Chapter 2: The Bathroom Confession
The bathroom was always too quiet after Alain went to sleep. The kind of silence that wasn’t empty, but full. Full of the hum of the refrigerator downstairs, the sigh of the old plumbing in the walls, and the weight of a thousand nights exactly like this one. Julie leaned against the sink, the cold porcelain seeping through her silk robe. The mirror was fogged at the edges from a shower she’d taken an hour ago, just to have something to do.
Her phone lay face-up on the marble, a black rectangle glowing with the ghost of his last words. Your imagination is wonderful. And then, nothing. For two weeks, radio silence. Her own final message—It's still a bit frustrating... It could be different...—hung there, unanswered, a little flag of surrender she’d planted in the digital void.
It was frustrating. It was a slow, quiet burn that had smoldered for seventeen years, flaring up every time life felt a little too neat, a little too sterile. She started a fire, a couple of weeks ago. Waiting for him to respond, to resume their fantasy, to let him have her on paper. She could stay alive for ever with just that, even in the dead space between finishing the dishes and picking up a book. That's all she wanted, a non committal and distant passion to not slowly being buried alive.
But his silence threw oil on that fire she started. She wasn't in control anymore. That fire was burning deep inside her, and she needed to attempt to it, every day. It was burning now as her hands were touching the silk fabric against her belly.
She picked up the phone. Her thumb hovered over the screen. The steam from her shower had condensed into droplets, blurring the display. She wiped it clean with the sleeve of her robe.
What was the point? He was probably just another man who enjoyed the flirt and digital chase. He got his kicks, then he logged off to his stable Canadian life. She was the one left in the echo chamber of her own mind, directing scenes for a sequel of a movie she lived 17 years ago.
Her fingers moved, anyway. A tremor in them she hadn’t felt in years.
JulieMar: You know, the silence after saying something like that is… loud.
She sent it. Immediate regret, hot and sharp. She put the phone down as if it had burned her. She paced the two steps to the bathtub, her bare feet cold on the tiles. The tub was old, clawfoot, a relic from a previous owner. She’d never liked it. It felt like a giant porcelain mouth, waiting.
Her phone vibrated on the sink. A single, abrasive buzz.
She didn’t move. She watched the light from the screen cast a faint blue glow on the ceiling. She counted to ten. To twenty. The silence stretched, tighter than before.
She walked back, picked it up.
MarkD: I’m here. Sorry. Had to shut the laptop. Was getting… distracted. Loud is one word for it.
Her breath left her in a short, silent puff. He was there. Instantly, the quiet bathroom seemed to shrink, the walls pressing in. This wasn’t a stale archive anymore. This was a live wire.
JulieMar: Distracted by what?
MarkD: By the fact that you said it could be different. And that I’m a 38-year-old man sitting in a dark office wanting to ask a very stupid, very dangerous question.
Her heart was a hard, fast knot in her throat. She typed fast, the words appearing in a reckless spill.
JulieMar: Ask it.
There was a pause. The ‘MarkD is typing…’ indicator appeared, vanished, reappeared. The condensation was back on the screen. She wiped it again, her reflection in the dark glass looking blurred, unsure.
His message came through, plain and unadorned.
MarkD: When you imagine it different… what does that look like?
She closed her eyes. The bathroom vanished. In her mind, it wasn’t this chilly, polished space. It was a hotel room somewhere neutral. Amsterdam. Brussels. Somewhere with rain against the windows and a minibar they wouldn’t touch. The lights would be low. There would be no history in the walls, no future waiting outside the door. Just a bed, and two people who had carried a photo of each other in their heads for so long it had worn a groove in their souls.
She opened her eyes. The cold tub stared back.
Her fingers flew over the glass, tapping out the truth before the censor in her brain could catch up.
JulieMar: It looks like a closed door. A bed that isn't mine. And your hands. Always your hands.
