More harmless lightning, revealing the empty black stage of the lake.
“I can’t imagine it was easy for you to hear,” I submit. “I’m sorry.”
Henry puckers his lips in a show of consideration, sliding his plate back and forth on the table with his wounded index finger, a big cat toying with its prey. “What if I said that’s not good enough?”
I raise my chin, hold Henry’s eye, force myself to withstand the discomfort. Sometimes, I think that it is these moments, the ones between the moments he tells me what to do, that I miss the most.
Henry nudges the plate in my direction. “I’d like you to clean up now.”
I am weightless and warm as I gather our dishes and carry them to the sink. I turn on the faucet, squeeze a generic brand of blue dish soap into a sponge, an everyday domestic act turned tightwire act under the tension of Henry’s storm-blue stare.
I dry the plates. Open a cabinet door, return them to their stack. A light, irregular rain begins to streak the windows, and then thunder cracks so near it feels like an unruly child has shaken our little snow globe, rattling the miniaturized scene of us.
“There are crumbs on the table,” Henry says.
I tug the dish towel off its hook.
Henry flicks his hand. No need for that. “You can use your mouth.”
I fold the dish towel silently, my hands shaking, and return it to its hook with the borders lined up neatly. I approach Henry, aware that I am retracing an old, sacred path. Lust rises in the back of my throat like bile.
With one foot, Henry slides a chair out of the way and angles his own so that he is sitting perpendicular to the table, creating a small space just big enough for me to slip inside. Our bodies brush—my outer thigh, his inner—and then, impossibly, I am bending over the edge of the table and crumbs are adhering to my tongue like a lint roller. Henry puts an elbow on the table and rests his temple on his fist, watching me with that combination of contempt and fascination that has always been my undoing. He takes the tail of my light-colored shirt and passes it between my legs, exhaling long and slow when it comes away wet.
He fingers the damp fabric with a low, incredulous laugh. “I haven’t even touched you yet.”
I rest one cheek on the table, look up at him with all my stupid, embarrassing need. His nostrils flare once, like he might cry.
“Okay,” he says, because he has always been inside my head, hearing and understanding everything. “Okay,” he says again.
He stands, placing the wide sprawl of his fingertips on the small of my back. I hear the clang of metal hitting metal, leather rustling belt loops. Henry slips his big toe under my instep and nudges. Wider. He wants my legs wider.
For a while, he strikes me in silence. I imagine his face, his grim concentration as he waits for one of us to break and say I’ve had enough. But nothing he’s done to me has ever felt like enough.
“Say you’re sorry, Faye.” Henry’s voice is tight with anger and yet in it I hear the heartbreak he is asking me to soothe.
I curve my torso on the table, turn my head to the side with the pad of my thumb tugging down my lower lip, taking in Henry with heavy, hooded eyes. His fresh-looking face is soft with devotion, a flip of light hair in an eye. His shirt is untucked, buttoned all wrong at the bottom so that it hangs haphazardly at his collarbone. He looksundone, tormented in exactly the way I hoped he might be after all these long years without me.
“I’m sorry I told my husband I missed him,” I say. The expression on Henry’s face tells me this is not nearly enough. I stare at the pained part in his lips and I realize what it is he needs to hear. “I’m sorry I have a husband.” That’s it, isn’t it? My gravest offense.
With an anguished groan, Henry collects me by my hair, stands me up, turns me around, walks me backward into the bedroom with his mouth on mine. If I stopped suddenly or turned around to run, he wouldn’t let me. It is this thought that propels me over the threshold of the door. I want to feel so wanted I have no choice, though of course this is everything I choose.
The lights are off, the drapes open, the moonlight casting everything in silver. Henry lifts me by the wrists and throws me on the bed, slips off his shirt, steps out of his jeans.
The snap of his boxer band, and then he stands before me, naked, godlike and indestructible, something knowing and merciful on his face. The fire and the moonlight are too romantic. I need to be tossed around, sordidly fucked while still half dressed. He grabs my ankles and slides me under him.
“I’m not on birth control anymore,” I suddenly remember to say out loud.
Henry wraps my legs around his waist and gives no indication that he hears me or cares. He rubs the head of his erection over the seam of me until I’m wet enough for him to push partially inside. I’m mortified by how much it hurts, and tears prick my eyes, not from the pain but because the pain indicates something I’ve found ways to manage before now.
“Fuck, Faye.” Henry doesn’t go any deeper. He scooches us farther back on the bed so he can climb on top of me and put his thumbs in thedamp corners of my eyes. He’s staring down at me in astonishment, like he can’t believe everything I told him was true. “I felt that. I’ll go slow.”
I try to turn my head, but he holds me still between his hands, watching me chew a hole through my lip as he slides the rest of the way into me. I make a sound without opening my mouth, like I’ve just been given some piece of terrible but inevitable news. Henry moves slow and shallow until I start to relax, and then he rolls over onto his back, bringing me with him. He puts a pillow in his lap, bunches it down, giving me something textural to rub against. I think about the time he gave me his credit card to buy a new dress, how he gave me a limit and said that for every dollar I spent over it, he would hurt me that many times. I think about how I spent an extra thirty-one dollars, just to see if he meant it, and how I remembered that he did every time I sat down for the next week—
“You’re so pretty when you’re about to come,” Henry says, because I am damp at the small of my back and my pleasure is concentrated in a perfect little knot at the top of my pussy.
I am nearly horizontal on top of Henry, the silver heart pooled in his clavicle. I’m grinding on him when I should be bouncing. There’s no way he’s not bored. I start to straighten, but Henry hooks his finger through the charm and holds me down.
“I want it from behind,” I protest.