Total pages in book: 47
Estimated words: 42790 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 214(@200wpm)___ 171(@250wpm)___ 143(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 42790 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 214(@200wpm)___ 171(@250wpm)___ 143(@300wpm)
She doesn’t accept the wall. She never has, and it’s one of the thousand things about her I never understood to be a danger until it was too late. She fits herself along the length of my back, unhurried, patient, and I feel her cheek come to rest between my shoulder blades, and then her hand spreads warm and open over my heart the way it does when she counts it, when she lies awake in the dark matching her own careful rhythm to mine. She doesn’t say a word. She only stays, the way she stayed through the worst of the nights after her father, and the staying gets up under the wall in a way no argument she could make ever would.
“I’m angry with you,” I tell her, and even in the dream my voice has gone rough in my throat.
“I know,” she says against my spine, and I feel the shape of the words more than I hear them. “Turn over anyway.”
I shouldn’t. I know it with whatever part of me is still standing sentry. But her hand slides up from over my heart to my jaw, gentle, turning my face back toward her in the dark, and I let her turn it, and that is the moment the wall comes down, not knocked down, not stormed, simply set quietly aside by my own traitor body before I’ve agreed to any such thing.
She kisses me before I can find the word that forbids it, and the word never comes, because the kiss is soft and certain and entirely without apology, the kiss of a woman who has never once doubted she would be welcome, and that bone-deep certainty of hers undoes me more thoroughly than any practiced seduction ever could. My hands come up to set her away from me. Instead they close on her shoulders and draw her in, both of them at once, traitors to the last, and I feel her smile against my mouth as though she’s known all along that they would, as though my own hands have been more honest with her this whole time than I’ve ever allowed the rest of me to be.
I stop fighting. That’s the part I will hate myself for when I wake, the ease of it, the relief of it. The fury doesn’t vanish so much as quietly change its name, and the thing underneath it is the thing I’ve refused to look at squarely all day, the simple unbearable wanting of her, and in the dream I let myself have it at last. I gather her against me and she comes willingly, warmly, fitting to me the way she always fits, and the dark closes over the two of us, and for a while there are no articles, no photographs, no board, no golden boy with his hand at the small of her back. There is only my wife in my arms in the dark, kissing me like I’m the only man she has ever wanted, and I believe her. That’s the cruelty I never see coming. I believe her completely.
“There,” she breathes, when I’ve stopped pretending I want her anywhere on earth but here. Her mouth is at my ear now, her hand spread once more over my heart, laying open claim to the beat of it. “Don’t deny the truth, Trey. You know you’re mine.”
Mine.
She says it the exact way I say it to her. The words I’ve taken from her every morning for six months, soft and certain and a little shy, I’m yours, sir, except turned all the way around now, the whole ritual reversed, the leash passed quietly out of my hand and into hers while I wasn’t watching it. You’re mine. And here is the thing that will wake me with my heart slamming against the very palm she laid over it, I don’t argue. In the dream I have no wish to argue. I hold her tighter and I press my mouth into her hair and I am glad, wholly and shamefully glad, to belong to a woman who belongs to another man, and I lie there in the warm after with her heartbeat going against mine and want it to be true so badly that the wanting tears something loose in me I’ll never have a name for.
“Yours,” I tell her, into the dark, and I mean it down to the floor of myself.
The dream lets me have that. It lets me say the word and lets me mean it and lets me rest there a moment in the having of it, just long enough to be certain.
Then it takes the whole of it back at once.
I come awake in the black of a room full of another man’s trophies, alone, the narrow bed gone cold on the side where no one has lain, my heart slamming hard under a hand that isn’t there and never was. The taste of a kiss that never happened. The shape of a word I said out loud to no one in an empty room. Yours. I lie still and listen to the building tick and settle in the cold around me, and I understand, with the slow drowning horror of a man surfacing from deep water, that none of it was real, that I gave myself away whole and entire to a thing my own mind built out of wanting, and that I would do it again this very second if she walked in through that bookshelf door and asked me to.