The rain has stopped. The house is silent and waiting.
Then, methodically, Henry folds back the blanket, lets it slip off my knees and bunch on the ground. I am thinking that the sight of my thighs forced wide by the restraints is nearly intolerable until Henry slides his cool hand under my shirt and puts his thumb on my clit, obliterating the physical barrier we’ve been testing and pushing up against these last few days. We stare at each other, astonished. When all of this is over, when I am stuck in stock-still traffic on Sunset at three forty-five in the afternoon, when I am staring at the pink dusk, wondering if it is nature or pollution I am enjoying, this will be the moment I return to again and again: Henry’s thumb printed on my center and our shared awe that we get to have this again.
“You’re still so soft.” He says this with a slight gasp, with total grief. He leans in, brushes my bottom lip with his. We open our mouths, do not use tongue. He groans a curse deep into my throat, thumbing my clit in small, delicate circles. “Does he tell you how soft you are?”
I press my forehead against his with a whimper. No, my husband does not tell me how soft I am.
“How pink you are? How perfect?”
“Fuck.”
“You still like it when I hold you there?”
I melt into his hand. Nod with my bottom lip in my teeth.
And so Henry cups me between the legs, snugly, in the way I still like, the heel of his hand firm against my clit, fingertips digging into my ass. I am a nuclear button to which only he has the code.
“You’re in my dreams,” Henry says, kissing the tip of my nose, the dip in my cupid’s bow. “Sometimes you refuse to talk to me. Sometimes I’m chasing you, trying to stop you from leaving again. But sometimes you are like this.” He sits back on his heels, strokes my pussy lightly, thoughtfully. Watches, his beautiful face mesmerized by his ability to stir up all the ugly, undisguised desperation on my own. I feel full and empty at the same time, an irreconcilable pain that binds me to Henry still. His eyes leave mine, travel the length of my body, stop at the place where my long shirt cuts off his hand at the wrist. I follow his sightline to see his hand roving under my shirt. Such a small movement, barely a rotation, to be so vulgar. We stare at what his hand is doing to me with slack jaws, looking like two druggy dumbfucks who are almost certainly going to jail. But, you know what? Hard time might give me an edge. I’d have a good lawyer; I bet Gloria Allred would take me as a client, she’d make sure I was sent to one of those cushy prisons where they do yoga and eat organic, that I was out in less than a year. I raise my chin, open my mouth in a silent groan. Release blasts through me, shrapnel lodging in my nerves and fibers, embedding a bright new everywhere burn that makes kindling of the lie I’ve been telling myself over the years. That I could ever be okay without this.
I am a limp, leaking mess as Henry unties my ankles, my rug- burned wrists. I reach for him like a child, and he picks me up, hooks my legs around his waist, carries me into the bedroom. He pulls back the sheets and packs us tightly inside. I fall asleep on top of Henry’s chest, listening to the private conversations in the chambers of his heart.
Chapter 19
I wake alone, the room infused with harsh, high-noon light. I feel melty and warm, my mind untangled and clear.You killed Campbell yesterday, I am reminding myself when Henry comes out of the bathroom, patting his face dry with a hand towel.
“Hi,” he says, almost shyly.
I sit up in bed slowly. “Hi,” I say.
“Did you sleep okay?”
I nod. “You?”
Henry nods too. We are being careful with each other, polite and distant.
“I was going to make some breakfast,” Henry says, and starts for the kitchen. I catch his hand as he passes, tug him back to me. I get on my knees and tilt my face up to his. Henry is backlit and precisely rendered, his shadow falling to the side and broken by the wall, too long to fit the floor. He looks down at me with his deep-water-blue eyes, his face twisted in pain. I put my hands on places where he is furrowed, frowning, try to smooth him into what it is I am feeling.Alivedoesn’t begin to capture it. I feel younger than I am, more beautiful, my wits sharp as knives. I awoke a completely idealized version of myself.
“I’m sorry,” he says, burying his face in my hands.
“Sorry?” I repeat.
“I don’t know how to say this without sounding patronizing, but I’m just so fucking proud of you, Faye. Sometimes I’m so proud it turns into envy. Sometimes panic. I think about that day in the car and what would have happened if you hadn’t gotten away from me, and it makes it hard to breathe. And I’m like…” Henry is having trouble breathing now. “Should I just let you go? Am I going to ruin you? I don’t want to ruin you, Faye.”
My heart is flipping around like a fish on land. Henry is giving me an out, but the crevices of my fingers are collecting his tears like rainwater, and my body is aching from the briefest of use. I put my mouth on his and shake my head. No, no, no. I am not being ruined. I am being reminded of what I am capable of. “I want to do this for you,” I say, and I kiss his neck, his collarbone, the backs of his hands and the fronts.
Henry grasps my hands in his own. I can see the question shaping his lips into a smallO. Why? Why would I want to do this? How can I be so willing to risk everything? I give a small shake of my head. Please don’t ask. Not yet, anyway.
Where the inlet narrows with tall granite rocks on either side, the current curls around us like a fist. Henry does something to the gears that throws our heads back then snaps them forward on our necks. My hair is sticky with the spray of lake water by the time we reach the cabin where Campbell and Corrine spend the smallest fraction of their summers possible. Corrine much prefers her parents’ shingled estate that clings to the cliffs of Newport, though Campbell did what he could to make the property on Lake Wanika more appealingto her, going so far as to install a tankless water heater that caused such an uproar an addendum had to be added to the community guidelines regarding property permits. It confirmed for the members a bias they’d harbored against Corrine before they had any evidence to support it: she wasn’t all in on this place. She didn’t want to see flabby old bodies bathing in the lake, and when something needed repair, she hired people to fix it.
Inside, I track Emma’s silhouette moving away from the window and disappearing into the back of the house. She was watching, waiting for us, and I think she ducked into the bathroom to reapply a coat of her emotional-support lip gloss, because when she lets us in the side door, her lips are once again that cheap shade of pearly pink that makes her appear tanner than she already is. I can smell the dry shampoo on her, and she is wearing black slacks and a button-down, like we have a scheduled job interview.
“Come in,” she says with an expansive sweep of her arm. I stomp my feet on the braided jute doormat and step inside Corrine’s version of Connecticut in the burly mountains. Beige rugs and beige couches. Those woven navy-and-white barstools at the countertop. Matching light-oak coffee and farm table. Bland on ever more bland.
“I’m so glad to see you,” Emma says to me with relief, then directs a chiding glance at Henry. “You had me worried the other night.”
“Oh God.” I laugh like I am embarrassed and tuck myself into Henry’s side. “We were just messing around. I had no idea anyone else was here.”
Emma eyes me, then Henry, like she is a social worker assessing for signs that I am protecting my abuser. But I am snug under Henry’s arm, fitted into his firm torso, and I do not have to perform my content.