She sent it. The phone clattered from her shaking fingers onto the sink, the sound shockingly loud in the tiled room. She stared at it, lying there, a little black box holding a confession she’d never spoken to her therapist, her best friend, herself.
No answers. Again
"Fuck you" she said, louder than what she would have wanted.
JulieMar: It's a pathetic thing to admit, isn't it? A grown woman, happily married…
She stopped herself. Happily. The word tasted like dust. She was punishing herself for making the first move.
MarkD: Don't. Don't do that. It’s not pathetic. It’s just… unfinished.
Unfinished. Yes. That was the quiet hell of it. Everything else in her life had a conclusion, a final sum. This was an equation with a variable never solved for.
She picked up the phone, sank down onto the closed lid of the toilet, her night gown stretching around the curve of her body. The steam had cleared from the mirror. Her face looked back, pale, her eyes wide. She looked exactly like someone who had just thrown a grenade into the middle of her own life.
JulieMar: So finish it. Ask your dangerous question.
There was a longer pause this time. She could almost feel him, thousands of kilometers away, wrestling with the same gravity she was. The same pull toward the edge.
MarkD: How do we make it not just different, but real?
The air left the room. The faint hum of the extractor fan seemed to grow deafening. Her thumbs were numb against the screen.
JulieMar: You tell me. You're the engineer. You solve problems.
MarkD: This isn't a problem with a logical solution. This is a fire with a logistical nightmare.
Yes - a fire that s what it was Mark
JulieMar: Then let's be illogical.
Then she typed with a tiny, frantic heartbeat. A list began to appear. Not sentences. Fragments. Brutal, simple, impossible ideas that were the outcomes of her long steamy shower, of the fire burning and of her fingers desperate attempts to control it.
JulieMar: 1. A business trip to Paris you don't have. 2. A consulting gig in Montreal I don't have. 3. A weekend in Amsterdam or Brussels. Neutral ground. 4. A missed flight anywhere or a 24-hour layover poorly planned. 5. A sick relative neither of us have. 6. A conference. Any conference. Anywhere. 7. An inheritance from a distant uncle. A lie. 8. A sudden, urgent "family emergency." 9. A pilgrimage. To nowhere. Just to get on a plane because we need space. 10. We ask for a hall pass.
The list stopped. The tenth item remained blank, a hanging cursor blinking in the digital space between them.
Her vision blurred. She wasn’t crying. It was something else, a pressure behind her eyes. She had typed out the secret catalogue of every cheap fantasy she’d ever entertained and dismissed. Every feeble, desperate plot she’d concocted in her mind while washing dishes or riding the Metro, and rehearsed in her bed late at night
She added the eleventh. An ultime, desperate version. The one she’d never let herself fully form because it would split her apart.
JulieMar: 11. I convince him to have a threesome and I choose you.
She sent it. The bathwater in the tub beside her had gone fully cold. The peeling wallpaper near the light switch seemed to curl tighter in on itself. The ghost in the mirror watched, waiting.
Her phone buzzed again, once. A new message.
MarkD: I have the same tenth. They re not all equals...
The words glowed on the screen. Simple. Final. The edge of the cliff.
MarkD: I could do 11. Whatever it takes.
She didn’t hesitate. She typed the first name that came to her, a place with no history for either of them, a blank page.
JulieMar: We just need to work on one of them. Together.
MarkD: I could do 11. Whatever it takes.
She put the phone down on the cold tiles of the floor. She didn’t look to see if he replied. She didn’t need to. The question was out there now, hanging in the ether between France and Canada, between past and future, between a life built and a life imagined.
She stood up, her knees stiff. She walked to the bathtub, placed her hands on its cold, hard rim. She looked down into its empty, waiting depth.
The only sound was the faint, digital hum of her phone on the floor, waiting to tell her if she was about to fall, or finally, after seventeen years, fly.
The only sound was the faint, digital hum of her phone on the floor, waiting to tell her if she was about to fall, or finally, after seventeen years, fly. She stared at it, a dark square on white tile, a Pandora’s box she’d kicked away. Her night gown felt suddenly heavy, a costume for a life that wasn’t hers tonight.
