it, even if he won’t. But I let him pretend we’re meeting so I can watch him take pictures of empty rooms and peeling paint, and not so that he can fuck me.

But oh, I have every intention of making him do that.

He takes a lot of pictures using natural light. I have to lean in close to see what he sees through the lens, and I take a long, slow breath of him when I do. The feathers of his hair tickle my cheek. I want to nuzzle against his skin, and stop myself only at the last minute. And then only just.

His phone buzzes from his pocket. We pull apart while he answers. It’s the model who’s supposed to be here, posing for some urban fantasy romance cover. She’s sick. Will’s expression goes dark as he listens to excuses that sound like bullshit even in the small bits and pieces I can hear through his speaker.

“She’s not sick,” he says when he disconnects. “She’s hungover, or she ate too much for breakfast and she’s determined to barf it all up.”

“That’s such a cliché.”

He slowly smiles. “Yeah. It is.”

“Maybe she’s got the flu. You’re so cynical.”

We’re standing very close together. I can count his eyelashes and the bristly threads of his brows. I can see the glint of silver in his hair when he stands in the light coming through a window from which all the glass has been broken out.

And then I can’t stop myself from touching him. My fingers curl in the front of his shirt and pull him even closer. He holds his camera to the side, out of the way. Our mouths are very close, but we do not kiss.

We talk every day. Silly things. Jokes and comments on the weather. We talk about our kids; it’s been such a long time since my girls were small that his stories of crayon-colored drawings for the fridge make me feel both nostalgic and relieved I’m no longer in that place. We share our favorite colors and flavors of ice cream and television shows and music, but we never talk about what this is.

He doesn’t lean toward me, but he doesn’t pull away. And I...I stand there for another half a minute with my lips so close to his all it would take is a whisper and we’d be kissing. But I don’t do it. I pull away and walk toward the window, glancing over my shoulder at him to see if he’s watching. He is.

“Great view,” I tell him.

Outside the window is the vast expanse of the East River. Below us, busy streets. This warehouse is slated to be turned into expensive condos pretty soon, and I’ll admit that I don’t have the vision to imagine it as anything other than a giant box of filthy wooden floors and cobweb-strung beams. I spin, arms out, to make the hem of my skirt flare.

He’s taking pictures of me, and I should protest but I don’t. My spinning makes the dust fly up, motes dancing like stars in the shafts of light. This is it, this is me. I am made of stars.

I’ve made myself dizzy so that I stumble, but Will is there to catch me. Together we look out the broken window to the world below, and at last, at last I think he’s finally going to kiss me. That’s when the sound of boots and voices distracts him.

“Shit,” Will says. “Security. C’mon.”

“Wait, what?” I follow him toward the stairs on the opposite side of the huge room. We’d come up on the elevator, a gigantic, creaking thing that gave me visions of plummeting to our deaths.

Will holds the metal door open for me to step through. “Security. I didn’t get permission to shoot here.”

“Oh. Shit.” I pause and wait for him on the landing. There are windows here, thank God, or else we’d be in darkness.

Will eases the door closed to keep it from slamming. We make it down only one flight when the door we came out of opens. Voices, two or three, echo in the concrete shaft. Will pushes me against the wall, out of sight—unless they decide to come down the stairs, in which case we’re screwed. My hands skid along the metal railing. They are on the landing directly above us. In a minute I smell the familiar tang of pot.

I start to laugh. We can’t move from under the landing or they’ll see us, though honestly, stoned security guards can’t be that much trouble, can they? Will lowers his camera bag gently to the gritty concrete and puts a finger to his lips.

When I can’t stop laughing, he covers my mouth with his. His hands anchor at my hips, pushing me back. I’m holding on to the railing, the metal cool and gritty under my palms.

He kisses me hard and harder.
It will always be like this,
I think, before the slide of his tongue on mine makes it impossible to think about anything but that and the creeping tickle of his fingers against my inner thigh as he pulls up my skirt and eases my panties down. Always hard and fast and delicious like this. We will never grow cold.

His fingertips circle, and I’m already close to the edge when he eases off. I mutter a protest into his mouth, but only for a second, because he’s turning me to face the wall. Behind me, Will puts his hands over mine on the railing, curling my fingers tight on the metal. He nudges my feet apart as he pushes up my skirt, and I hear the click and clack of his zipper, but the moment I let a moan slip free he’s got his hand over my mouth again.

Above us, the guards are talking about their girlfriends and getting laid, but it sounds more like bragging than truth. They’re complaining about their boss, and that sounds more real. They’re talking about rousting out bums who like to sleep in the warehouse, and how they’ll happily beat the shit out of anyone they find inside, and though we aren’t bums and I’m pretty sure they wouldn’t actually hit us, my heart beats faster and I struggle a little against Will, who digs his fingers into my hip until I go still.

With his hand covering my mouth, he bends me forward. I grip the railing tighter when he pushes inside me, and it’s a good thing he’s stifling me because I can’t stop myself from moaning again. I spread my arms apart, not caring about dust or rust as my fingers skid on the metal. Holding the railing lets me angle my body to take him in deeper, all the way to the verge of pain.

