Chapter 4: Rekindling
But they were undeniably, irrevocably bound together by it.
A fly buzzed against the windowpane, a frantic, mindless rhythm. Mia eased herself off him with a sharp intake of breath, a wet, peeling sound marking their separation. She stayed on her knees for a moment, head bowed, her panties still twisted to the side. The cooling drip of his cum traced a faint, itchy path down her inner thigh, mingling with the residue already there. She pulled the fabric back into place, a useless gesture.
Ellie stood, stretching her naked body with a profound, unselfconscious satisfaction. “Water?” she asked, as if they’d just finished a brisk workout.
Luke tucked himself back into his jeans, the denim rough against his oversensitive skin. The zipper sounded abnormally loud. He couldn’t look at Mia. He stared at a crack in the floorboard between his feet, following its jagged path to the leg of the chair where she’d sat, paralyzed, just an hour before. He’d fucked that paralysis right out of her, replacing it with a different, more complicit kind of numbness.
“We’re leaving,” he said. His voice was flat, scraped raw.
Mia didn’t argue. She gathered her discarded jeans, her movements sluggish, automatic. She stepped into them, wincing slightly as the rough material passed over her tender flesh. She didn’t look for her shoes. They weren’t in the living room. It didn’t seem to matter.
Ellie returned from the kitchen with a single glass of water. She took a long sip, watching them over the rim. “You know where to find me,” she said finally. The statement wasn’t an invitation. It was a fact, a placing of a landmark in the new, ruined geography of their lives.
Luke opened the door. Harsh midday sunlight flooded the dim, sticky apartment, exposing every dust mote, every stain. He walked out into the hallway without looking back. His bare feet were silent on the cheap linoleum.
Mia followed. The door clicked shut behind her, the sound final. The lock turned from the inside.
The walk to Mia’s car was a twenty-minute purgatory conducted in absolute silence. Concrete burned the soles of Luke’s feet. Gravel bit into his heels. He didn’t complain. The physical pain was a clean, simple counterpoint to the writhing mess inside his head. Every car that passed was a roar, every birdcall a screech. The world was unbearably loud and bright.
Mia unlocked her beat-up sedan. The interior was an oven, smelling of old fries and vanilla air freshener. They got in. The seats scorched the backs of their legs. She started the engine, the AC blasting hot air that slowly cooled.She drove. He stared out the passenger window, watching identical houses blur past. The memory of her body, loose and wet around him, played on a relentless loop. It was superimposed over the memory of her body, loose and wet around Damon. They were becoming the same memory, a single, corrupt filmstrip. Her soft cry as she took him inside her, the feel of Damon’s fingerprints under his own on her hips, Ellie’s whisper—you wanted to know.
Mia’s knuckles were white on the steering wheel. A tear escaped her left eye. She wiped it away angrily with the back of her hand, smearing the last of yesterday’s eyeliner. She said nothing.
They arrived at their apartment—his apartment, really, but she’d been staying over most nights for months. The space felt alien. The quiet was different from Ellie’s. It was their quiet, or it had been. Now it was accusatory. The framed photo of them at the beach grinned from the bookshelf, a fossil from a dead era.
Luke went straight to the shower. He turned the water as hot as he could stand and scrubbed his skin until it was red. The water pooling at his feet was grey. He could not scrub the images away. They were under his skin.
He heard the other bathroom’s shower turn on. A long time later, it turned off.
He found a pair of shorts and a t-shirt. He walked into the living room. Mia was on the couch, wearing one of his old sweatshirts and a pair of her own cotton shorts. Her hair was damp, dark against the grey fabric. She was staring at the blank television screen, a forgotten cup of tea cooling on the coffee table.
He went to the kitchen and made a sandwich. He wasn’t hungry. He ate it anyway, the texture of the bread like dust, the meat flavorless. He stood at the counter to eat. She didn’t move from the couch.
The afternoon dissolved into a formless haze. He opened a textbook. The words jiggled on the page, meaningless. He closed it. Mia flicked through her phone, her thumb moving mechanically, her eyes unseeing. The silence was a physical weight, thickening with each passing hour. It wasn’t peaceful. It was the silence of a crime scene after the bodies have been bagged but before the clean-up crew arrives.
He ordered pizza around seven because it was a thing to do. She ate one slice, picking at the cheese. He ate three, tasting nothing. The cardboard box sat on the table between them like a centerpiece.
Dusk came, then true dark. Neither of them turned on a lamp. The room was lit by the sodium glow of the streetlight outside their window, casting long, distorted shadows. The unspoken words piled up in the corners of the room, a suffocating heap of what nows and how could yous and I came while I watched.
Finally, Mia stood. The couch cushions sighed with relief. She walked to the bedroom, her footsteps soft on the carpet. He waited ten minutes, listening to the rustle of sheets, the creak of the bedsprings.
