Or had I imagined that?
There was no softness tonight. No pause. No moment where he slowed down and looked at me like I was someone he’d chosen, not just someone who happened to be there. He didn’t check in. He didn’t ask. He didn’t hold me after.
But hadn’t I pulled him closer when he started to push? Hadn’t I bitten his lip first? Hadn’t I arched my back and begged for more when every sane part of me should have been screaming stop?
Just taking.
Just finishing.
Just silence after.
I turned my head on the pillow and looked at him. In the dim light, his face had lost that hard edge. His jaw was slack. His lips were slightly parted. He looked almost boyish. Almost kind. Almost like the man I’d met four years ago, before whatever was between us curdled intowhateverthis was.
Four years, yet the cold space between us in bed felt wider than any ocean I’d ever crossed.
I wondered if it could be different.
If rough could still mean close, the way it used to—or the way I thought it used to—or if I’d made that up. Maybe I’d been rewriting our history in my head for so long that I couldn’t tell the real memories from the ones I’d built to survive this.
Could intensity carry tenderness underneath? Or was I just desperate? Was I seeing love in the spaces between his cruelty because the alternative was admitting there was nothing there at all?
I thought about the way his fingers had loosened on my throat at the very end. Just slightly. Just enough. And the way his eyes had searched my face for one quick second before he looked away.
Was that tenderness? Or was that hesitation?
Was that him feeling anything? Or was that him deciding not to?
I didn’t know. And lying there in the dark, I realized that not knowing was its own kind of torture—worse, in some ways, than a clear answer would have been. Anowould have been something I could grieve. This murky, shifting was something I could drown in.
Was there a version of us where he reached for me because he wanted me? Not my body. Not a release. Me—the woman who laughed too loudly at bad movies, who cried at dog food commercials, who he once told, at two in the morning, made the world seem less empty.
Did that woman still exist to him?
Did she still exist at all?
I didn’t know. Part of me held onto the possibility like a life raft in deep water. The other part whispered that this empty state wasn’t a mistake, that it was the truth I’d been outrunning for years, finally catching up.
And lying next to him in the dark, I couldn’t tell if Peter was struggling with the same questions somewhere underneath his silence—or if he simply had nothing left to struggle with.
Outside, the street was quiet, just the kind of crushing stillness that shows up at three in the morning when the whole world is asleep and you’re the only person left awake with your thoughts.
My hand resting on the mattress between us, inches from his back, I wanted to touch him. I wanted to press my palm flat between his shoulder blades and bask in his warmth and know that something in him would register it, thatsome sleeping part of him would lean back into me, even unconsciously, even by accident.
But I didn’t move, because I was afraid I’d reach for him and feel nothing. Or worse—that I’d reach for him and he wouldn’t stir at all.
So I stayed still, and the darkness stayed with me.
Six
Callan
Rain had left its mark on everything.
The porch boards beneath my boots had become dark with it, as had the siding and the soil. Every breath carried that odor the ground gives off after it’s been soaked through—dirt and a darker, pungent odor underneath.
The old chair groaned when I sat down, leaning forward with my elbows on my knees. I’d dragged it back onto the porch after I moved back in, set right where it had always been. Not sure why that seemed important. Beyond the railing, the backyard looked beat to hell—rain had flattened the grass and left raw patches of dark earth showing through like bruises.
It used to look different out here, or possibly my perception of it did.