The colors begin their swirling dance, bursts and flashes. He’s not saying my name or anything else, but the faint cry of gulls and the rush of the ocean fill my head. I push back against him, but the slap of our flesh is too loud and he holds my hip to keep me from moving. Slowly, slowly, he eases inside me and slowly, slowly, retreats.

The guards are still above us, and I no longer hear what they’re saying as anything more than a long stream of jumbled sounds. I don’t care about them. All that matters is the maddeningly slow press of Will’s body into mine.

He curves himself over me. I feel his breath on the back of my neck and taste salt from his hand. When he bites the soft flesh exposed by the scooped neck of my blouse, I come. Hard but soundless, biting back cries that would surely be too loud even behind the guard of his palm. The metal railing rattles as I shake, but I can’t stay still enough to keep it quiet. Will moves a little faster then. Deeper. The hand that had been gripping my hip shifts forward to press against my clit.

I’m not quite there, and honestly don’t expect to get there again. Really don’t care. I’m still shaking from the first one, unable to catch my breath, my legs weak. But Will’s still moving so slowly, so quietly, that every time he thrusts he pushes my body forward, against his hand. And that slow, steady pressure builds and builds until I’m tipping over. I’ve bitten him on purpose before, but now I sink my teeth into his hand by reflex.

He shudders.

Blinking, I return to the world with an ache in my fingers from gripping the railing too hard, weak knees, strained toes from pushing my body into the right position. He pulls out and away, and I relax all at once, still quiet, still furtive. I start to laugh again.

I try to hold it back, but from upstairs I hear one of the guards remark confidentially to the other that “sometimes, man, I just don’t know what it all means,” and I can’t keep it in anymore. My shoulders shake and I bite my tongue, but I can’t stop.

Will is laughing, too, and he pushes me back against the wall to cover my mouth with his. The kiss presses in my giggles, and then, without thinking, I have my arms and legs wrapped around him, my face buried in his neck, my ass resting on the railing and the concrete wall digging into my back. It’s not comfortable, but I’m not laughing anymore. I’m clinging to him like a baby monkey, trying to get as much of myself around as much of him as possible, and now I’m stifling something closer to tears.

Upstairs, the metal door creaks and clangs shut, leaving behind only echoes and the faint, drifting scent of their smoke. Neither of us move. Will is supporting me, arms around me, his face pressed against my skin. We breathe and breathe, and finally, I have to move. I extract myself from him one limb at a time until I’m standing in front of him. Panties around my ankles, slickness coating my thighs, my clothes and hands filthy. I’ve left the marks of my fingers on his shoulders. I hold his face for a moment, forcing him to look into my eyes.

We say nothing.

By the time we’ve gathered our things and taken the stairs all the way down to the street, Will is making jokes that deflect attention from what we did in the warehouse. I’m quiet, looking out the window of the cab we share back toward the gallery, where I’ll get out and he’ll keep going. We have a history in cabs, I think, and wonder if he’ll kiss me again or if he’ll just keep pretending we don’t do that sort of thing.

At the gallery, the driver stops and I pay him, but before I get out, I slide across the seat and take Will by the front of the shirt. Not hard, not grabbing. He could pull away, if he wants to. I offer my mouth without saying anything, just a tilt of my head, a parting of lips. I wait. Wait, wait, wait.

And then, just before it would become awkward even for the cabbie, Will leans in to brush his mouth across mine. It’s a sweet kiss, brief and perfect and exactly what I wanted. I smile into it. He smiles back.

“Talk to you later,” I tell him. Not a request.

I get out of the cab and don’t look back to see if he’s watching me from the window, but I figure he probably is. Inside, I head for my office, avoiding Naveen, who is tied up with some clients, anyway. At least until he comes to find me and I’m busy doing my best not to fiddle with my hair, which I’m sure is just-fucked messy, or my lipstick, which is just-been-kissed smeared.

“Hi.” I’m casual.

Naveen isn’t paying attention. He hands me a stack of invoices and folders, sending receipts fluttering to the floor like errant butterflies. He’s blathering on and on about some sort of show he wants to put on at the end of the year, how the gallery will need to be redesigned to accommodate some bigger pieces, blah, blah, blah.

He stops almost in the middle of a sentence I’m not really paying attention to, because I’m so busy reliving the feeling of Will entering me. Startled, I realize Naveen’s asked me a question. “Huh?”

Not a question, though he’s looking at me expectantly, as though I’m supposed to provide an answer. “Next week. On Thursday.”

If I ask him to repeat himself, he’s going to be pissed off, and also wonder why I wasn’t paying attention, which could ultimately circle around to why I’m distracted, a subject I want to avoid. “Thursday is probably...fine?”

“So you think I
should
see her.”

I get it now. “Oh, Naveen. You have to ask me that?”

“Yeah. I should tell her to fuck herself.”

I roll my eyes. “Shut up.”

He looks distraught, running a hand through his hair to mess it up, then smooth it. “She said she has something to tell me. Something important.”