He went in. She was on her side, facing the wall, a lump under the blankets. He got into his side of the bed, the side farthest from the wall. The space between them felt vast, a cold chasm. He lay on his back, staring at the ceiling’s texture. The memory of her smell from earlier—sex, sweat, shame—was gone, replaced by the clean, floral scent of her shower gel. It was worse. It was a lie.
The digital clock on the nightstand ticked from 11:47 to 11:48. The hum of the refrigerator cycled on in the other room. A car door slammed outside.
His anger, which had been a hard, cold stone in his chest all day, began to erode. It was worn down by the sheer, exhausting weight of the silence, by the vivid, invasive recall of her face when she came that morning—for him, this time—and by the darker, more terrifying memory of her laughter from the kitchen. The two Mia’s wrestled in his mind. The one who had betrayed him, and the one whose betrayal had, for a few blinding seconds, become the most potent aphrodisiac of his life.
He shifted onto his side, facing her back. The sweatshirt had ridden up slightly, exposing a sliver of skin at her waist. In the dim light, he could just make out the faint, mottled suggestion of a bruise.
His hand moved of its own volition. It crossed the cold expanse of sheet. His fingertips brushed the small of her back, just above the waistband of her shorts.
She went perfectly still. She wasn’t asleep.
He slid closer. His body conformed to the curve of hers. He pressed his chest against her back, his thighs tucking behind hers. His arm draped over her side, his hand splaying across her stomach, feeling the soft give under the thick cotton. He buried his face in the damp hair at the nape of her neck, inhaling the clean, fake flowers. He nuzzled there, a slow, unconscious movement of seeking comfort.
A shudder ran through her. It wasn’t a sob. It was a deep, seismic release of tension held for hours. She melted backward into him, her body softening, molding itself to his frame. Her hand came up and covered his on her stomach, her fingers lacing through his. She didn’t speak. She held on.
He wasn’t angry. The realization was a quiet flood, warm and terrible. The stone was gone. In its place was a hollow ache, a confusing throb of need that was directed entirely at her. At her shamelessness. At the way she had taken what she wanted with a greedy, open-mouthed hunger he could never provide. At the submissive position he now occupied, not just in this bed, but in the new reality she had forged. He was the aftermath. He was the one holding her in the dark, turned on by his own cuckolding, by her capacity for filth, by his helpless complicity in it all.
His cock, soft against the back of her thigh, began to stiffen.
She felt it. Her breathing, which had begun to even out, hitched. Her hand tightened over his. She pressed her ass back, a slow, deliberate rotation, grinding against his growing hardness. A silent question.An offer.
He answered by pulling her closer, by pressing his erection more firmly into the cleft of her ass. He moved his hand from her stomach, sliding it down, under the waistband of her shorts and her panties. His fingers found her pussy. She was already wet. Slick and hot and swollen. Ready. She was always ready now, it seemed.
“Luke,” she whispered, the first word either had spoken in nearly twelve hours. It was cracked, half plea, half prayer.
He didn’t answer with words. He pushed her shorts and panties down over her hips, just enough. He freed himself from his own shorts. He didn’t turn her over. He didn’t want to see her face. He wanted this darkness, this anonymity, this raw, physical connection that bypassed all the shattered things between them.
He positioned himself at her entrance from behind. She was still so open, so easily accepting. He pushed inside with one smooth, deep thrust. She gasped, arching her back, pushing back against him to take him all. Her inner muscles fluttered around him, a reflexive, welcoming pulse.
He fucked her like that, on their sides, in the dark. It was a solemn, driven rhythm. His arm hooked under her leg, hiking it up to open her wider, to drive deeper. Each thrust was a punctuation mark in their silent dialogue.This.What. You.Made. Me.
Her moans were muffled by the pillow. She reached back, her hand fumbling, finding his hip, pulling him into her with a desperate strength. Her other hand slipped between her own legs, rubbing her clit in frantic circles. The lewd, wet sound of her fingers on her own flesh filled the dark room, a secret, filthy music.
“I’m sorry,” she choked out, the words breaking on a particularly deep thrust. “I’m so sorry, Luke, I’m so sorry…” But her body belied the apology. It was demanding, hungry, celebrating the very thing she was apologizing for.
Her apology, her wetness, the devastating looseness of her around him, the memory of her laughter on Damon’s cock—it fused into a single, intolerable pressure in his gut. “Don’t be sorry,” he growled into her neck, his voice rough, a stranger’s voice. “Just come. Come on his ghost. Come on my cock. Just fucking come.”
The vulgar command undid her. A sharp, shattered cry tore from her throat as her body locked, her pussy clamping down on him in a series of violent, exquisite spasms. The feel of her orgasm, so intense, so obviously rooted in the entire toxic tapestry of the last day, triggered his own.
He came with a deep, guttural groan, surging into her, filling her for the second time that day, in the bed they’d once called t