Page 94 of Wrong Marriage. Right Groom
Outside, the world expanded in a single breath, vast and bright.
Rafael helped me into the car, his hand briefly steadying my arm before I sank into the seat.
The leather was smooth beneath me, unfamiliar luxury pressing against the reality of everything I had agreed to without fully understanding how far it would reach.
The car door shut with a heavy click that landed too final.
I turned my head slightly, searching for any sense of direction, as if instinct alone might map the space around me, but there was nothing to anchor to except him—his presence, close and unavoidable.
Then the engine started, breaking the silence in a low, controlled growl that made the enclosed space feel even smaller.
The vibration hummed through the seat, through my bones.
The silence that followed pressed in from all sides.
I could hear him beside me—Rafael. The steady, controlled rhythm of his breathing.
The faint, almost imperceptible shift of his hands on the steering wheel as if even that small motion was calculated.
He was contained in a way that made my skin feel too tight.
I stayed still, fingers curled tightly into the folds of my wedding gown.
I wondered why he had not said a single word to me.
The silence between us did not feel accidental—it felt deliberate, as if even sound had to be permitted in his presence.
All I could think about was Tess. The image of her lingered behind my thoughts like a wound that refused to close.
Would I see her when we reached his apartment?
Since yesterday, since he had taken Tess away from me at the office, something in me had not settled back into place.
I moved through moments without fully arriving in them—eating without tasting, breathing without noticing, existing in a strange, suspended state where my mind kept drifting back to her absence.
The car continued to move for a long while, the city slipping past in blurred fragments outside the window, and I began to wonder—quietly, unwillingly—if this marriage would always feel like this.
A burning silence.
Time stretched in a way I couldn’t measure.
Nearly an hour passed before the vehicle finally slowed.
Then stopped.
Gravel crunched sharply beneath the tires.
The sound alone told me everything I needed to know about where we were not.
No pavement.
No distant horns or restless traffic bleeding through the air.
No familiar pulse of a city pretending to sleep.
Just stillness.
Heavy, uninterrupted stillness that made my awareness sharpen as the car idled, as if the world itself had stepped back.