“Well,” I say slowly, understanding now why he’s so nervous, because it’s about that woman he told me he was in love with, and not some random bang, “I guess you just have to be prepared for what she might say. What do you think it could be?”

“She’s leaving her husband,” he says confidently.

“Would that be a good thing for you?”

His mouth works. He shrugs then. “No. I don’t know.” He gives me the old, helpless look that used to melt me. “What do I do?”

“I don’t know. I wish I had an answer for you.”

He sighs, shoulders lifting. “Fuck, it’s so complicated.”

“Yeah,” I say. “That. Twice.”

Chapter Twenty-Three

We talk every day.

A call in the morning if I’m on my way to work at the Philadelphia office, maybe a video chat if I’m working from home. If I’m going in to the New York gallery, we meet for lunch, and mostly, just eat lunch. We talk again on my train ride home, and those couple hours are never long enough.

We talk, and talk and talk. About everything from alien abduction to the zombpocalypse—I’m uncertain about the former and adamantly opposed to the viability of the latter, while Will’s a believer in all of it, including Sasquatch and the Loch Ness monster. On the existence of God we are both torn.

We message each other throughout the day. Silly quotes. Commentary on whatever it is we’re doing. He sends me pictures of what he’s working on and I reciprocate, though of course his are always artistic and beautiful and mine are stupid, out-of-focus snapshots. I have an entire gallery of the work he sends me, hidden in a folder on my phone.

He makes me laugh.

Oh, God, how he makes me laugh.

He tells me the dumbest jokes, or subtly imitates the lady on the bus with the shopping bag or the guy behind the counter at the corner grocery—never unkind, never mocking, just perfect mirroring of gestures and phrases. He replays them for me late at night in front of the computer while we sneak in a video chat, and I have to be quiet so as not to alert Ross, sleeping in the room down the hall. I hold both hands over my mouth and laugh, and laugh and laugh until my sides are sore.

And then...there is nothing.

I wait for my early morning message, and when the hours pass without one, I start to wait for the lunchtime invitation. When that doesn’t come, I break down and call, leaving a short message on his voice mail when he doesn’t answer. Just before I go home for the day, I send another instant message. Ignored.

At home, I find dirty dishes in the sink and crumbs on the counter, a pile of laundry by the washer and the sounds of the television coming from the den. That’s where I find my husband, firmly ensconced in his favorite recliner with a beer in one hand and some kind of sports on the big screen.

Maria will clean the kitchen, of course, if I decide to live in filth and leave it for her when she comes in a few days. That’s why we hired her. That is why my husband thinks it’s perfectly okay to live in our house like it’s a hotel. But I don’t want to live this way, housekeeper or not, so I pull out a dishcloth from the drawer and attack the counters as if they’ve done me wrong.

I’m not hungry, but I make myself a bowl of soup, anyway. I eat it at the counter with my silent phone next to me. It refuses to buzz or beep or chirp. I refuse to look at it.

Later in bed, Ross rolls over, groping expectantly. He doesn’t fumble. He knows just where and how to touch me, but I’m instantly tense, waiting for him to make it all go wrong. He doesn’t. He eases me into arousal even though I don’t want it. His fingers stroke and probe, and his mouth finds places to tease. We find one of the tried-and-true positions, me on my back with him on his side. It should work. I’m wet, he’s hard, his fingers toy with my clit as he fucks into me...but it’s not working. He finishes, and I’m left with a vague sense of loss. That’s what this has become.

Loss.

Dozing, Ross sounds like a chain saw. His arms and legs are still tangled with mine. He’s sweaty. I need to pee. I cannot fall asleep this way, so I do what every wife learns to do—I shove him until he rolls off me, and mutter, “Turn on your side, you’re snoring.”

He does, and I stare up at the ceiling for a few minutes before I manage to get out of bed and go to the bathroom in the dark. I wash my hands, also in the dark. I grip the sink while the water runs to cover up the sound of my sudden, gasping sobs.

Back in bed, fully dressed, covers pulled to my chin, I cannot sleep.

There used to be nights when Ross and I stayed up late talking. Not just in the beginning, when we were dating and everything was new and sweet, and staring into his face was as delicious to me as ice cream. Later, when the kids were small and the only time we had together were these late-night conversations under the blankets. There were times when we fought in fiercely hissing whispers, and times, too, when we giggled ourselves into hiccups. Now I can’t remember the last time Ross said anything that barely raised a smile, much less made me laugh so hard it was as good as having an orgasm.

There are a lot of reasons to stay in a marriage, and I’ve learned that love can be the least of them. Debt. Family. History. Laziness. Those can keep a person from leaving.

Fear can, too.

Lying beside my husband now, I want to turn and kiss him the way I used to. I want us to laugh under the covers again. At least, I try to want those things, but the truth is...I no longer really do.

I give in to the embarrassingly obsessive and desperate urge to check my phone, but there’s still no message from Will. No reply. I’m still awake when the sun comes up.
Everything changes,
I think.

Everything ends.