Page 22 of Where Vows Collapse
He stepped back. Another small step. The foot of space between them became two feet, then more, and she saw that he was not going to give her the next sentence, because the next sentence had already been given, and she had missed it when he saidmistake.
She lowered her hand.
She had not realized, until she moved it, that her hand had stayed there the whole time. As though some stupid part of her had been waiting to see if he'd change his mind. She lowered it smoothly. She did not let it shake. Her mother would have been proud, she thought distantly, of how smoothly she lowered her own hand.
"I see," she said.
She could feel, underneath the steadiness, the whole understructure of her wanting to make a sound she was not going to make. She would not make it.
She stepped back.
One step, two. She gave the room back to him. She turned, smoothly, because turning smoothly was a thing her body knew how to do regardless of what her body was being asked to carry in the same moment.
"Good night, Elias."
It came out level. She could not have said afterward how she had produced the level.
A brief pause. She felt his hesitation behind her. The second in which, if he were ever going to say the next sentence, he would have said it.
"Good night."
Back in her bedroom, she stood at the looking out at Chicago, and she pressed her fingertips lightly against her own mouth.
The sensation had already faded. His mouth had been on hers briefly. It had not been long enough for her lips to be tender from it. There was no physical residue. There was onlythe memory — brief, unexpected, real — and the memory was doing, against her will, the work of the residue. She stood at the window and pressed her fingertips against her mouth and felt, for the second time in her life, her face do the thing her mother had trained it not to do.
She turned from the window.
She sat on the edge of the bed.
Mistake.
She knew, sitting on the edge of the bed with her hand pressed to her mouth, that it had not been a mistake. Whatever he was telling himself, whatever he had told her… it had not been a mistake. A mistake was a thing that shouldn't have happened. What had happened in the living room had been the truest thing her husband had offered her in all the months of their marriage. He had taken it back, and the taking it back was the lie.
She knew this. She knew it completely.
The knowing changed nothing. He had taken it back, and he would not offer it again, and she was now the woman who had been given one kiss and told it was a mistake. There was no version of her life going forward in which this became anything other than a private wound she would carry for as long as the marriage lasted.
Noelle undressed in the dark. She got into bed. She lay on her back, stared at the ceiling and listened to the apartment go quiet around her. Somewhere down the hall she heard her husband's study door open and close, and she heard his footfalls move along the hall and past her door. She heard his own bedroom door close, and she realized that he had walked past her door without pausing and that the walking-past was its own sentence.
She closed her eyes.
She did not sleep for a long time.
CHAPTER 9
ELIAS
Elias left before Noelle woke.
He did it without thinking about it. That was the first thing he noticed, afterward, in the back of the car on the way to the office in the blue hour before the city had fully woken: that his body had made the decision before his mind had. He had come awake in the dark of his own bedroom before dawn. He’d looked once at the ceiling, gotten up, showered and dressed and left the apartment without eating. He’d been in the elevator before he’d registered that he was making a tactical retreat.
He registered it in the elevator.
He did not go back up.
Tactical retreat was not, in itself, shameful. It was an efficient use of terrain. A man who had allowed a significant lapse in judgment the night before was not obligated to present himself to the author of that lapse at the breakfast island. He would return at a time of his choosing, in a posture of his choosing, with the terms of engagement restored to what they'd been before his hand had, without his permission, lifted itself and crossed the air between his body and his wife's jaw.
He hadn’t planned to touch her.
