Page 26 of Neglected By Her CEO Husband

"I'm not reaching for my wallet, I'm trying." There was something in his voice I hadn't heard in years, frustration with fear underneath it. "I don't know how to do this. I've never had to. You were always fine. I thought we were good."

"We were never good. I was just quiet."

"I know that now." He closed the distance. "I came home. Do you understand that I came home? I walked out of the worst quarter of my life and left Emily holding the deck because I couldn't sit in that office one more minute knowing what I'd done to you."

He reached up and put both hands against my face. He looked at me, actually looked, the first time in longer than I could remember, and I forgot how to breathe for a second, because that was the only thing I'd ever wanted from him and he'd never once known to give it.

I should have pulled away. I'd spent two weeks deciding I was done, and here was every reason to walk, the flowers, the trip, the apology with a budget. I put my hand flat on his chest to push him off. His heart was going hard under my palm. I didn't push. He felt that, and he kissed me.

The kiss wasn't gentle. Two weeks of cold and eight days of nothing went into it, and the anger didn't leave, it just found somewhere to be. His hands fisted in my hair and pulled. I let my teeth catch his lip, and he made a low sound against my mouth and pressed me back into the counter.

"I'm still furious with you," I said.

"Good." His mouth was at my jaw, my throat. "Be furious. Don't stop."

He pushed my coat off my shoulders and dragged my sweater over my head, and the cold air hit my skin a beat before his hands did. He knew the route. Eight years, and his hands still knew me, and that undid me more than any of the words had, because his hands remembered me on the nights the rest of him forgot I was in the house.

I got his shirt open and ran my palms up his chest and felt him shudder. He lifted me onto the counter and stepped between my knees and kissed me until I couldn't hold the anger and the wanting apart, until they ran together into the same heat. The flowers went off the edge in their plastic. Neither of us looked.

He took me upstairs. Not to the guest room. To our bed, the one I hadn't slept in for two weeks, and he laid me down and took the rest of my clothes off slowly, like he was paying attention, like attention was something he'd suddenly remembered how to do.

When he finally pushed into me I made a sound I hadn't made in years, and he caught it with his mouth and stayed there, forehead against mine, moving, saying my name like it meant something, like it had always meant something. I dug my nails into his back hard enough to mark him and he didn't slow down. He took everything I had left to give him and asked for more.

It was good. My body had missed him even while the rest of me was packing to leave. I came with his name in my teeth and his hand crushed around mine against the sheets, and for a few minutes after, tangled and breathing hard in the dark of a room I'd locked myself out of, I let myself just have it.

Afterward he fell asleep with his arm heavy across me, which he never did. He always got up, checked the phone, took a call, found the work. Tonight he didn't reach for it once.

I lay awake and made myself be honest about the size of it, which was small. He'd bought flowers I didn't want and offered a trip he half-remembered the reason for and put his hands on me, and none of it touched what was actually broken between us. I knew that. I wasn't a fool about it.

But.

He'd left the office. With the board calling at eight and Emily holding his work together and the whole company balanced on a trial that hadn't read out, he'd walked out and driven home and waited for me in the dark. He had never done that. Not once in eight years.

Lying there with his arm across me and his breath slow against my hair, I felt it, small and stupid and impossible to kill. A flicker of hope. Maybe it had taken almost losing me to wake him up. Maybe leaving the office was the first true thing he'd done in years, and maybe he could learn the rest.

I knew better. I held onto it anyway.

16

MADDIE

The first week after, I kept waiting for it to stop but it didn't.

Damon came home for dinner. Not once, as a gesture, but most nights. He texted in the afternoon to ask what I wanted and a car would bring it, or he'd come through the door at seven with takeout from the Thai place we used to go to before the company ate him. The first night he put his phone in a drawer while we ate, I watched him do it like a magic trick, and then I waited for it to ring through the wood, and it didn't, and he asked me about my day.

I didn't have an answer ready. He hadn't asked in so long that I'd stopped keeping one. I told him about the spring wall at Ellie's, about a boy named Jason whose streetlight paintings were better than half of what hangs downtown, about a fight I'd had with a tube of cadmium that wouldn't behave. He listened, or did a convincing impression of it, and stayed in the room for the answer. It's a low bar, a husband who asks about your day and waits to hear it. I'd been under it so long that clearing it felt like flight.

The trial had started for real. An independent panel ran it now, a clean read, no Brighton anywhere near the data, and it would take months. He talked about it less than I expected. When I asked, he gave me the short version, the panel's timeline, the long stretch of nothing we'd live through before it spoke, and then he changed the subject and I let him, because not talking about work was new and I didn't want to scare it off.

Some nights I caught the cost of it on him anyway, the trial sitting behind his eyes while he laughed at something. He was carrying it into the one room he was trying to keep clear of it. I decided that was a kind of love. Maybe it was. Or maybe he just had no words for it that weren't a press release.

The gifts started small and got out of hand fast. Flowers first, every few days, then every day, until the kitchen looked like a viewing. Then a box on my pillow with emeralds in it, drop earrings, the apology he'd skipped at the anniversary arriving in installments with interest. Then a car. I came out one morning and there was a little vintage Mercedes in the drive with a bow on it, an actual bow, the keys in an envelope with my name on the front in his new assistant's handwriting.

I didn't need another car. I told him so. He said he wanted me to have it because I'd remarked on a similar one once while we were driving. I didn't even remember that, and the biggest shock was that he did. That did more than the lavish gift itself.

Then the art supplies. He had a whole studio's worth delivered, more than I'd buy in five years. Hand-milled paint in tubes I'd only read about in luxury industry magazines, sable brushes, a French easel that cost more than my first real car, a roll of Belgian linen tall enough to paint a door on. He stood in the doorway while the delivery men carried it past him, pleased with himself.

"It's the best they had," he said. "The man at the shop said it's what the serious people use."