Page 87 of Dirty Ink

I’d kissed her and she’d kissed me and now it was gone. The moment.

Yet again she’d avoided a confrontation. We’d fought in the department store and it had been fun as hell, but it wasn’t the kind of fight we needed to have. That I knew we needed to have. It was just another fantasy. Like Rachel burning toast. Like me getting caught by my wife with another woman. The fantasy of a fucked-up marriage. The fantasy of us being messy and angry and fucked up, but together.

“I can’t believe you asked the security guard for two more minutes,” Rachel whispered next to me.

I gave her the same smile she’d given me. Small. Easy. Noncommittal. I think she saw it. I think she knew. Knew what she had done. Knew what I was letting her do.

Because I didn’t want this to end either. Us having fun. Us fooling around. Us being us.

“That was for you,” I leaned over to whisper. “You know I could have come just at the sight of you.”

Rachel elbowed me again. After a second she whispered back, “Then you should have asked for five.”

I put my arm around her and after a moment’s hesitation she put her head against my shoulder.

A little while later we paid the fine. Hefty, but reasonable, I suppose. We made our apologies. We listened to the security guard’s warning as he tacked up our photographs to the wall of shoplifters and flashers and child snatchers.

I should have wondered why Rachel would have risked such a potentially damaging public relations fiasco when the reason she was here in the first place, asking for a divorce after all this time, was to scrub off the last remaining stain on her record.

But I ignored that along with everything else.

Because Rachel was worth it.

Or at least whatever role she claimed she was playing was worth it. It was a painful truth, I supposed: that a glimpse of Rachel, a shadow, a part, a piece of Rachel was better than nothing.

But I ignored that, too.

At least, for as long as I could…

Rachel

It was nice to sweep things under the carpet.

Nice to put on a sweet apron with little heart details and scalloped edges. Nice to get a kiss from your husband on the cheek. A pinch on the ass if he was feeling frisky. To hear him humming a song you’d just been singing in the shower. Nice to lift up the corner of the carpet in the bedroom you shared, sweep the dust right under it.

It was nice to be Mason’s wife even if I wasn’t. Even if I couldn’t be. Even if we never talked about the reasons why.

It was nice to ask him which lipstick before dinner. Nice to watch his head tilt from side to side as he considered, to laugh when he inevitably said, “Neither goes with that dress, so really I think you should just go naked, darling.”

It was nice to hold his hand on the sidewalk like any other couple. To have him pull out my chair for me. To have his fingers interlock with mine beneath the white tablecloth without either of us trying to break the other’s knuckles.

“You two seem…different,” Conor said at the restaurant we’d selected for our do-over double date.

He eyed us over his glass of whiskey. Apparently he’d arrived early. Ordered a double. Threw it back and had another ready for when Mason and I showed up. To prepare, he’d said.

Aurnia swatted at Conor’s chest. He narrowed his eyes suspiciously at the two of us across the table from them.

“It’s called happy, you idiot,” she said.

Conor shook his head.

“It’s called strange. It’s called ‘I don’t like it.’ It’s called ‘I don’t trust it.’”

I turned my head to smile at Mason and he turned his head to smile right back at me.

“We talked,” I said.

This was a lie. We fucked and said dirty, filthy things to one another while fucking, but we did not, in any way, talk.

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