She untied the silk belt. It slithered to the floor without a sound. The dress fell open, then slipped from her shoulders, puddling around her feet on the cold tile. The air chilled her skin, raising goosebumps. She didn’t look in the mirror.
She stepped over the edge of the tub into the water. It was a shock, a full-body flinch. The cold bit at her ankles, her calves, then her thighs as she lowered herself down. She lay back, the porcelain unforgiving against her spine. The water barely covered her hips, a shallow, intentional punishment. Her teeth wanted to chatter. She clenched her jaw. She wanted to kill that fire in her.
Her phone glowed, a tiny blue star fallen to earth. She left it there. She let her head rest against the cold rim, closed her eyes, and surrendered to the fire instead. There was only one way to turn it down for a moment... The conference would be in Geneva. She'd find one they could both attend without suspicion. Or two that are happening together. The train ride south, separate booking, not informing colleagues. A mid-range business hotel with generic art and quiet hallways. Not the hotel where the conference would be held.
They would message that they have arrived and agree to meet in the lobby. He would be waiting there, or at the bar. Not smiling broadly, not waving. Just standing there, seeing her. His face would be older, softer than the pictures. His eyes would find hers and hold them, and everything she’d typed for seventeen years would crystallize into a single, breathless second of silent recognition.
“Julie.” He’d say her name like it was a real thing in his mouth.
“You came,” he’d say, his voice lower than she remembered.
“Where else would I go?” she’d reply, the line from their old fantasies falling from her lips effortlessly.
They wouldn’t embrace there. The tension was a physical wire. They ll have a drink or two to alleviate their nerves. The elevator would be empty. The doors would slide shut. Then, only then, his hand would come up to her cheek. His thumb would trace her jawline, a question. She’d nod, just once.
Her own hand moved underwater, trailing over her ribs, her stomach. The cold was a stark frame for the heat gathering within. In the fantasy elevator, his other hand would slide around her waist, pulling her into him. They still wouldn't kiss. The first kiss wouldn’t be gentle. It would be seventeen years of compression, of silent typing, of imagined touches detonating on contact.
They wouldn't even kiss. They’d stumble out onto his floor, a tangle of limbs and key cards. The hotel room door would click shut. The world would narrow to the space between the door and the bed. He’d push her against the wall, his body solid, real, finally real against hers. His mouth on her neck, his hands pulling at her clothes, her hands fumbling with his belt.
Her fingers found their rhythm beneath the cold water, circling, pressing. The fire in her began to fight the chill, a spreading warmth that started deep in her core. His imagined hands were everywhere, rough with urgency, mapping a territory they’d only ever described. The bed. They’d fall onto it. No patience, no gentle exploration. Just claiming, and being claimed.
A desperate, hungry reunification of two ghosts making themselves flesh. The weight of him, the sounds he’d make, the way her own cries would be muffled against his shoulder. It wouldn’t be love-making. It would be archaeology, a brutal and beautiful unearthing of something they’d buried alive.
A sharp, choked sound escaped her lips in the quiet bathroom. Her back arched off the cold porcelain. The water sloshed. The fantasy fractured into pure, white sensation, a culmination that rolled through her in warm, defiant waves against the cold embrace of the tub.
She went still. Her breathing was ragged in the silent room. The water was no longer cold; it was a tepid witness. She opened her eyes to the familiar cracks in the ceiling. The high, the desperate fiction, evaporated, leaving only the damp air and her own nakedness.
A vibration shuddered through the floor, a low buzz against the tile. Her phone. It skittered an inch. The screen lit up, casting a severe rectangle of light onto the bottom of the tub.
It was a message notification. The screen was too far to read. It could be him. It could be Alain, asking if she was coming to bed. It could be a notification from her bank.
She didn’t move. She watched the light. It glowed for a few more seconds, a silent siren in the dark, then went black.